[SCdF]

Boots on the ground are important. Tools are important. Ancillary tools are important. I've worked with doctors, researchers and software developers. We're all important.

Doctors solve problems that are occurring right now. They save lives right now. They're assisted by nurses, and the guy who resets the sheets on the beds. They're all important.

Tool builders are like nurses, or the guy who resets the sheets. They enable the boots on the ground to do their job better. They're important. I used to build healthcare software. It was focused around making Doctors spend less time filling out forms, so they can spend more time with patients. I have never saved any lives with software, but I've helped other people save lives with software. And in turn, the fine people at Atlassian (JIRA) helped us manage our bug reports, which helped us focus on building better software.

My girlfriend does biomedical research. She has also never saved a life with her work. She probably won't have anything remotely useful out of what she does for decades. But, decades later, she might be a small part in something that makes people slightly more likely to survive cancer. What she does is important.

Are any of these things more important than each other? I don't think so. Doctors and nurses save lives now. Hospital workers and people who build hospital software help make them more efficient. Researchers create understanding that allows whole new avenues of live saving to occur.

It's all important.

[Udo]

I don't disagree in principle, but as a fellow biomedical/hacker hybrid I'd like to point out that the notion of doctors and nurses saving lives is probably too simplistic for the purpose of this discussion. I see research as the sole enabling factor for saving lives and healing people in general. It's very important that there are people out there applying our knowledge, but it's also painfully clear that we still have a long, long way to go in giving doctors the tools necessary to actually save a patient from cancer.

We have managed to make some modest gains in life expectancy of cancer patients, but it bears repeating that there is no cure. Modern medicine likes to gloss over the fact that there is no cure for most serious diseases, sometimes the desire to finding a cure can even be ridiculed as "unnatural" by some practitioners. With a few notable exceptions, hospital doctors don't do a lot of scientific research - if they're researching at all it's mostly what I would call engineering research. Not that this isn't important, too, but the potential to actually save lives largely rests in the hands of other people, such as biomedical researchers, but also increasingly computer scientists.

Of course you're right in asserting that without implementers such as doctors and nurses there would be no lives saved. But let's de-emphasize the romantic notion of the life-saving doctor a bit, because scientific advances are really the force that makes all medical treatment possible.

[refurb]

I'd have to disagree with the "modest gains" in life expectancy for cancer patients. We have made some incredible progress in the last few years.

The best example is chronic myelogenous leukemia. Before Gleevec was launched, the 5 year survival rate was 30%. Now? It's into the mid-90s and basically the same as the general population.

And Gleevec isn't the only drug that has changed the natural progression of cancer. There are drugs in the pipeline that will basically "cure" other types of cancer as well.

[Udo]

Chronic myelogenous leukemia might be the best example because the improvement has been so drastic. I challenge you to look up historical average 5 year survival numbers for lung cancer, colo-rectal cancer, cervical cancer, or even breast cancer (where we maxed out in the mid nineties). Fact is, an actual cure is missing. Available treatment options tend to be palliative.