I write as someone who once believed that new energy breakthroughs were destined to save us from our dirty and time-limited oil dependence, and by God I was going to be a part of those breakthroughs.
I wrote out all the equations and enzymes and conversion steps, using photosynthesis to turn sunlight into hydrogen instead of sugar. Calculate maximum efficiency. Engineer the missing steps. Scale as necessary. Voila, our shiny future awaits!
Once I really got into the nitty gritty of working against evolution and trying to redesign enzymes in my graduate work, I started to wake up. But then I realized that I was working alongside others who had devoted their entire careers to this work and who had not yet woken up and probably never would. The fact that they could make it work on paper meant that it *had to* work in the real world given enough research and investment.
I see that same Progress belief at work here. The theory of vaccination says that it is always possible to induce immunity to a pathogen by training the immune system to recognize some component of it. Vaccination works because the theory says it works, and if the real world disagrees then it can be massaged or blurred or wishfully interpreted so that it validates the theory.
Certainly there *is* greed and incompetence, but I really think it's driven by the belief that technology and Progress has given us a God-like understanding of the world, and therefore the world *must* conform to our models and theories and abstractions and solutions. Which means that scientists will place a lot of weight on proxy measures for which the theory is validated (antibodies are produced!) and be extremely incurious regarding all of the potential limitations and failure modes.
Re: Immunity changes and spike distribution after the vax
I write as someone who once believed that new energy breakthroughs were destined to save us from our dirty and time-limited oil dependence, and by God I was going to be a part of those breakthroughs.
I wrote out all the equations and enzymes and conversion steps, using photosynthesis to turn sunlight into hydrogen instead of sugar. Calculate maximum efficiency. Engineer the missing steps. Scale as necessary. Voila, our shiny future awaits!
Once I really got into the nitty gritty of working against evolution and trying to redesign enzymes in my graduate work, I started to wake up. But then I realized that I was working alongside others who had devoted their entire careers to this work and who had not yet woken up and probably never would. The fact that they could make it work on paper meant that it *had to* work in the real world given enough research and investment.
I see that same Progress belief at work here. The theory of vaccination says that it is always possible to induce immunity to a pathogen by training the immune system to recognize some component of it. Vaccination works because the theory says it works, and if the real world disagrees then it can be massaged or blurred or wishfully interpreted so that it validates the theory.
Certainly there *is* greed and incompetence, but I really think it's driven by the belief that technology and Progress has given us a God-like understanding of the world, and therefore the world *must* conform to our models and theories and abstractions and solutions. Which means that scientists will place a lot of weight on proxy measures for which the theory is validated (antibodies are produced!) and be extremely incurious regarding all of the potential limitations and failure modes.