The Cure Culture: Our Obsession With Cures That Are 'Just Around the Corner'

citadrianne writes: Cures for major disease always seem just a few short years away. We constantly read about promising new treatments for cancer, diabetes, HIV, ALS, and more. While the prognosis for these diseases has improved over the years — sometimes greatly — we still focus doggedly on the cure. "The idea of a cure is simpler, it's more appealing as a fantasy." This article takes a look at so-called "Cure Culture" — the focus on reaching for a cure when our scientific efforts may be better expended attacking a disease in other ways. It asks, "Why are we telling our children, our friends, and our family members that we are going to cure them? ... What does it mean to be cured of a disease that is encoded within your DNA from the moment you become a zygote until the moment you are dead? ... And why are we eschewing or overlooking treatments—real, honest-to-god treatments—that can let patients lead longer, more normal lives?

Comments

Not just cures, but inventions too.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Story: New energy source based on [insert some form of unicorn fart here] may one day solve energy crisis!

Story: New memory storage based on [insert excited hand waving] may one day replace current RAM!

Story: New computing method based on [something, something, carbon, something] may one day re-instate Moore's law!

Story: New AI algorithm based on [GAs, deep multi-layer neural nets, connecting organic brains together, a little man in a box that answers the questions and pretends to be a machine] may one day give us true artificial intelligence (whatever the fuck that means).

At 57, I've been hearing this crap since I was 6. There's no magic energy source. Moore's law has been stopped by physics. HAL has yet to enter the building. There's no cure for cancer or alzheimers, and so on.

Editors and writers with liberal arts or journalism degrees who can't evaluate the research anyway *love* this kind of filler shit because it attracts the eyeballs of the sort that read popular science magazine and take it seriously. It's the science literature equivalent of Reece's Pieces (meaning no disrespect for that fine candy).

But SCIENCE am I rite?

[responsibleusername]

I think a big part of the issue is that science journalism (by which I mean pop science journalism) caters to our optimistic "something-will-come-along-to-save-us" mindset. Scientists are happy for the attention and might make their research seem further along than it is and/or the journalists spice it up (consciously or sub-consciously) and to a lay-person everything sounds like its just around the corner. Now there is a whole internet sub-culture around science worship that tries to show science as seemingly fun and easy and I think we're far too reliant on some breakthrough to solve our problems. The sad truth is we will have to solve most of our problems with the tools we have no, or assume some constant conservative improvement in those tools. You can't predict breakthroughs, thats why they are breakthroughs. Thorium reactors and cold fusion and nanobots and whatever other BS popular science is espousing today might happen eventually, but we're fucked if it gives us the confidence to put off doing what will most likely be the fix for our worlds problems - hard work.

nature has a cure

[swell]

This is a hard reality for humans to accept, but there is a permanent cure for many terrible diseases.
We call it DEATH.

Am I joking? No.

We have all seen those dramatic nature shows where the lion catches the gazelle and rips it apart. The narrator of the show explains that by catching and eliminating the slower gazelle, the lion benefits the gazelle species by removing defective elements that otherwise would reproduce.

Human evolution has taken a turn for the worse. Rather than eliminating the weak elements and promoting the strong, we have reversed the evolutionary direction. We expend great resources to help the weak survive. OTOH, If a certain deadly disease was allowed to run its course, and all victims died before they could reproduce, the disease would kill itself. It would be removed from the gene pool.

If we live long enough as a species, and don't blow up the planet, we may well solve these problems without too much death and discomfort. Nature's way is not pretty to watch.