[perpetuallunch]

Targeted gene therapy, cancer survival rates, trauma care, the advancements in hip and knee replacement, all sorts of surgery, HIV is now a non-issue with the right care. The list goes on.

Drug development is a hard problem because the solution space is poorly constrained: biochemistry is complex and messy, expecting one chemical substance to have narrow positive effects is probably hopeless.

[estearum]

...?

So the claim is that we're out of the wild west because there's a set of things we've made advancements on, despite drug development getting harder and harder?

[preg_match]

Consider drug development becomes harder because we've gotten so good at it. Basically all the low-hanging fruit is long gone. We have very reliable and effective drugs and vaccines for illnesses which DESTROYED humanity before.

The only reason people are even dying from cancer at such high rates is because we solved other easier illnesses, and people live way longer as a result. People 100 years ago weren't dying to cancer like they are now, because they were already dead from other more common, simpler, diseases.

Something like cancer is extraordinarily complex. It's nothing like a bacteria or a virus. I mean, think about it, we have to devise methods of targeting cancer cells without injuring human cells around them - when the bodies own immune system cannot differentiate them.

And we have devised those methods! Chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy. It's truly incredible.

[estearum]

Sure I agree with all of that. "We've made progress" is not what comes to mind when I read "we're just coming out of the wild west."

[preg_match]

I would agree, I guess it's a matter of perspective. I'd put modern medicine at maybe a 100 year timeline. That's short as compared to, say, industrialization. Which is then short as compared to, say, agriculture, at 10,000 years. And the shortest of all is computerization.