Personalized Medicine: ‘Very little yield’

When reductive materialism bars the way to medical progress

An excellent article in the Guardian draws some conclusions from more than two decades of research in genetics. We were promised a bright future of personalized medicine (now called ‘precision medicine’) from research in molecular biology and that was supposed to revolutionize medicine, but now many scientists have to admit the ‘very little yield.’

The following is a (slightly readapted) extract from my book ‘Free Progress Education’ that highlighted the problem already five years ago.

“In March 2000, former President Bill Clinton announced the mapping of the human genome. Billions upon billions of dollars were invested in order to open humanity to the ‘genetic personalized medicine’. This was the promise. Twenty-three years later the widespread consensus is that the human genome project was quite disappointing. It turned out that ‘life is complicated’, since our cells are much more complex than we suspect. Therefore, any hope of healing genetic diseases remains as far off as ever.

And it is now for at least three decades that we have been hearing about the coming age of a bio-engineering and agrarian revolution that would save us from genetic diseases and feed a world plagued by overpopulation. But, while we are still waiting for some sort of ‘personalized medicine’, people in the so-called ‘third-world countries’ continue to starve. Genetic engineering and the application of genetically modified organisms in the food industry remain a controversial topic more than ever, and, among fears, ethical concerns, and lack of real progress, continue to raise skepticism. After the first cloning in 1998 of the sheep Dolly, the world was thrilled by the prospects of big-science medicine, in particular by the growth of stem cells with the promise to grow human organs as transplants. What happened to the radical breakthroughs? Much was promised, but as of 2023 not much was delivered. As biomedical engineer Professor Michael Sefton put it already ten years ago, they had been 'hopelessly naive', since 'organs are immensely complex'.

Recently, stem cell research has been overshadowed by the advent of yet another big-science project: CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a genome-editing technique that allows researchers to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR has inspired hope about its potential applications, from gene therapy to the improvement of crops. However, its promise also raises ethical concerns. It caused a worldwide outcry when it became known that a Chinese researcher claimed to have produced the world’s first gene-edited babies. This, when it was already known that gene editing produces unwanted DNA deletions and it is clear that this technology won’t fully fix sick people anytime soon.

 On top of that is a growing awareness of how bad science is determining not just some scientific outcome but the lives or deaths of millions. A nice example of that is the account of Richard Harris, an American biomedical scientist, in his book “Rigor Mortis”, which describes how American taxpayers spend about half of the $30 billion in annual funding for biomedical research on studies that can't be replicated due to poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Morris describes a dysfunctional biomedical system in which good scientific criteria and rigorous methods have been replaced, much too often, by procedures that once would have been regarded as inexcusable but that nowadays are increasingly becoming the norm. What once was called the ‘scientific method’ is becoming “an illusion of progress by wrapping incremental advances in false promises”, as expressed by Sabine Hosselfelder, a German theoretical physicist at the University of Frankfurt who is also quite renowned for her criticism of how modern particle physics is managed and pursued.

Big science initiatives are no longer about creating enlightenment but, rather, excitement. Most of the money goes into producing papers with exciting but ultimately empty headlines. This self-sustaining multimedia hype-cycle creates research-bubbles which, sooner or later, become unsustainable and destined to burst. Meanwhile, politics is all too happy to jump into this self-sustaining circus and talks about international competitiveness to keep the money flowing.

Yet the hard facts on the ground are lacking. In most cases, for these big science projects, tangible progress is difficult to see and real breakthroughs are not coming. The irony is that most scientists are well aware of this but prefer to keep going on. After all, they make a living out of it, and it is hard to escape the instinct of self-preservation. Additionally, those who find themselves too annoyed by it simply quit. The ones who survive are those who adapt best and are more prone to accepting the state of affairs. Many also like to convince themselves that the research is so big and so complex, it is a quite natural thing that requires more time. To reach the goal, we need another two or three decades. After that time has passed, they will retire and a new generation of scientists will take over, repeating the same argument as a mantra to justify another three decades of the same research with the same methods and the same mindset.

However, all this is not only a consequence of humanity’s selfishness or bad faith.

The universe is revealing to our research, and upon closer inspection, an ever-increasing complexity that quickly is escaping the grasp of the analytic mind. Even our personal life, which is manifestly influenced by the very same scientific and technological revolution, has become increasingly complex to such a degree that it is unlikely it will remain controllable for a long time. At some point a mental civilization that drives itself towards an ever-increasing complexity is doomed to collapse, or a relapse.”

I’m quite sure that the next two decades of this kind of research won't deliver the expected results either. Because the problem is not scientific or technological. It is the fundamental metaphysical assumption with which science works that is wrong: The hard-to-die belief that our life can be understood in an exclusively materialistic and reductionist paradigm. Our medical condition is only partially determined by molecules, cells, and chemicals. There is a whole dimension to life, biology, health, and well-being that transcends our material and bodily nature.

What should the future medicine look like? Well, I’m not a physician and don’t have a crystal ball. But everyone who does not live in a state of denial can see that the present paradigm isn’t working. I guess that government-funded research should open itself to a much less physicalist conception of our physical body and a more psychological, psychiatric, and spiritual multidimensional approach to mental and physical diseases will be necessary to make some progress and that does not continuously fail to meet expectations.

However, this remains taboo. There are no signs that the lesson has been learned. On the contrary, everything indicates that we are going to double down with the very same materialistic and reductionistic mindset. We will spend another load of billions on the same projects for several decades, only to realize, again, the “very little yield,” telling us that “too much emphasis is placed on our genes,” and that “life is immensely complicated.”