Everybody has a new idea. By default it is the latest and greatest of all time. Sure to change the world. Last night I caught an episode of Red Gold, the story of our relationship with blood. This particular episode chartered the medical discoveries that led us to transfusions. Assessing today’s speed of discovery against this particular example suggests we’re often kidding ourselves about the importance of what we have.
Galen, a 130AD Roman physician first put forward a theory that the liver was the source of all blood and the heart simply a destination. That stayed as the predominant thinking until the mid-1600’s where it was discovered the heart was a pump. Transfusion experiments [between animals and humans](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/ innovators/bio_denis.html) begins shortly thereafter. Eventually leading to [human-to-human transfusions](http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/innovators/ bio_blundell.html) in the early 1800’s. It took until the 1900’s to find different blood types existed and thereby make transfusions safe.
Big discoveries in any field take time. Astronomy has a similar history from Galileo through Newton, Einstein and Hawking. A nice perspective to keep when in heated debate of the latest RSS format for example.