Medical Knowledge Near Useful Limits

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29907, 22 August 1962, Page 13

Medical Knowledge Near Useful Limits

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

SYDNEY, August 21. Any new advances in medical knowledge could have “no more than marginal applications" to moat of mankind, Sir Macfarlane Burnet said yesterday. Sir Macfarlane Burnet, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. Melbourne, was giving the first of a series of public lectures in conjunction with the jubilee congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science.

He said he believed medical science had now reached the stage “when no socially significant improvement is possible beyond what is obtainable by the competent application of available knowledge.”

In this case some new justification for medical research was needed to replace the conventional claim that research was needed to improve the health and increase the longevity of AustraJians. “If current medical knowledge and available techniques are competently applied. the vast majority of

human beings will live out their Whole span of social usefulness.” he said. “We may have to recommend at some stage a progressive movement of the money and people now employed in some types of medical research to more socially-useful employment in the medical field.

“There are now no major organs of unknown function in the body,” he said. "It is orthodox amongst academic scientists to say that every discovery opens up the possibility for many more discoveries.

“I have said this myself and it is perfectly true, but the new discoveries are minor ones. progressively less important for human affair*." "Worthy Aim” The congress was a worthy aim and deserved every wpport, the “Sydney Morning Herald” said m an editorial today. “The public needs, and indeed is only too willing to be informed. It has long accepted the proposition that this is an age, and ours is a aociety, which is dominated and is being transformed by the ‘dramatic exptoeion' of scientific knowledge,* it said.