#54 of #100Scenarios — Neuroscience Research

We tend to think of research as been on this linear trajectory of research and progress. Any serious academic will you that is not the case at all. A lot more research gets done before some of it might prove useful and find a path to translation. And even this path to translation is not a smooth one. The therapeutic route too, getting it into the clinic and the doctors to the patients, is another long and arduous route. We assume that progress is always possible — yes it is, but it might come from directions we never thought about before. Conceptual walls are a real possibility — it might be that there are some problems that are a little bit more intractable than we can chew for now. This is not fatalism. This is instead a call for even more funding into these research areas.