Seems strange but it can be true that we’re desensitised the progress being made right now, around the world, and that we could be going so much faster if we stopped standing on our own toes.
The deeper problem is that technology isn’t always the barrier: sometimes it’s about the funding, the incentives, and the institutions. While genome sequencing costs have plummeted and the resolution of microscopes has surged, productivity in drug development has actually slowed down: the cost of getting a drug to market has been doubling in real terms every nine years for decades. This phenomenon was first described by Jack Scannell, who coined it ‘Eroom’s law’, the reverse of Moore’s law, which says that transistor chips roughly double in density every two years, allowing smaller and cheaper computers. The slowdown may be part of a broader trend: across many fields, including semiconductors and agriculture, the number of researchers has risen while the output per researcher has fallen and productivity has slowed down.