nunia
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
经验值: 5079
|
|
|
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, by Morton Meyers, a book that just came out. It is a MUST read. Please go buy it. Read it twice, not once. Although the author does not take my drastic “stochastic tinkering” approach, he provides all kind of empirical evidence against the role of design. He does not directly discuss the narrative fallacy(q.v.) and the retrospective distortion (q.v.) but he certainly allows us to rewrite the history of medicine.
We did not realize that cures for cancer had been coming from other brands of research. You search for noncancer drugs and find something you were not looking for (and vice versa). But the interesting constant:
a- The discoverer is almost always treated like an idiot by his colleagues. Meyers describes the vicious side effect of “peer reviewing”.
b- Often people see the result but cannot connect the dots (researchers are autistic in their own way).
c- The members of the guild gives the researcher a hard time for not coming from their union. Pasteur was a chemist not a doctor/biologist. The establishment kept asking him “where is your M.D., monsieur”. Luckily Pasteur had too much confidence to be deterred.
d- Many of the results are initially discovered by an academic researchers who neglects the consequences because it is not his job --he has a script to follow. Or he cannot connect the dots because he is a nerd. Meyers uses Darwin as the ultimate model: the independent gentleman scholar who does not need anyone and can follow a lead when he sees it.
e- It seems to me that discoverers are usually nonnerds. Egomaniacs, perhaps, but certainly of the nonnerd category.
Now it is depressing to have to review the works of the late Roy Porter, a man with remarkable curiosity and a refined intellect, who wrote many charming books on the history of medicine. Does the narrative fallacy cancels everything he did? I hope not. But we urgently need to rewrite the history of medicine without the ex post explanations. Meyers started the process: he provides data for modern medicine since, say, Pasteur. I am more interested in the genesis of the field before the Galenic nerdification.
作者：nunia 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
|
|
听医生的话
