PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

5. GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS COMPETE THE SAME WAY
forecasted trajectory and the actual course more striking. At face value
this would imply that the miracle drug in this case had no real effect!
I found this conclusion so disturbing that I went to the library to read
about the antidiphtheric vaccine. It was not an inspired discovery. Researchers
had been working on it for decades with progressive success
both in Europe and the United States. Early, less efficient versions of
the vaccine had been employed on large samples of the population. The
more I read, the clearer the emerging conclusion became. The development
of the vaccine had itself gone through a natural-growth process
over many years, and what we see in Figure 5.3 is the combined evolution
of disease and vaccine.
Medicine was not the disease’s only enemy. Diphtheria’s decline
must also be attributed to improvements in living conditions, diet, hygiene,
or simply education. Moreover, fast growing new diseases, such
as cancer, claimed increasing shares of the constraining overall death
toll. The fully developed vaccine helped regulate the exit of diphtheria
rather than eliminate it instantly. Individuals would still die from it, but
epidemic outbursts where whole villages were decimated could now be
prevented. The vaccine’s history is intertwined with the disease’s phasing
out. The progressive realization of the antidiphtheric vaccine can be
seen both as cause and effect of the phasing out process.
A situation similar to diphtheria is found with tuberculosis. The
medical breakthroughs that had an impact on this disease include the
development of antibiotics and, of course, the B.C.G. (Bacillus-
Calmette-Guérin) vaccine. The first human experiment with the tuberculosis
vaccine was done in 1921 in France, but ten years later its
safety was still disputed by experts such as the distinguished American
bacteriologist S.A. Petroff.5 Reliable curative antituberculosis drugs
became available only in the mid-1950s. Which one should be labeled
the “miracle” drug is not obvious. What is clear for tuberculosis, however,
just as it was for diphtheria, is that the disease has been
continuously losing ground to other diseases since 1900. Repeating the
diphtheria exercise I graphed the percentage of all annual deaths attributed
to tuberculosis from 1900 onward. Then I fitted a growth curve to
the historical window 1900 to 1931, before penicillin, antibiotics, vaccine,
and curative drugs. The projection of this curve agreed
impressively well with the data of a much later period, the post-1955
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