I have no technical training in the first three of these fields.
I have a great deal of doubt about two parts of the field of medicine. I have great confidence in one part of it,
My personal experience comes from my paternal grandparents. My grandmother got her medical degree, MD from U.C. SF in two years. My grandfather got his dental degree, DDS from the same school in three years. American dentistry was the most advanced in the world at that time. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake my grandfather moved his practice to Berlin to be The American Dentist to the Kaiser.
That shows me the level of accumulated knowledge in the two fields. Dentists were the heirs to the field of surgery. Surgery dates back to prehistory. The earliest book describing replacement of an ear dates to more than 600BCE in India (Sushruta Samhita).
Medicine was mostly wives-tales based on my father's recollection of my grandmother's practices. Her sister also had an MD and did research on leukemia.
Today's surgeons can go through the arteries and work on the heart. I have a heart stent. I am impressed with surgery with its history of experience dating back millennia.
On the other hand today's doctors have had effective medicines only since WWI when sulfathiazole was used as an antimicrobial. The first potent drug doctors had was penicillin which was used in WWII. Followed by the amazing Salk polio vaccine. For me, modern medicine only dates from that early Post War period. Today it is slowly becoming research and data based. Slowly.
Still mostly guess work. Doctors claim many maladies due to smoking tobacco and tobacco smoke. I've seen most of the research. No one who knows statistics could see it as anything but nonsense. It is the medical profession that claims the new vaping of nicotine is medically harmful without a shred to research evidence. Medicine, excluding surgery is still less than impressive.
One field of medicine that is totally fictitious is nutrition. Most of my growing years I was told not to exercise after a meal lest I get cramps. That sugar was very harmful and raised my blood sugar level, while egg cholesterol raised my blood cholesterol level. None of these are correct. All the while doctors knew little or nothing about the role of the flora and fauna in my intestines. Nutrition medicine is not much better than Puritan voodoo.
Now to the brain. There are several tools being used to study the brain. One is accidental damage to the brain with observation of the consequences. Another is eeg, Electroencephalogram and the third is MRI.
Much is known about what parts of the brain connect to functional parts of the body. I am impressed with the use of electrical probes inside the brain to control Parkinson.
Beyond good maps of the brain I see no genuine progress. I personally don't expect much of anything out of brain research for the balance of this century. The brain is too complex for modern science to understand and grasp.
The same applies to DNA and the two sisters RNA and the mitochonria. DNA is too complex to be amenable to useful understanding
I detect no humility in the face of the complexity of the brain or DNA. Consequently I see no significant progress in either of these fields.
Lastly, I am regularly pounded with the miracles of AI artificial intelligence. This is mostly black box arithmetic. I am a trained statistician, and a legal expert in the field. I worked in statistical analysis for 50 years.
AI seems to me to be the application of two well established techniques to large data bases. Most of which occurs in a computer black box with the application of human intelligence after the fact.
The techniques are reduction of variance and creation of logic trees.
Reduction of variance is easy to understand. Take three lists of numbers with the same range: 1,3,6,8,9 and 1,2,4,8,9 and 1,2,3,4,9. Total the numbers and square the total. Now square the individual numbers and divide the first total by the second total. You get a measure of variance 3.82 and 3.47 and 3.25.
If you want the most variance you see it in the first list of numbers and the least variance is in the last list of numbers.
Now take something you want to explain. Who likes the children's movie, Bambi? You have a population of people who are leaving a theater after seeing the film. You have everyone rate the movie 1 to 10. Now you apply a measure of variance to all the data.
You find that people under 18 have the least variance in their response. That is the first branch of the logic tree. People over and under age 18. Now you look for the least variance in the responses of the people under 18. You find a new variance difference at age 12. That is the next branch on the logic tree.
People under 18 are more in agreement about the movie Bambi than people over 18 who have a greater variety of judgments. Now on the second branch you find that kids under 12 are more of the same opinion than teenagers.
You now have the findings of an AI study.
It can be interesting and it can be useful.
AI has a future but it always takes the application of human intelligence to make something of it. Young kids are more consistent in their reactions to a Disney movie than teenagers who are more consistent than adults.
In summary. Surgery and AI are fairly reliable forms of human action based on tradition and experience. Modern medicine not so much. Research on nutrition, the brain and DNA are mostly hubris.
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