Eroom's Law
#personal-growth #complexity
In a curious counterpoint to the optimism of Moore's Law, pharmaceutical researchers face what Jack W. Scannell termed "Eroom's Law" (Moore spelled backward). Since 1950, the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every nine years—an 80-fold decrease in inflation-adjusted terms.
While our computing power races forward, our ability to translate research dollars into medical breakthroughs follows a geometric decline, suggesting a troubling upper bound. "½ + ¼ + ⅛ + 1/16..." No matter how much you add to this sequence, you never exceed one. The implications are sobering: maintaining progress against diseases like cancer requires ever-increasing investment for diminishing returns. The fundamental challenge, Scannell notes, lies in the profound difference between the relatively simple physics of microchips and the "deeply complex, dynamic systems" of human biology, "for which our current understanding is still limited."