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The next big thing
December 2016
SHARING OPTIONS:
We come to end of another year and another
administration. I’m thinking change as did many voters in this election year. When I began to play in the global life-sciences business in the 70s, the
telex machine (teleprinter or teletypewriter) was king, an electromechanical wonder that chattered and rattled to call us to attention. Variants of these
wondrous devices were popular for punching yellow paper tape to program minicomputers. An input/output device of the most primitive sort—it was a
mature device in my immaturity, having been introduced in the 1930s.
It was a joy to come to the office each
morning and unroll the paper, hoping for orders from Hong Kong or Frankfurt, but please no service problems from Australia.
Fax, and then Fedex, came to the rescue. They were very costly and special, but accommodated graphics and even hand scribbles on hotel stationery
in Bavaria. Within five years or so the bloom fell off and fax machines digested menus from local restaurants, frauds from Nigeria and the favorite fraud of
all, invoices for fax paper that had never shipped.
The first email brought us back to the telex machine: words
without graphics. The signal-to-noise ratio was at first high and very special. We’d get an email that said, “We just sent you a chromatogram by
fax.” Then the pollution increased exponentially with access to the web and bandwidth to accommodate attachments. A decade later we were expected to
network socially, although with more noise and jokes than substantive data. Video then fried more neurons and national human productivity sank, as robots
took over. Now all this is in our pocket. Are we done yet? Can I rest?
These developments have impacted science in
ambiguous ways. The rise of endless commercial journals and open-access publications that print nothing eats up our time. Much is published in a third (or
even fourth tier) that is not well reviewed, and found to be irreproducible. Some even advocate making preprints widely available without review.
Transmission costs now approach zero, paper is only used locally, postage is irrelevant and the human brain is not advancing. Could it perhaps be slipping
from multitasking under the weight of Big Data? I recall when genomics was new and then proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics and more. They all were the next
big thing. They became easier (to do) and harder (as the unknown unknowns became known).
Today the lower friction
to get data has outrun the ability to interpret it or even properly repeat it. What to do? Invent complex data sets, hoping that enough of it will result in
enlightenment, even with much of the data being junk? Is the microbiome getting old too fast? CRISPR too? Optogenetics? But we haven’t finished riding
the earlier omics waves which thus far benefit very few patients. I see a parallels with an open-access press. There truth has been sacrificed to the
priority of supporting a political narrative. Even worse, it appears the same has happened in science, with so many press releases publicizing biomarkers far
from clinical validation and drug targets unproven to be either safe or effective (i.e. druggable).
The
public press is beginning to wonder about science-by-tweet in parallel with what they see as corruption in drug pricing, confirmation bias in clinical trials
and even, in a few cases, creating diseases to fit drugs at hand. The influence of low friction communications on human culture is now a legitimate topic of
scientific study. What is the impact on our mental health, our productivity, our politics, our science reporting, our civility and our respect for each
other? It’s early, but it’s not looking good.
Can we please stop hyping STEM and associated higher
education, while neglecting (effectively disparaging) those who do most of the work and provide most of the votes? I’d recommend a return to
conservative arts (known to some as liberal arts) where the truth is again respected, debate is welcomed, common values are noted and science can be
reproduced and is based on valid data. In other words, can we make America ambiguous again? An indication of a first-rate intellect is the ability to keep
two opposing thoughts in mind simultaneously (Thank you F. Scott Fitzgerald). This we need to be able to do.
I’m afraid the genie is out of the bottle and it will continue to be challenging to pick signals out of the noise in so many poorly controlled
communications channels. We must try. There is very little in the life sciences that is not ambiguous. The public should know the truth that magic bullets
remain a fantasy from an opera. We do make incremental progress, but must be more patient. Meanwhile, the telex machine and TWX network rest quietly in
peace. Or do they?
Peter T. Kissinger (who can be reached at kissinger@ddn- news.com) is professor of chemistry at Purdue University, chairman emeritus of BASi and a director of Chembio Diagnostics, Phlebotics and Prosolia. Back |
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