# Eroom’s Law Explore Eroom’s Law and its implications at the intersection of Mormon theology and transhumanist thought—where faith meets the future of human progress. Eroom's law names the long decline in new medicines found for each dollar of research. Scripture places the power of a remedy in its reach to the cause of disease, and that standard gives a way to judge whether new discovery tools will reverse the decline. Eroom's law is the observation that the number of new drugs approved for each billion dollars of research and development, adjusted for inflation, fell by half roughly every nine years from 1950 to 2010. The analysts who named it in 2012 spelled Moore's law backward, setting drug discovery against the computer chip, whose capacity doubled on a steady schedule over the same decades. A common transhumanist reading of progress expects every field to improve at the pace of computing, so that cures for disease and aging arrive on schedule. Eroom's law describes a field in which more money and better instruments produced fewer results, and scripture tells a story of the same shape. ## Many Physicians The Gospel of Mark records a patient whose experience follows the curve of Eroom's law. A woman with "an issue of blood twelve years" had "suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse" (Mark 5:25-26). Interpreters have often noticed that Luke, whom tradition remembers as a physician, tells the story more gently: she "had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any" (Luke 8:43). Mark's version keeps the harder detail, that her spending rose while her health declined. The industry's history has the same pattern, and the analysts who named the law gave four causes: each new drug must outperform cheap and effective older ones, regulators have grown more cautious after drug disasters, institutions respond to failure by adding money and staff, and researchers have overrated what large-scale screening can deliver. ## Remedies That Reach the Cause Restoration scripture treats medicine as part of the order of creation and locates its power in addressing the cause of disease. The Book of Mormon notes that fevers were less deadly among the Nephites "because of the excellent qualities of the many plants and roots which God had prepared to remove the cause of diseases" (Alma 46:40). Ezekiel's river, flowing from the temple, waters trees whose "fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine" (Ezekiel 47:12). The Hebrew word rendered "medicine," *teruphah*, means "healing" and comes from a root akin to *rapha*, "to heal." It occurs only in this verse, so the Bible's one word for a remedy appears in a vision of the restored temple. It has long been recognized that drug discovery grew costlier as the easier targets were found. Less often noticed is the argument, made in 2016 by one of the same analysts, that the larger loss lay in the quality of the tests researchers use to decide which compounds to pursue. Mid-century pharmacologists tested fewer compounds, often in whole animals or in patients, and their tests predicted human benefit well. Industrial screening tests millions of molecules against single isolated proteins. In his model, a small drop in how well a test predicts outcomes in patients can cancel the gain from running a hundred times as many tests. A revelation teaches that every blessing is "predicated" on a law, received "by obedience to that law" (D&C 130:20-21). Latter-day Saints have read the workings of medicine as one such law, which researchers learn only through tests that reach the cause of a disease. ## Wisdom and Order The recent gains in drug discovery have come from better judgment about which candidates to pursue. King Benjamin told his people to "see that all these things are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength" (Mosiah 4:27). His counsel concerned giving to the poor, yet it fits an industry that has tried to buy speed. Since about 2010 the decline has slowed or reversed, chiefly because more candidates succeed in clinical trials, a gain credited to better evidence, including genetic evidence that ties a target to a human disease. Protein-structure prediction by machine learning received a Nobel Prize in 2024, and in 2025 a drug whose target and molecule were both proposed by generative software reported encouraging results in a small mid-stage trial for a scarring disease of the lungs. Mormon transhumanists count such tools among the means God has provided for healing. The risk is that machine learning becomes one more way to screen faster against the same poor tests, repeating the error that produced the decline. ## Cost, Access, and the Test The cost of discovery is often cited to justify the price of new medicines, so Eroom's law also bears on who is healed. The woman in Mark spent everything before she found help, and many patients now face therapies priced beyond their means. Treatments for aging would come through the same pipeline and could divide those who can afford longer lives from those who cannot. Zion asks that there be no poor among its people, and a cure available only to the wealthy falls short of that standard. The test for any technology of drug discovery is whether it brings researchers closer to the cause of a disease and brings the remedy within reach of those who suffer from it, or only multiplies attempts and costs.