Does Human Knowledge Double Every 5 Years?

The War on Cancer

There are many who say that we are losing the war on cancer. This article (it is from Fortune, reproduced in PDF format on the Aperio blog), offers depressing information. It says (in part)

• The age-adjusted percentage of Americans dying from cancer is the same now as it was in the 1970's... and the 1950's
• That 33 years ago, half of all cancer patients survived 5 years or more following diagnosis. That figure has climbed, but to only 63%
• Most of the progress that has been made has been due to early identification of the disease
• American spending (all public and identifiable private sources) on cancer research amounts to $200 billion since 1971
• The cancer research community has published 1.56 million papers just on signaling pathways and its related genes

And yet... for all the article's accounts of false starts, corporate greed and bureaucratic fumbling, a great body of knowledge has been accumulated. A lot of wrong paths have been followed--but if they are identified and no more time and effort is wasted on them, it means something. Those with many years of experience in the field are starting to talk about drug cocktail approaches that target both the tumor and the environment it lives in. This is after watching AIDS treatment make spectacular rapid progress while cancer treatment seemed stalled. There is talk about imitating strategies that were successful in the rapid reduction of heart attacks and strokes, as well. And again, a lot of basic research has been done.

Knowledge has been created. Outcomes have not matched this creation. Politics and corporate policy have interfered. But it looks... possible... that when the politics and corporate policy are finally removed, that progress can jump and outcomes catch up. One hopes.

Cancer Survival Rates

Again, a doubling of human knowledge should result in different outcomes in areas where that knowledge is applied. A lot of money is spent in improving our knowledge of certain cancers. If we double our knowledge, treatment of cancer should have a beneficial effect--improved survival rates being one effect we can measure.

A Google news search on cancer survival rates shows evidence of this. From Canada, the National Post reports that "the death rate for breast cancer for Canadian women has fallen 25% since 1986, when organized breast screening programs began being rolled out across the country." Apparently, this reduction is down to human knowledge from the early 1980's (beneficial effects of mammography) being dispersed through the wider population. Again, to me this counts. This is good news, great news. But again, if we keep a 5-year clock ticking, this news will disappoint, as it shows nothing remotely indicating a doubling of human knowledge within that timeframe.

Similarly, MedicineNet says, "Statistics (released in 1997) show that cancer patients are living longer and even "beating" the disease. Information released at an AMA sponsored conference for science writers, showed that the death rate from the dreaded disease has decreased by 3 percent in the last few years. In the  1940's only one patient in four survived on the average. By the 1960's, that figure was up to one in three, and now has reached 50% survival." So we see a doubling of the beneficial effect, but over 60 years, not five.

More encouragingly, St. Jude's Research Hospital shows 5-year survival rates for some cancers since 1962, and some of them might just qualify as 10-year doubling (pause to experiment on how to present this information... Okay, got it--click on the image to enlarge to readable size).

Again, a miracle, but it doesn't fit a 5-year window--it's 10 years for the best performing cancers.

Improvements in Medical Knowledge

One of the problems in doing a weblog such as this, based on desktop research that is basically powered by Google and supplemented by Wikipedia, is that one can only work on work that has already been done.

If I want to tell you about the doubling of human knowledge in medicine, I have to look at something that has been measured, and measured over time, as well. This essentially means that much of the subject matter has already been chosen for me.

My desire would be to measure the doubling of human knowledge by noting beneficial effects of new knowledge. If human knowledge in oncology has doubled in 5 years, the clearest proof for me would be the doubling of survival rates for cancer in the same period (although there would obviously be a time lag involved). That's for my next post.

But casualties to U.S. troops on the battlefield are measured, and historical information allows comparison. And, there is evidence of dramatic improvements in survival rates for casualties due to improvements in care. Note that not all improvements are due to specifically medical knowledge. Improvements in logistics (getting a wounded soldier to care, getting the right treatment to the soldier on the battlefield, improvements in body armor) contribute heavily to this improvement. However, this is all improved knowledge being applied to the medical treatment of injured soldiers. To me, this counts.

Here is the lead paragraph from the first result of a search on Google News for 'battlefield survival rates.' It comes from Heraldnet in an article titled "Trauma Care Boosts Battlefield Survival Rate."

"The survival rate for U.S. service members wounded in Iraq has reached 90 percent - higher than in any previous war and 10 points higher than in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The major reason, says the general in charge of Army medical training, is improved trauma care being delivered moments after injury by medics and a growing number of soldiers trained as combat lifesavers."

The U.S. Army Public Affairs site has an article about the improved survival rates as well, noting that "of the 1,077 soldiers injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, only 18 have died of their wounds, a rate of only 1.6 percent. This is less than half the 3.68 death rate for wounded soldiers in Vietnam."

