Molecules, magic and forgetful fruit flies: the supernatural science of medical gas research

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".-Arthur C. ClarkeOften times in the day to day work of scientific endeavor, our efforts are not so much discovery as window dressing. Innovation has become a casualty of increasingly limited resources and the demands for concrete results in return for investment. Thus, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tend to fund known investigators in established project lines and we learn more and more about vanishingly small and irrelevant details of things such as the thromboelastographic characterization of fibrinolysis, while the incidence of autism in the United States stands at 1 in 110 children and continues to increase without explanation [1]. Similarly, commercial scientific funding emphasizes the certain result, that is, the "win", rather than a gamble on the unknown and studies of Pharma drug × vs. drug Y predominate, but studies of drug × on an untested medical condition are far less common, that is, nonexistent. Even in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), hallmark terms are "non-inferior" and "substantially equivalent", with the path for approval of the unique product in an unmet area of therapeutic need is extraordinarily arduous, to the point of killing new technologies before they are born.In a sense, scientific innovation has been the victim of the expansion of our body of knowledge. In an earlier era, all investigation broke new ground and any research could be considered "high risk", as there was no assurance of a useful result. So, we have reached a point where we understand just enough about the known universe to limit the exploration of new territory. After all, if we are comfortable in our neighborhood, why go traveling across town to unfamiliar areas? Indeed, basic research has become so arcane that we have developed a new term, "translational", to emphasize the practical application of these arcane findings. We find this to be a curious sort of lexography; after all, if rese