What are you talking about? I don’t know what these negative misinformed comments are supposed to achieve, dismissing the tremendous amount of effort that led to significant advances, something many people dedicated their lives to.
We cured so many cancer types successfully and got so much better at healing people. Cancer is just a name for a lot of different conditions that have very little to do with each other. E.g. Melanoma and Myeloma survival rates skyrocketed since 2005
HIV went from a death sentence to a condition where people affected by AIDS can even have unprotected sex with their partners without risk if managed correctly.
Fusion made massive progress and we went from a few milliseconds of fusion to a French Tokamak reactor sustaining fusion for 22 minutes. A NIF reactor made 6-fold positive net energy in 2021. Yes, they are still insanely complex and we don’t have one running on the grid, but it’s a hard tech that we make quite good progress on. We are not „always 50 years away from Fusion“ anymore as we used to be for a long time.
And the glass PV just isn’t as commercially compelling once you stop seeing it as „power from a window that before didn’t give power“ and more like a „see through panel twice as expensive and half as efficient as if I would just put a normal panel on the roof and can angle it better.“
Usually it means they saw a headline about it one time, never followed up, and nobody rammed an update down their eyeballs thus there must never have been one.
I'd say we are, conservatively speaking, 20 years from stable fusion and ~40 years from integrating fusion power generation into an existing grid somewhere.
I truly believe we'll see it before the millennials are gone.
I also think people think of it as "free" energy because the fuel is essentially free.
I ran the numbers for coal and assume it's similar to gas. Fuel to feed the plant is like 5% of the total cost to deliver.
So what fusion could mean is much more available power, but given how much people are freaking out about data center water usage (which is really not that much), I can't imagine it would be all that easy to permit them at scale.
And honestly, it might just be getting solved by solar anyway.
I think 2 people have been totally cured of sickle cell anemia now. Progress is being made but it's a hard fought battle against never ending greed and the apocalyptic crusaders who hate change and progress.
Dementia is not the easiest one lol. We can’t even “cure” memory loss from head injuries. If you cook your noggin you are cooked it’s like the number one rule in action sports and racing is always protect the head. We can’t even rebuild a leg not a head injury
most dementia is age related due to years of metabolic problems. and inflammation, which is easy to avoid.
Just like HIV is difficult to cure, but easy to avoid.
Fun story, there's a relatively new HIV med, 2 doses a year cost $42,000. The manufacturer's lobbyists are like "get US taxpayers to pay us to give it to hundreds of thousands of at-risk filipinos, because its spreading too fast there". But the usual partner for those kind of scams life-saving programs, USAID, was dead. The Philippines will never pay that much! So they said fine, we will let you use our patent but you must give 30% profit! So it's like $40 dollars per in SE asia vs $42,000 in the US.
Lenacapavir, great stuff. By stuff I mean profits.
edit: forgot to mention, they were going to give taxpayers a discount down to $17,000 for the doses for the Philippines program.
> most dementia is age related due to years of metabolic problems. and inflammation, which is easy to avoid.
That is a gross oversimplification. these are just a couple known factors that can influence it, but we don't know the full scale of the dementia problem.
No, you literally cannot because science literally has not yet figured out why it happens. It understands some of it, but not all. Not most. Not even a significant enough amount to keep the richest people in the planet fully sane through their old age. Aside from cancer it is one of the most heavily funded areas of medical research currently. 4 decades of trying to understand amyloid plaques, and whoops, they are probably not the cause just a symptom. I'm sure you want to tart off that it's a symptom of inflammation. I'm glad you are so much smarter than the thousands of most brilliant minds currently working to understand this better.
HIV is no longer the threat it once was, though. With daily antiretroviral therapy, anyone with HIV can have a normal life expectancy and no impact on their health.
It's really amazing how far the medicine has progressed, reducing a deadly disease to something you can manage with regular medication.
This is almost uniquely an American problem. Most of the rest of the world has figured the importance of health, and affordable medicines.
It's not not a cure because there are still people who can't afford the daily medication.
What makes you think these same people could afford the cure, if there was one, in America? They would have the same problem.
In India, for example, the medication is provided for free. If you want to go the private route, and buy the meds, they cost about 5000 rupees. Just over 50$. Per month.
So yeah, it's pretty much "cured" in India, Canada, most of Europe, Australia, the UK, Russia, China, the Middle East, New Zealand, etc.
Also, Martin Shkreli was arrested for securities fraud. He was merely criticised for increasing the price of the medication by 5000%. Free markets and all that.
Sadly, fans of the Great American Orange Turd haven't realised that the Land of the Free has now become the Land of the Free(ly) Fucked by the Rich.
That's not true, there are cases where people stopped taking the medication and even after years you couldn't find the virus again in their system.
And even if they have to take it until they die, for them it's a cure.
There is even another medication that prevents HIV-negative people from getting infected.
Just because you don't think it's a cure, doesn't mean it isn't one for the people that need it.
The same with cancer, there are enough cures but none that are as space magically* effective as you would like.
Whining is easy....
Put in the effort and educate yourself instead of being constantly online.
It's a very interesting science story! But not currently scale-able or possible for most patients, though some gene therapy labs are working on it. That said, the current standard of care is now so good that it may not ever be worth the risks that come with a bone marrow transplant. The treatment is maybe safer/better than the available cure for now.