I would rather have this type of information about cancer survival rates. I don't think that battlefield survival rates necessarily should have a one-to-one correspondence with improvements in knowledge, training and logistics. But this is what is being written about. What it does show is that knowledge has improved dramatically--but it has improved incrementally and linearly, not geometrically, and the period is perhaps over a decade and not five years.

The final word shows more historical comparison, coming from Wounds1.com. "During World War II, approximately 30% (almost one-third) of soldiers wounded in combat died from their wounds. In the Korean War, the number dropped to about 24%, and held steady at that rate through the Vietnam and Persian Gulf Wars. In the current action in Iraq, the number has dropped dramatically to just under 14%, or one in seven." A 50% drop in death, but over a 60-year timespan. Truly great and wonderful news, unless you are assuming it will occur twice a decade.

Are there more people generating knowledge?

One proxy for measuring the creation of knowledge could be the number of people engaged in that activity. Not all knowledge is scientific (is it?), but governments tend to keep an eye on how many people are either practicing science or studying it. In the U.S. and the U.K., people are worried that the numbers are decreasing. Does the rest of the world make up for the shortcomings?

Well, someone has done some work on this: Via Google Answers we see... (and boy, is Google Answers great)

• The number of scientists in the United States doubled very quickly in the past. "the number of scientists increased from 150,000 to 2,685,000 between 1950 and 2001" but growth from 2001 projected to 2010 is much more modest, with only medical scientists having doubled in the previous decade and projected to grow at the substantial rate of... 26.5% in this decade we're in.
• According to the OECD Observer (January 2004), the number of researchers in the OECD rose 42%  from 1990-2000, which won't get the doubling job done. The article talked briefly about foreign researchers filling the gap...

So how about those Chinese scientists? Those Indian software geniuses?

• An article in Intellectual Property Watch says the number of patents filed in India has increased 50% in the past 5 years, without offering numbers. That's a big increase, but only half of what would be needed to double human knowledge, if we used patent filings as a proxy for new human knowledge (and found that percentage increases were similar worldwide). And if we are counting on India and China to fill a gap caused by U.S. and U.K. reductions in research and researchers, this would not support that thesis.
• In fact, patent applications to the World International Patent Office last year reached a record 145,300 in 2006, according to this article in Inc.com. But the article notes that this increase was only 6.4% year-on-year, and the United States accounted for one third, followed by Japan and Germany. This shows no evidence of 5-year doubling (you need an annual growth rate of 14.78% to double in five years), and no evidence that Asia will replace more traditional centers of knowledge production.

There Were Hints And Allegations

Remember we are testing three hypotheses here:

1. The actual store of human knowledge (not, repeat not, data) has doubled in the past 5 years

2. Access to knowledge has grown so quickly that it fulfills the same function as a doubling of human knowledge

3. We are disproving previously held theories at such a rate that it frees up resources to concentrate on useful lines of enquiry resulting in an effective doubling of knowledge.

The easiest to find positive indications for is number 2. As an example, 5 years ago:

• Wikipedia had 80,000 articles and 125,000 hits per day in August 2002. On January 1, 2007, it had over 6 million articles (in 251 languages!) and in Dec. 06 it averaged more than 5 million daily unique visits. Okay, that's more than double... but this only works for hypothesis number 2, as we have no indication on how much of the knowledge placed on Wikipedia during that time period existed before 2002.

It Should Be Lumpy, Right?

We wouldn't expect a uniform doubling of human knowledge within a 5-year timeframe, right? Even if this is a law as inexorable as Moore's (and that doesn't seem as inexorable as it once was, or am I reading the Dell ads wrong?), one would reasonably expect that human knowledge would advance a little in some areas and a lot in others. You with me?

Given what the world's attention has been focused on since 2002, here are some of the areas where I think human knowledge should have increased fastest:

• Epidemiology, thanks to SARS and Avian flu
• Biofuels
• Vaccines
• Proteome
• Oil extraction from rock and shale
• Mars
• Genetically Modified Organisms
• Fishery management
• Global warming
• Solar activity
• The Long Tail
• Stem cell cultivation
• Infectious diseases

I will treat this as a proxy list of subject areas to explore. I'm going to be digging around to see if we've seen dramatic advances in any or all of these. I'll probably dedicate a few posts to each of them. Got any suggestions?

Hopeful Signs From Personal Experience

I have learned a lot in the past 5 years. I'm not sure if it's doubled my personal knowledge, and I'm not sure that even if that has taken place, it proves that human knowledge has doubled...

I've read about 125 books in the past 5 years, and some of them have been important. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (click here if you're shopping from the UK) may have been the most important of them.

