Medical research has become more laboratory oriented in the last fifty years. To be sure, this shift has produced some impressive results. But at the same time, human biology is not exclusively mechanical, and there are limits to what the laboratory can accurately study. The laboratory study of infectious diseases has been magnificent - it is very straightforward. But its very success has deflected attention from the influence of emotions. As a result, medical research has failed abysmally in many areas. The evidence is everywhere you look. Pain problems have become epidemic. Gastrointestinal, dermatologic, and allergic conditions are increasingly widespread, all because laboratory identification of the physics and chemistry of these conditions does not, contrary to popular medical belief, identify their cause.

An article in the May 2004 issue of Natural History illustrates beautifully the limitations of laboratory findings. The author, Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biological sciences and neurology, reported on what he identified as a landmark paper published in the journal Science. The investigators followed a population of over a thousand New Zealand children from age three into young adulthood, identifying the incidence of depression, and noting that a proportion of the group being studied also possessed a serotonin-regulating gene known as 5-HTT. The role of serotonin in depression is well known due to widely used drugs like Prozac. The investigators correlated the incidence of two variants of the 5-HTT gene and depression and found that inheriting the genes only increased the risk of depression in people. The "bad" gene did not produce depression in those who had not suffered major stresses.