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Poll: Forcing smartest people on earth to do medical research would...

2 points by amichail ↗ HN
What would happen if the smartest people on earth were forced to major in biology and subsequently pursue a career in medical research?

Specifically, one would expect cures to come about around how many years earlier on average under such a scenario?

4 comments

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psyklic
Unless medical research is someone's passion, the creativity and intuition needed to break through to new cures likely will not be present. This proposed system will introduce many new worker drones to the field, but likely few additions who actually love the subject.

So if funding stays the same, I bet a lot of the people with actual passion for the subject will be pushed out in favor of people with perfect resumes but little passion. Hence, perhaps cures will come around even more slowly.

Scriptor
I also feel that biology requires a different mindset from those who would rather go into physics or engineering. Back in high school I would always excel in biology while one of my friends would excel in physics. On the other hand, it took much more work to also do well in the other's field.

Although some complain that biology is more about rote memorization, I've found that that works only if you want to pass the test. Understanding something like gene->protein is much more interesting when you try to understand the context and reasons for everything. It's hard to explain, but I get the impression that biology requires a stronger understanding of how large systems work, while physics requires a strong ability to manipulate and refactor situations to solve problems.

tokenadult
Interest in the subject matters a lot for successful scientific research. I would propose rather that people take steps to identify highly intelligent young people

http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

http://cty.jhu.edu/set/index.html

and then expose those young people to very excellent teachers of a variety of important subjects, including but not limited to biology. Some of those young people will become excited about biology, and some will not, but all of them will make their best and most creative contributions if they enjoy the freedom to pursue their interests.

Somewhat related to this topic, if a young person is very interested in mathematics and computer programming at age sixteen, the summer before he applies to college (I know a few cases like this), what advice would you have for that young person about how to prepare well to make a positive difference with that interest in math and computer science?

jibiki
Modern medicine is largely built on advances made in non-medical fields like physics, chemistry and engineering, no? (E.g., it would be harder to do medicine without electricity.)

So I would expect advances in those fields to be crucial to future medical progress.