…the living human body is a complex, cybernetically integrated system. This system has been studied by scientists …for many years. … Being doctors, they had purposes: to cure this and that. Their research efforts were therefore focused …upon those short trains of causality which they could manipulate, by means of drugs or other intervention, to correct more or less specific and identifiable states or symptoms. Whenever they discovered an effective “cure” for something, research in that area ceased and attention was directed elsewhere. We can now prevent polio, but nobody knows much more about the systemic aspects of that fascinating disease. Research on it has ceased or is, at best, confined to improving the vaccines.
But a bag of tricks for curing or preventing a list of specified diseases provides no overall wisdom. The ecology and population dynamics of the species has been disrupted; parasites have been made immune to antibiotics; the relationship between mother and the neonate has been almost destroyed; and so on.
Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York. Ballantine. 1978, p. 145.
