Science: a Bit of a Letdown, Lately

I took my son to the doctor’s office today for his 1 year shots, he has to have 7 shots between 12 months old and 15 months old.  They break the shots up into two groups, one with three shots and one with four shots, not that big of a deal and it is something that everyone has to go through, but something about it bugged me.  I always hated getting shots and I know that most people are no different.  What bugged me was the simple fact that we still used needles at all, where was my Star Trek style hypo-spray?  It has been over 40 years since Star Trek first aired and we still haven’t been able to produce a better and less painful way of administering medicine?

That got me thinking about other areas where science has just absolutely been a complete and total let-down.  Things like the fact that I still can’t be a tourist in space, yes I know that I can pay tens of millions of dollars to the Russians and they’ll send me up for a couple of days to the International Space Station, but that is less a statement about the progress of manned space flight and more an indictment of the Russian space programs dire need for cash.  I still can’t take a supersonic flight from New York to London, we had the Concord but it is now gone, a relic of a time when people were at least trying to push the envelope with regards to what man could achieve.  Hologram technology will never take off, I’ve given up hope on the transporter, and we all know about the state of the flying car.  Aside from the pie in the sky stuff, science still hasn’t been able to give us more useful and mundane advances like personal robot assistants or cars that will drive themselves - and parking poorly by themselves does not count.  It has been 32 years since Star Wars gave us the idea for personal robots like R2-D2 but we’ve still got nothing even close.

Aside from penis pills and miniaturization, I’m having a hard time coming up with real accomplishments here for the world of science over the past 40 years.  Things like computers and televisions seem to always originate in sheds and garages rather than from scientists and engineers who are paid to come up with these sorts of things.

Maybe what needs to happen is a cut in science funding, force those people looking to make the world a better place back into their garages and their sheds, where they can do real work to change the world.  Who knows? If we do that, maybe by the time my son becomes a father he can take his child in to get his shots with a hypo-spray and avoid the screaming and the crying that needles tend to bring.