Medical hypotheses
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We argue that the most ambitious science is intrinsically riskier science, more likely to fail. It is almost always a safer career strategy for the best scientists to seek to extend knowledge more modestly and to build incrementally on existing ideas and methods. Therefore, higher rewards for success are a necessary incentive to encourage top scientists to work on the most important scientific problems, ones where the solution has potentially revolutionary implications. We suggest that mega-cash prizes (measured in tens of millions of dollars) are a suitable reward for those individuals (or institutions) whose work has triggered radically new directions in science.
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Editorial Biography Historical Article
James Watson tells the inconvenient truth: faces the consequences.
Recent comments by the eminent biologist James Watson concerning intelligence test data from sub-Saharan Africa resulted in professional sanctions as well as numerous public condemnations from the media and the scientific community. They justified these sanctions to the public through an abuse of trust, by suggesting that intelligence testing is a meaningless and discredited science, that there is no data to support Dr. Watson's comments, that genetic causes of group differences in intelligence are falsified logically and empirically, and that such differences are already accounted for by known environment factors. ⋯ Lies and a threatening, coercive atmosphere to free inquiry and exchange are damaging to science as an institution and to scientists as individuals, while voicing unfashionable hypotheses is not damaging to science. The ability to openly voice and argue ideas in good faith that are strange and frightening to some is, in fact, integral to science. Those that have participated in undermining this openness and fairness have therefore damaged science, even while claiming to protect it with the same behavior.
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Partly spurred by the rapid emergence of discovery tools, empirical science founded on experimental validation now dominates academic funding, publishing, and recognition while forums for theoretical science have been marginalized. Although this hegemony of empiricism instills useful discipline to the scientific process, it also limits the pace of science to sensor innovation and renders the ontogeny of scientific knowledge path-dependent, concealing potential discontinuities in intellectual trajectories. Theoretical science, founded on intuition, inspiration, and abstraction, can complement empirical science by creating disruptive paradigms that facilitate detection of spurious results and frame new hypotheses. ⋯ Paradoxical medicine and dynamic range management may represent initial strategies to reprogram the neuroendocrine stress axes to modulate lifespan at the organism level, and many other strategies are anticipated. The key to theoretical science is original insight, but the prevailing pressure to conform to medicine's educational and practice standards dis-incentivizes independent thinking. A scientific future is envisioned when the commoditization of experimental science will enable its outsourcing, liberating health scientists from the tyranny of empiricism to engage in a more balanced process of discovery infused with theoretical considerations.
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Neurogenic pulmonary edema is an acute life-threatening complication following central nervous system injury. The exact pathogenic mechanism leading to its development is still unclear. We introduce a new hypothesis that high levels of anesthesia might protect the organism against the development of neurogenic pulmonary edema due to a more pronounced inhibition of the hypothalamic, brainstem and spinal vasoactive sympathetic centers. ⋯ During experiments with central nervous system injury, low-anesthesia-induced neurogenic pulmonary edema might negatively influence the overall recovery of the animal. More importantly, during a neurosurgical intervention, insufficient anesthesia might similarly lead to neurogenic pulmonary edema development in operated patients. Our hypothesis indicates the necessity of precisely monitoring of the level anesthesia during experimental manipulations of the central nervous system in animals or neurosurgical interventions in humans.