>ideas have to navigate through a maze of social forces, power structures, and personal agendas — forces that are still very much alive today.<p>You think ideas have it tough.<p>Counterintuitively, with proofs-of-concept, prototypes, and actual pilot runs it can be even worse :\<p>Galileo wasn't threatened as badly on his ideas alone.<p>Once he could demonstrate, new obstacles were just waiting to rear their ugly head.<p>>science isn’t like law or medicine<p>Wait a minute, law isn't based on natural laws or even fundamental logic very much of the time so the dissimilarity can be extreme.<p>But medicine is, and more natural is usually a good baseline.<p>It's just not ethical to go willy-nilly experimenting on living subjects like you can in vitro.<p>It's still true to a good extent that science is not like medicine, but at the same time medicine is very much like science because health care is a meta-science itself.<p>Medicine, like raw science, can move forward mightily by compounding principles that are truly effective, whether fully proven or not, based on natural law with little-to-no-interference from any lesser type of law.<p>/end of critique :)