The current paradigm of drug development and pharmacology will be changed sooner or later and those who will recognize the change will be able to take a major profit associated with the paradigm shift. A phenomenon which induces this kind of shift is usually called as a wild card or Black Swan in Nassim Taleb's terminology. In the history we can recognize several wild cards which dramatically changed the medicine and in this way made a significant impact on the civilization. Examples? Well, vaccination which eradicated a lot of dangerous infections and prevented pandemias. Another more recent example is discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics. In oncology we can mentioned discovery of curative effect of mustard gas on leukemia patients.
Well, let's take a closer look on the situation with natural science. The last Black Swans were: quantum theory, discovery of hormones and vitamins, nuclear fusion and synthesis, genetics, cybernetics with IT, internet, NLP and cognitive science. Well, probably I missed something. Then we have a lot of important phenomena, very crucial events and discoveries which could make a huge impact on the mankind but by some reasons the impact was not very huge. Let's call these events as Grey Swans. Examples? Personally I would name transplantology – it is proven to be possible and even now very usual to conduct organ transplantation but it doesn't changed very much the society. Another example is a space flight inclusive Moon expedition – very interesting event which didn't changed people very much. Genomics, stem cell discovery, renewable energetics... You can also find another good examples. The Grey Swans can probably lead in the future to bigger changes becoming in this way really Black Swans. May be in a very long perspective.
But there are a lot of disciplines and events which pretend to be very promising and important in the same scale as a Black Swan but in reality which are not inducing any remarkable impact on the global level. Let's coin a name for them: Dirty Swans. Intuitively the name is understood: Dirty Swans are look like Black ones but being simply dirty they can be “cleaned” into “usual” and not very important White Swans by close critical scientific analysis of their potential and practical merits. I would suggest the following nomineeo be named as a Dirty Swan: nanotechnology (inclusive nanomedicin, nanochemistry etc), biotechnology, ecological science inclusive global warming, combinatorial chemistry and HTS. The list of Dirty Swans will be constantly updated – in the search of a really Black Swan we will clean every Swan available for our critical analysis.
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