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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

Science advances one funeral at a time

sometimes i think even funerals can't help.

For example, several years ago significant cataract improvement was achieved by applying to eyes lanasterol (chemical in your body clearing cataract naturally) with DMSO (well known widely used solvent which is used in particular to deliver various medicine through the skin, etc., and some adventurous people are also using it to for example deliver dye into eyes to change the eye color). Several other scientific teams at different places tried to reproduce the result by applying lanasterol without DMSO, and no improvement happened. They concluded that the original study effect is non-reproducible and that the application of lanasterol is non-effective. I'm not kidding - you can google these articles yourselves.

Sounds like they are still trying to use lanasterol:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36484206/

I see stories about this being used for cataracts going back almost a decade.

Medicine advances so slowly.

Of course, as lanosterol is how your body does it when things work ok on their own. The issue is delivery, and for unknown reason they are doing it without DMSO or anything similar. Lanosterol with its large molecular weight have no chances of making it inside on its own. The other way of course is injecting it directly into the eye, and it probably would have to be done many times, and, once injections stop, the crystalline accumulation may happen to start again (as cataracts indicate that the body probably have some issue producing and delivering lanosterol naturally), ie. cataract returning, and in this case the cataract surgery starts to look like not that bad of an approach solving the issue once and for all.

>Medicine advances so slowly.

This is one on my deepest existential fears - not just in medicine - the Ancient Greeks could have had steam turbine based ships, yet it took more than 2000 years, and i'm wondering with a tint of fear what wonderful things we're missing on and what Dark Ages we have to pass through before getting to those things (and i'm not going to see them being long gone before it). The high-tech with AI, etc. is the only area where i feel that the progress has at least some minimally reasonable speed (or at least it is hardly reasonable to ask Nature for something faster than the Moore law), and if it were in high-tech there would be already 10 start-ups funded by at least $100M each perfecting and productizing the combinations of DMSO+lanosterol and exploring the similar approaches :) Unfortunately it seems there is no money here, and the Robin Warren's discovery didn't make him a billionaire.

the bigger problem is that if society collapses again there are few easily-accessible resources anymore, particularly fuel/energy. Consider the coincidence of factors that led to the industrial age in Britain… some of those can’t be reproduced again.

Mining garbage dumps for resources could of course be a thing, but probably not abundant energy.

This time there is no plan B. We either become an interplanetary species or this planet eventually becomes our tomb. Probably a couple millennia.

well, may be civilization would be much better off if we went straight to electrified industrial society using wind and hydro energy bypassing burning of dinosauruses - windmills and watermills were known for millennia, one only had to add copper winding and some magnetic iron, the things available for the last 2000+ years.

> We either become an interplanetary species or this planet eventually becomes our tomb.

Yes, only my version of the "tomb" is that it would be our planetary scale ant city/colony as we become totally connected and our societies naturally become highly totalitarian (not necessarily due to some ideology, you'd just naturally have less and less space/resources/opportunities for your private endeavors). Some ant colonies exist uninterrupted for several thousand years, no progress, just happy busy ants doing their happy stuff. Only few of us who'd get off that planet will have a chance to continue the civilizational progress. Kind of bifurcation of our species. Interesting that Musk advances our civilization in both directions - neural implants as well as SpaceX.

How do you get the prerequisites for solar without access to large amounts of energy? Solar cells are made from silicon wafers which must be refined and doped to work. Maybe we could build windmills if we salvage copper and magnets, but refining even copper would be challenging without access to high heat fossil fuels. I guess you would have to bootstrap using charcoal, which would be very labor intensive.

Photovoltaics are not the only form of solar electricity production. Concentrated thermal solar power can easily get into the hundreds of megawatts range.

Good point! I guess that requires mirrors, but those can be made of less hard to refine materials.

They'd mine ruins of the fallen civilization, not dumps.

Well, you’re not going to find centuries of easily-accessible fuel by raiding gas stations. Good luck drilling natural gas two miles under the gulf with your renaissance era mineshafts.

More specifically Max Planck wrote: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Most famously quoted in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which seems apt to link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Robert Warren is most likely older than the doctor in question, so it would seem the science needs at least two generations of funerals in this case.

Several, if you count the patients.

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