While on my flight from London to Berlin last week I had the chance to read this very interesting article in Fortune (of all places!!) recommended by Burkhard Haefner.

The article claims that too much effort is placed on the wrong targets when it comes to cancer research. These targets seem to be flawed drug development (rats are not humans, less so petri dishes), obsession with tumour shrinkage (which seems to experts like a desirable and measurable good thing but is not the end of the story), obsession with the tumour cell in isolation (a more holistic approach seems to be recommended) and doing proper science.

About this last topic I have to say that I quite agree that to a certain extent it might not be necessary to have a very deep understanding of everything that goes on in a tumour to come with a successful treatment. It has happened before and it could be the case this time if more effort was paid on engineering a treatment. I am personally interested in understanding, as much as possible, the somatic evolution in cancer, but for most people, having something that just works is likely to be the only priority…and understandably so.

In other trades, engineers are the people that, in the realm of science, focus first in the application and only secondarily on the full understanding of whatever field they work in. In an interpretation that could be polemic, physicians are the engineers of medicine so the weight of carrying on a more result-oriented line of work would fall on their shoulders. Problem is that there are some engineering disciplines that are more forgiving with respect to playful experimentation, which is a very important aspect of successful research, and unfortunately medicine is not one of them.