We hear repeated claims that the accelerating pace of technological change will leave us foundering in its wake, and to some extent it is true. Certainly increasing numbers of Cientifica clients rely on us to sort the wheat from the chaff and help them make the right mission critical business decisions, while nanotechnology is so abstract compared to the daily lives of most people that meaningful debates are difficult to instigate.
However, the pace of change is not uniform, as recently pointed out by the US Food and Drug Administration, who note that there has been a downward trend in the number of new drug and biologic marketing applications being submitted to the FDA for review. This means that the new sciences are not yet having a substantial impact on patient care.