Limits

When I said there is a limit for us to expand our medical knowledge, I was actually considering two distinct problems – and each has two subtly different aspects.

The first one is the amount of medical knowledge per se, for which you can consider either the actual volume of information that is possible (a taboo question that should not be asked by a religious scientist) or the amount of material that could be handled by the brain of Homo sapiens (a philosophical question which, when analyzed by the method of Ludwig Wittgenstein, could never be answered).

I shall therefore leave these considerations aside.

The second problem is the amount of medical knowledge that a human society could afford to acquire – both in terms of human and financial resources.

Once again, there are two layers of this problem. In a microscopic scale, you have to consider whether manpower and money should be better spent on a few potentially fruitful areas of research – leaving out other interesting but probably less practical topics.

This is why many granting bodies now heavily rely on track record, favour the approach of Area of Excellence, and prefer giving a few big grants to elaborated groups of collaborators than tiny bits of money to a whole range of researchers with no overall theme. To a certain extend, this is a winner-takes-all approach and, in the long run, makes the environment hostile to new comers.

Interested visitors may like to go on and read More time for research: Fund people not projects by John Ioannidis, in the 29 September 2011 issue of Nature.