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Contact Matthew Herper

Why Steve Jobs' Magic Doesn't Work In Medicine

Steve Jobs while introducing the iPad in San F...

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As Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson made the PR rounds everywhere from 60 Minutes to the Daily Show, the terribleness of Jobs’ too-early death has come into focus: that Jobs evaded conventional medicine when his tumor first appeared, may have died as a result, and regretted it.

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking,” Isaacson told 60 Minutes. “We talked about this a lot. He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it….I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn’t always produce one.

There’s more here than just the simple lesson that people with cancer should listen to their doctors about getting their tumor cut out, or that you can’t cure cancer with diet or acupuncture, as Jobs apparently hoped he could. The kind of innovation Steve Jobs practiced, probably the type of innovation we mythologize and lionize most since personal computers started changing the fabric of society three decades ago, does not and has not translated to medicine in the same way.

To some extent, everything that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the folks at Google have done to change our world springs from a single innovation: the creation of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. Every computer technology has sprung from this fundamental innovation. If we really want to talk about the biggest heroes of the digital age, we should always be starting with Robert Noyce, the Intel co-founder, or Jack Kilby, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his transistor work.

But we don’t. Neither of those men ever bonded with the larger public the way Jobs did. And that’s because Jobs (like Gates, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, really), was solving a different kind of problem: how to make a powerful new technology useable to people. And Jobs, with an artist’s vision, went a step further: he made it perfect. Like Ferdinand Porsche building cars, he made the mundane beautiful, building technological gadgets in which people could see themselves.

Certainly, hospitals could use the Jobs touch. In a stunning eulogy, Jobs’ sister Mona Simpson recounted how an intubated Jobs asked for a sketchpad in the ICU. “He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment,” she said. “He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.”

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  • drkenromeo drkenromeo 3 years ago

    Steve Jobs was a master of technology, but technology in medicine today usually does little more than extend lifespan. While this is commendable, where is the concern for the “quality” of life as we live longer due to technological breakthroughs?

  • zier zier 3 years ago

    Your comment is not sound given your use of an old propagandist’s device. Take a situation where you know the outcome. Make sure that this outcome seems to prove something that you believe in. Then state that story as proof of your already predetermined belief, leaving out any facts that contradict your falsely abstracting that one incident into a universal truth. This approach to argument is a tool of ideologues and not of those pursuing truth.
    Jobs might have lived longer if he had surgery, but the fact is that people have successfully treated cancer with diet and/or herbs and the survival rate for liver cancer using biomedicine is far from excellent. What his case proves of anything is that a slavish belief in either biomedicine or so-called alternative medicine is a poor approach. The only way that technology analogies enter into this is the need to remember that the human body and mind are not machines or like machines and modern [medical] technology is far from infallible.
    So the best solution to any given health problem is an individualized diagnosis often by more then one approach (i.e., including alternative medical disciplines) and the use of whatever medical approaches can, individually or in a complementary fashion, lead to better health with a relative minimum of risk.

  • whydavid whydavid 3 years ago

    Well no, not really. Alternative medicine that actually works goes by a different name: “Medicine”

    Alternative medicine approaches are frequently put to the test in scientific literature….and the results are consistently poor or consistent with a placebo.

    Look at the Cochrane collaboration and you will see detailed literature reviews of acupuncture and other alternative medicine techniques.

    So, when you are ill, you should indeed come up with an individualized treatment plan after consulting with specialists. Those specialists should include licensed physicians and your family, and not the snake-oil salesman who thinks he can flush your gall bladder by feeding you seaweed.

  • dutch dutch 3 years ago

    The flu shot that your ‘healthcare professional’ recommends has been proven in multiple independent studies to be no more effective than a placebo either. Check your facts.

    And at least alternative medicines don’t have 15ug per dose of mercury.

    The flu shot is poisonous snake oil and plenty of “licensed physicians” and “specialists” recommend it. Acupuncture meanwhile predates it by some 2000 years. Sorry that you don’t believe in it because an astroturf organization of healthcare lobbyists claim that years of painkillers are a better option.

    When you’re done appealing to authority, we’d be happy to hear an original thought from you on the topic if you have any. So far you’ve only pitched slogans that are laughable to anyone armed with facts and absent an agenda….

  • Matthew Herper Matthew Herper, Forbes Staff 3 years ago

    No. This isn’t true. For multiple reasons, the flu shot is one of the least effective vaccines in common use. But it has clearly worked, for instance, in challenge studies. There is nothing poisonous about the dose of mercury in flu shots, and flu shots without mercury are available.

  • miguelriviel miguelriviel 3 years ago

    What is biomedicine to you. It sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about. Biomedicine is an extraordinary field that is breaking grounds, the likes of which one has never seen before. The reference this blogger made about Jobs getting his genome sequenced is made to seem like a bad thing, when in fact it is a screening for chemotherapeutics that act well only on cancers enthralled to a certain genome. furthermore, your assertion that the human body is a machine is entirely wrong. I get your point, but within the context, it is horribly inaccurate. “Alternative medicine” that works, IS medicine.

  • hubbling hubbling 3 years ago

    Will Steve Jobs magic will work or not ? only time will decide it. We have to wait and see

  • John R. Graham John R. Graham, Contributor 3 years ago

    As David Whelan writes, we don’t want to go to the hospital. We all want to play with an iPad.

    However, we all need to go to the hospital at least once in our life, so the challenge that Matthew Herper raises is valid.

    Let me turn it on its head: Think of a parallel universe where the tech industry was regulated the way we regulate hospitals.

    Tech companies would not be allowed to employ computer scientists directly. Instead they’d grant “coding privileges” under complex contracts with groups of practicing computer scientists.

    Costomers would not buy computers and other tech devices directly. Instead, they’d acquire them for free, or a small co-payment, and submit a claim to an insurance company.

    The insurance companies would pay the tech company a “facilities fee” to cover overhead and materials. However, they would pay the computer scientists separately, according to a schedule of fees based on billing codes that were the intellectual property of the computer scientists’ largest professional association.

    These billing codes would also be used by the largest single buyer of tech equipment, the federal government.

    Furthermore, in some states, an entrepreneur who wanted to start a new tech company would have to get a “Certificate of Need” from the state, which would only be granted if he could prove that incumbent tech fims in the state were not satisfying the residents’ needs.

    And, of course, any new “app” would have to be approved by a federal bureaucracy that would determine whether it is safe and effective.

    Et cetera.

    Would a Steve Jobs ever arise in such an environment? Highly unlikely.

  • 2204rob 2204rob 3 years ago

    Exactly! Well put.

  • Hsuanchi Lai Hsuanchi Lai 3 years ago

    Really great comparison! It totally explained why its so tough for any innovation in pharma/biotech.