>Modern scientific medicine is supposed - no, required (with the increasingly narrow exception of surgery) - to learn only in the first way. Guess what? It doesn't seem to be learning much. Or at least, much of any use. Maybe medicine isn't as much like physics as we'd thought.

Hmmm: http://www.ined.fr/fichier/t_paragraphe/27734/paragraphe_img...

It seems we've doubled our life expectancy in the last 50 years. Medicine isn't working you say?

Look, I'm bitter as much as anyone else about the state of academics. I'm ex-academic-biology and have made no bones about it, here in this thread or elsewhere. But you are seriously characterizing the entire field.

Do you know why people are dieing from cancer? Because we've cured all the other diseases that killed them off at age 40.

Think about that for a minute.

Cancer is simply your body falling apart, going off the rails and destroying itself. It's doing that because, frankly, we were never intended to live 100 years. Thanks to modern medicine, we live well past the age that normal diseases killed our ancestors.

Our reward: battling cancer, instead of tuberculosis, pnemonia, cholera, gangrene or simply fever.