Gore Vidal once sarcastically referred to “living in the glorious eternal American present” in commenting on the peculiar presupposition of leading media pundits that history is safe to ignore when assessing a societal problem.

Given the scientific solutions to all problems promised 50 years ago, how did we wind up in this predicament, bouncing from crisis to crisis, not sure which ones are real or fake? Can a slight dip into history tell us anything about the HIV fiasco? After all, weren’t all diseases supposed to be cured by now thanks to the sequencing of the human genome? Talk about fallible predicting!

The key, I think, isn’t “errors”, for they will be made; it’s more about the commodification of science, which, of course results – as mass production is won’t – in imitations and not the genuine article. For practitioners, it becomes an irrelevancy to assess the likelihood of “success”, since it is assured anyway once one is admitted to the club.

Let’s consider post World War II “knowledge monopolists” sitting at the institutional levers of power, who prefer a compartmentalized “team approach” whereby experimentalists are divorced from the roots of that which they are investigating. Lives must be saved now, “no time” for idle contemplation, we are handing you this problem ready-made for your experimental solution. When the first polio vaccine resulted in an epidemic of polio, a warning was provided to society on what this new “hurry up and produce” science had in store. Was there “a remarkable level of data mismanagement, poor design and misleading conclusions” in the actual cell culture experiments that isolated the poliovirus? I don’t know. Here I prefer Feynman’s “served up ready made” wisecrack that criticized lack of fundamental understanding in physics as more important than errors per se. In biomedical research based on cell lines, post-1950 generations know of nothing else: this particular methodology is “biology”, an inherent restriction that I believe results in myopic puzzle solving. Working pathologists might say cell-line experimentalists are – notwithstanding credentials – out of their depth. They never know when they’re just chasing their own tails, even while publishing quite impressive papers.

So, “science” should include a scientist analyzing the history of a problem. Cell-lines begat virus isolation which begat HIV – a “myopic discovery” par excellance given a total and complete failure to find this putative HIV in a single AIDS patient. But evidence of toxic exposures can be found aplenty. And cell-lines have NOT begat the promised cancer cures.

The “error-problem” is there, as TS eloquently points out, but what if it is mostly a consequence of the manner in which work is organized in our ever increasingly dysfunctional (because they are) authoritarian places of employment. (Not to mention toxic as well.) Essentially the strategy is mindless production, more and more output, faster and faster lest we fall behind our competition. Cell-lines, of course, are well suited to this mind set.

Thus, there’s no time to review the history of a line of enquiry to determine how likely the next step will be successful. And no time for a “science journalist” to actually know something about the field being reported on.

“We scientists are doing our part, knowing that it’s most important to have an infinity of journal articles, with reams of inscrutable data that few users will ever have time to look at.”

“We practicing physicians, in more privileged positions, can afford to look at it differently. So what if it’s brilliant research or a lot of junk. We’ll leave the journals stacked around in various places to remind visitors that we’re not out of touch with current wonder cures. But with colleagues, we’re honest with each other. Just cut to the chase, this drug for this virus? The research backs it up over here? Good. Now it’s time for golf.”