I don't mean to belittle the whole thing; there are certainly good points raised, especially about how too much of science is becoming commercial (leading to a lack of new concepts that might not be "profitable").  But I think that John Horgan needs to take a trip to a hospital sometime.  
Take the UW-Madison hospital&clinics, where my brother was treated for cancer, for example.  There bone marrow transplants are fairly commonplace--basically, sending someone to the brink of death itself, then bringing them back.  If the diarist's theoretical '50s couple came to a hospital of today, they wouldn't believe that such a thing could ever exist (bone marrow transplants were first tried in the '70s).  If the couple's son had the type of cancer my brother had, he almost certainly would have died.  At best, he would have had a decent portion of his face (including his right eye) surgically removed, with only a small chance that that would have cured him.  Chemotherapy would have been right out of the question.  One scientist was ridiculed in 1948 for suggesting that leukemia (one of the most common childhood cancers) could be treated by any means.  It was not until 1958 that a single solid tumor (like the one my brother had) was cured by chemical means.  A government program to help develop drugs was not set up until 1955, and it was not until 1965 that more reliable treatments using combinations of drugs were suggested.  (It is also important when looking at these dates to remember that these drugs didn't gain widespread use until years after they were tested.)  For my brother, the cancer was intensely scary, and his survival wasn't assured, but it was over after one hellish year, and the side effects weren't debilitating.  For the '50s couple's son, it would have been a death sentence.  
Today new technologies are in the works.  It's fine for the diarist to say that looking at ever smaller pieces of the universe is futile, but consider the world of genetics.  One of my brother's main doctors is working on a drug that will attack specific genes inside cells to keep them from creating more cancer cells (caveat: this is only my cursory understanding; what he's doing is infinitely beyond my layman's comprehension).  
In 1843, Commisioner of Patents Henry Ellsworth testified to Congress that the flood of inventions at the time "taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end."  Needless to say, that time had not yet come.  Sure, maybe technologies in the home aren't changing much, and maybe humanity needs to get its research priorities in order.  But when I hear a doctor say that cancer in the future may be reduced to a "chronic  illness," more along the lines of diabetes or epilepsy (something that is "managed" over a long time, rather than in a short and brutal battle to the death), that icky feeling down in my stomach goes away.