Per se? If one does research that had medical implications, one is not a real scientist? If one's appointment is in a med school? If one's advanced degree is an MD rather than a PhD? My BiL is a PhD neurochemist at UCLA. I believe his appointment is through the med school, maybe joint with chemistry. He does pain research on rats. He assures me this does not involve torturing the rats. The research has a medical purpose and if successful will have medical implications. He'd be surprised, annoyed, and contemptuous to hear from some idiot with a philosophical theory that he's not a scientist. Do you mean he should be submitting his grant apps to the NEH instead of the NIS or NIH? Or do the grants handed out by the NIH not count as as "real science" grants?
This stupid particle physics worship involves a really profound failure to grasp the simple (though not easy) point that the virtues of physics, though considerable, are not the same as the virtues of science. There is a lot of science that isn't remotely like particle physics. Evolutionary biology, for example, doesn't permit precise predictions. For the most part it doesn't allow for expression in exact equations. Its basic theory can be expressed in English, without any math, that a fifth grader can grasp. Its explanations are narrative histories. But if it's not science, then something's wrong with your definition of science.
Medical research is generally just microbiology, anatomy, biochemistry, neurology, physiology. I don't see why the fact that it often happens to involve work that's relevant to our intense and burning, even passionate interest in human health, makes this classical "hard" science work not "real science," even by narrow physicophilic standards.
Maybe you mean, medicine isn't science. That's something few MDs, medical researchers, other scientists, or philosophers of science would dispute. But it's really a different point altogether.
--- ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
> On 9 Jul, 2007, at 11:55 AM, farmelantj at juno.com
> wrote:
> > lots of medical
> > researchers cannot be real scientists ...
>
>
> They are not.
>
> --ravi
>
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