Chris: "The medical industry is a business. Whether people decide to view it as such or not does not change the fact that they are tyring to make money."
Chris makes a great point. I often argue that cures don't make money, only treatments do. I have to wonder: is there no cure for cancer because cancer is a strange, complex disease that we know little or nothing about, or is there no cure for cancer because if we cured cancer nobody would need chemotherapy anymore?
Isn't the most likely case a combination of the above? That the pharmaceutical companies are nowhere close to a cure for many diseases like cancer, and it doesn't make much sense for them to do research to get any closer?
In a related note, astronomers and physicists long believed the universe formed during the Big Bang, in a massive expansion that would eventually slow and reverse, leading to an event they dubbed "The Big Crunch." Recently, however, astronomers announced that the universal expansion is not slowing, it is in fact accelerating, and at an alarming rate! But trust us, we're experts. Because gravity causes large objects to move towards each other, there must be a force, the physicists surmised, that is pushing the heavens farther apart. They named this force "Dark Energy" and then concluded that the only way there could be Dark Energy is if there is Dark Matter. By calculating the amount of mass in the universe required to explain the acceleration, the physicists surmised that 96% of the matter and energy in the universe is Dark.
Unfortunately, they cannot locate or explain either dark matter or dark energy. But trust us, we're experts!
Now scientists are broadening their scope:
Recently researchers using NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe -- rapidly becoming the favorite spacecraft of TMQ, owing to its string of puzzling findings -- proposed "dark flow." Distant galaxy clusters exhibit "a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase," according to lead researcher Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: "The distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for this motion." Kashlinsky and fellow researchers speculate they have found the footprint of some force that lies entirely outside the universe, dubbing this new power "dark flow."If dark flow is real, then we cannot measure nor account for 98% of the universe. I suspect that humanity is very, very early in its quest for knowledge. If we cannot account for 98% of the universe, if we cannot explain why three of the four fundamental forces of physics work together but gravity doesn't, then we very possibly have a long, long way to go until we really know as much as some arrogantly think we know.
I am not saying this to make fun of astronomers, or physicists. I am saying that if we only know like, one percent of all the stuff there is to know in the universe, we must fund research and we must do so on a massive scale.
The same is true for medical research. It's more than likely that - despite all our advances and CT scanners and open-heart surgeries - that we are still basically bumbling through the dark in terms of our knowledge of the human body. We must, if we truly are committed to improving the human condition, fund medical research and fund as aggressively as we can.
Someday, maybe our progeny will laugh at their dinosauric ancestors who used crude "needles" to "innoculate" themselves against "viruses", but we will not get there without research. My concern is that people see the lack of knowledge in the medical industry, and rather than seeing it as a challenge to overcome, instead they turn away from modern medicine and turn to voodoo therapies that they see on infomercials and hear about through pyramid schemes.
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