This is partly because of the theses the author explores, well enough detailed elsewhere that I don't feel the need to regurgitate it here. But it is primarily because at the end of the book Diamond redefines what a historian needs to look at to write good history. And this is evidence of a doubling of knowledge.

My 30 seconds or so at university was spent studying anthropology, and the best part of anthropology was the freedom of the subject matter. Just about everything touched on anthropology (or is that vice-versa?), from biology to zoology. Advances in any one of the sciences extended the frontiers of anthropology. More recently, that seems to have been true of economics as well. But when Diamond told historians that good history required the same wide-ranging view of geology, geography, biology et al, he doubled the field--and maybe that doubled the knowledge of history in one blow. How liberating. Maybe those folks will start having more fun now.

Top 10 Discoveries of 2001

Okay, here's the benchmark: We're supposed to have doubled human knowledge since this was published. Quick summary:

• A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, led by S. George Djorgovski, may have glimpsed the dawn of our universe. In Aug. 2001, this team reported that it had spotted the “cosmic renaissance,” the era when the first starlight shone through the cosmos.
• The skeleton of a new species of titanosaur, a common type of plant-eating sauropod, was found in Madagascar in July 2001 by American scientists Catherine Forster and Kristina Curry Rogers. The titanosaur is one of the least understood dinosaurs, though its fossils have been found on nearly every continent.
• Paleontologists from the “DinoNose Project” have confounded a couple of centuries' worth of thinking about the location of dinosaurs' noses. Since the 19th century, artists' renderings—based on paleontologists' conceptions—have shown the nostrils drawn on the top of some dinosaurs' heads. This position was thought to be accurate for semi-aquatic dinosaurs such as Diplodocus, but recent findings maintain that the nostrils for both aquatic and land-locked lizards are in fact right above the mouth
• In June 2001, Intel Corporation researchers, led by Dr. Robert Chau, announced that they had created the technology needed to produce the world's smallest and fastest silicon transistor on a mass scale. With these diminutive gatekeepers of electronic current, switching on and off 1.5 trillion times a second, microprocessors could complete a billion calculations in the time it takes a person to blink. And these transistors run at speeds of nearly 20 gigahertz—just a year ago the top speed of a transistor was one gigahertz, which was considered absolutely breathtaking.
• Plant biologists Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California at Davis and Hong-Xia Zhang of the University of Toronto have developed a tomato plant with a salt-tolerant gene. This new plant is important because it can grow successfully in soil irrigated, and often ruined, by salty water.
• Results published in the Aug. 2001 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance show that doing several tasks at once—multitasking—may diminish the productivity with which any of the tasks is performed.
• In March 2001, fertility doctors Severino Antinori of Italy and Panayiotis Zavos of the U.S. announced to a symposium of international fertility experts in Rome that they planned to begin reproducing human beings through cloning in Oct. 2001.
• On July 2, 2001, fifty-nine-year-old Robert Tools became the first person to be equipped with a self-contained artificial heart.
• Following lightning-fast FDA approval in May 2001, a new form of targeted cancer therapy known as Gleevec (formerly ST1-571) may become available by the end of 2001. During a three-year study, Gleevec was used successfully to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), an adult cancer of the white blood cells. Gleevec, which is taken in pill form, targets an abnormal cancer-causing protein called BCR-ABL.

If we have doubled human knowledge since then, sing hallelujah!

When President Clinton Said It

Address to the 150th Anniversary AAAS Meeting (1998)

President William J. Clinton
"We've come a long way in the last half of the 20th century. Fifty years ago, when President Truman addressed AAAS's 100th anniversary meeting, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had just created the first transistor; Mauchly and Eckert had recently powered up the seminal ENIAC computer. Pauling and Franklin were developing techniques that would help unravel the mystery of our DNA.

Things are moving much more quickly now. Today, the store of human knowledge doubles every five years. Soon, every child will be able to stretch a hand across a computer keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting ever painted, every symphony ever composed. We'll be able to carry all the phone calls on Mother's Day on a single strand of fiber the width of a human hair."

Update: I just found out that President Clinto repeated this statement in the State of the Union Address of 1998. Still trying to find out what the basis is...

How true is this? I can easily believe that the amount of data we collect and store doubles every five years. But knowledge? If human knowledge has doubled since April 7, 2002, should we, like, be seeing larger effects of this?

I want to find out. I want to find out if there has been a huge or small increase in knowledge. I want to find out if knowledge is becoming more widely available. I want to find out if any increases in knowledge are confined to certain sectors or spread widely across the range of human experience. I want to find out if the amount of false information is decreasing, thereby making more resources available for more useful enquiries.

But that's just me-- I want, I want, I want.