Hope for a Better Future

Pessimists predict the end of technological progress, but secular (long-term) stagnation is due to bad policies, not to having picked the low-hanging fruit, as illustrated by innovative medical entrepreneurs who have been constrained from bringing us quicker and better cures for cancer. Funded researchers must stick to their original protocols even in the face of promising serendipitous discoveries. Medical incumbents protect their turf by mandating costly double-blind studies for innovations, and then refusing to enroll their patients in the studies. Trial-and-error experimental tinkering allowed Emil Freireich and his Society of Jabbering Idiots to develop the chemotherapy cocktail that allowed many to be cured of childhood leukemia, and allowed Vincent DeVita to develop the chemotherapy cocktail that allowed many to be cured of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Yet FDA protocols restrict trial-and-error experimentation, resulting in many needless deaths. In medicine, as elsewhere, our future will be better if we unbind the innovative entrepreneur.