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About 10 years ago an Australian Doctor discovered the fact that ulcers were caused by a bacterialogical infection and not the overproduction of stomach acid. His work was initially villified and ridculed by Doctors specializing in ulcer treatment. After several years of travail the Doctors results were accepted and ulscers are now almots always treated by using antibiotics rather than older methods.

Medical research is difficult because, ethically, you have to use the best proven treatment, and because many treatments are only statistically beneficial (you can't tell if they benefit an individual, because some people get well without treatment.) For these and other reasons, progress is slow. Conceptual breakthroughs do not change practice immediately. I don't think you can fault the practices of science for the backwardness of medicine.

"Medical research is difficult because, ethically, you have to use the best proven treatment, and because many treatments are only statistically beneficial..."

You're right. The ulcer case is a poorly chosen example. Medical research is difficult becuase you don't to use human beings as guinea pigs.

I used to work for the Department of Energy which sponsors a lot of basic research. DOE used grant awards which were doled out based on recommendation for a proposal reviewed by a peer review committee. Much of American science is driven by this type of funding arrangement. The potential stultification of new lines of research under such arrangements is obvious. If some inventor did have a working prototype of an "anti-gravity" machine he would never get grant funding under the dominant peer review system because the principles involved were "unproven".

Scientists are first human beings (despite how they like to portray themselves). No human being likes to see years of work overturned suddenly by a new technology no matter how promising the technology maybe for the rest of us.

Dr. Park's attitude is typical of those scientists who work under government funding constraints. This attitude tends to be very conservative and not open to potentially revolutionary concepts in a particular field.

Scientists who work in private R&D are forced to take a different attitude to the scientific process than government-funded scientists. These scientists are compelled to think about protecting the commercial potential of their company's R&D investment. This makes these scientists less amenable to peer reviewed research results and the othere cadenced niceities of academic science. The mere fact that Pons and Fleischman did not publish their "cold fusion" findings in a peer reviewed science journal does not make their work inherently suspect. They were maneuvering to claim exclusive legal rights over their discovery; announcing their claims to the press was helping to establish their case for exclusivity.

The best thing that copuld happen to American science would be to blow up the government funded, peer reviewd grant system and start over.