Of supermarkets and medical science: getting the product lines right

Abstract

Every time you mentally subtract the cost of a cup of coffee from the money you hand over, you make use of one of the most remarkable human intellectual achievements - the use of zero in a positional notation. Take an average medical student: in the first year he\she will likely know more physics than Isaac Newton, and half way through his\her degree know more medicine that Osler. It is one of the striking aspects of our culture that we can take insights that have required the greatest leaps of imagination and package and distribute them so that their application is almost effortless. Science, as has been said before, is about making what was once profound, trivial. What is perhaps even more unexpected is that those of us less gifted can not only stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, but fashion their achievements into new structures, structures that furnish us with new and useful knowledge almost as a matter of routine. Take the modern randomised clinical trial (RCT) as an example.