vendetta 333
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Why Scientific Progress Is So Slow Compared To What It Could Be
People love to talk about how advanced modern science is, how we live in the most technologically developed era in human history, how medicine is constantly improving and all that. And sure, compared to medieval times we obviously know far more about biology and the human body. But if you actually step back and look at how slow progress is in areas like aging, disease, metabolism, or even nutrition, it starts looking a lot less impressive. The pace looks incredibly slow compared to what it realistically could be.One of the biggest reasons is something nobody really wants to say out loud within the research community. The organism we are trying to understand the most is the human body, yet the one thing you are almost completely forbidden from experimenting on in any serious controlled way is… humans. Everything has to go through layers of ethics boards, international rules, institutional review committees, regulations, consent frameworks, legal liability checks, and about ten other stupid fucking filters before anything even begins. By the time a study is approved the original idea is already years old.
So what do scientists do instead?
They use mice, rats, petri dishes, computer models, statistical correlations, basically anything except the actual system we want to understand. And then people act surprised when something works perfectly in a mouse and completely fails when tested on humans. Of course it fails. A mouse is not a human. Their metabolism is different, their lifespan is different, their immune system is different, their environment is different. Yet an enormous amount of biological research still depends on animal models because it is one of the few things that is allowed.
Human studies are mostly observational. You gather a group of people, ask them what they eat, what they do during the day, how much they sleep, and then try to extract patterns from the chaos. That is where most nutrition science comes from. One paper says eggs are killing you, another says eggs are healthy. Coffee is bad for you until suddenly it extends lifespan. Butter will clog your arteries until apparently it does not. The data is messy because the environment is messy. Everyone lives differently, eats differently, sleeps differently, moves differently. You cannot isolate variables properly so the conclusions constantly shift. And its things like these that cause these constant debates between vegans and carnivores, fruitarians and raw meat eaters, its all a big mess with all sides obviously cherry picking their own data. No diet, not even the balanced diet has been proven to be the most healthy diet for a human, the only reason the balanced diet is promoted is because scientists conclude it is the least RISKY diet to recommend to entire populations without seeing irreversible damage and degeneration across generations.
If humans could actually be studied in a fully controlled environment the way other scientific systems are studied, the speed of discovery would look completely different. Same diet. Same environment. Same sleep schedule. Same activity levels. Same chemical exposure. Then you change one variable and watch what happens over time. Cause and effect becomes extremely obvious when all that noise in the background disappears. That kind of research would answer decades of debates in a few years.
But the moment you start talking about controlled human environments people jump straight to the ethical sides of it. I think we can sacrifice a few unworthy humans to discover the cure for cancer for large populations, this sounds incredibly logical right? Well, it will never happen lol. See bottom for an explanation why.
And because of this, the result is a compromise where research is allowed, but only inside very narrow boundaries. Safe studies. Small studies. Slow studies. Carefully monitored trials that take years to organise and years to analyse. Progress still happens, but it happens at a crawl compared to what unrestricted experimentation would produce.
So when people wonder why we still do not have CLEAR answers for things like ageing, metabolic disease, neurodegeneration, or even basic nutritional questions, the explanation is not mysterious. The most important system in biology is also the system we are least able to experiment on directly. Everything has to be inferred indirectly through models and approximations, so scientific progress is not slow because scientists are stupid or because the problems are impossible, its because a large part of the slowdown comes from the fact that the most powerful and efficient experiments imaginable are simply not allowed to happen.
Very convenient by the way.....there is obviously many factions which defend the ethics board STOPPING human lab testing. (Obviously because it would disprove many shitty health products, would probably find direct cancer causing items in some food products and companies would lose out on billions of dollars lol).