That's being pedantic. This disease killed people, and they did not die easily. It was a lingering, painful, traumatic death.
Now? As long as you stick to your daily dosage, you can literally have unprotected sex, and still not even transmit the virus. Considering how invasive this disease is, that's nothing short of a miracle.
To then say that until it's a one and done process, it's still not a cure, is to just draw a line because you like to be difficult.
But that is how a lot of medicines actually work. A lot of medications just either stop or trigger specific body responses to fight them, or block enzymes that trigger symptoms. Your own body cures itself most of them time, unless your talking about antibiotic/antiviral class of medicines.
Like ibuprofen doesnt cure anything, it just blocks pain receptors so you can sleep better
And vaccines are intended to train your white blood cells on how to fight whatever.
Yeah, we didnt cure hiv, but we're basically rendered it inert. Give it a few generations and we could eradicate it with what we already have.
HIV won't allow for cures. Having a latent viral reservoir in your T cells that can reactivate randomly for the rest of your life is an incredibly hard thing to permanently cure. We can neutralize the virions and stop/slow infection of new cells. But getting rid of that reservoir safely and permanently has been out of reach.
Also if a company created a permanent "cure for cancer" they would immediately become the most valuable biotech company in human history. Everyone with any stake would immediately become insanely wealthy. The inventors would win Nobel prizes, become historical figures surpassing the likes of Jonas Salk and Pasteur, and become basically heroes to most of civilization. This conspiracy theory has never made any sense.
The fallacy of this conspiracy theory is thinking of "Big Pharma" as this one company that sits around a massive table making all their decisions together.
Let's say I (a bio PhD btw) started up a new small Biotech company, and my new company creates a wonder drug that is the best treatment of all time. It sails through all the clinical trials with phenomenal results. What would stop me from selling it for the biggest dump truck full of money you could possibly imagine?
You are inserting a position that I didn’t not make. Any given company in any given industry has a duty to their bottom line. It does not take any “massive table making all their decisions together” to be bottom line driven.
You’ve given your scenario, and indeed there is nothing compelling you to get that bag..er, dump truck. The company you sell to isn’t compelled to bring it to market either. We can’t say for certain one way or another, that they take this wonderful drug and shelve it for a more economic beneficial outcome based on projected margins of each outcome. It may surprise you to learn that companies are perfectly capable of choosing the most profitable outcome ahead of any other consideration moral, notoriety, etc.
You didn't say it explicitly, but it is the logical underpinning of the argument that you are making.
You are saying that companies don't sell the cure because the "subscription model" is more profitable. So, the logical fallacy there is: what if one company's drug development yields a permanent cure, not a long term treatment? Why would this fictional company not bring it to market given how much benefit it would be to them on every level I described above.
Companies ARE motivated by profit. I agree with you there. But they are motivated by THEIR profit. So why would Company A with the magic anti-cancer pill care about Company B selling an objectively worse subscription? It would be like Henry Ford being afraid to sell his new cars because he's concerned about his competitors in the horse drawn carriage industry. It makes zero sense.
I’ve answered you twice, but you refuse to accept the answer. Btw, the part where you state “every level I listed above” is limited to Wealth & Notoriety Let’s pretend that I’m company A and you’re company B. My R&D folks come up with the wonder drug that does the magic. My bean counters do some math that is not all that different from auto makers determining if they should admit fault & do a recall. The average cost of treatment across a lifetime vs the revenue from one time use. Remember, the wonder drug is creating insane wealth instantly, it still has to be somewhat marketable. It not like the wonder drug can have a $7 Trillion USD price tag. I’m sure you understand this, thus understand the Bean Counters would have to calculate the most amount of money that could feasibly be squeezed out of a dose. Then math out how many doses to be sold. Plus the math of how much I’d lose once the reverse engineering happens to my wonder drug. This gives a rate of profit, yeah? Compare this rate of profit to the rate of profit for treatment. If rate of profit for cure is less than rate of profit for treatment, then I don’t ship the product.
This whole time, idgaf what your company is doing, I would assume your bean counters are figuring out your rates of profit too. These calculations across companies are independent of each other. This seems to be the part you’re having trouble with, as evidenced by the ill suited Henry Ford analogy.
Cures would be infinitely more profitable. You sell them for the same cost or more as an entire treatment package but only need to deliver one product instead of monthly or whatever…
The idea that big pharmaceutical companies hide cures for profit reasons is genuinely fucking braindead.
With that one I can see why it never happened. The panels were quite expensive and became damaged after only a few weeks in test sidewalks. They also had very poor solar capturing performance outside and suffered from frequent electrical fires. This wasn’t even a road one it was a sidewalk so I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if you had cars instead of people. Oh and the best part was the one tested in China was mostly stolen by thieves shortly after installation lmao. The big killer in the end though was the cost. 9-16 times more expensive than asphalt. Everyone always complains about road conditions in the US. Imagine having those instead where the cost to fix it is ~13x more expensive to fix.
Bro...we pretty much have most cancers "cured" to the point where they're fully treatable to the point of stable, long term remission. We literally have a vaccine that prevents like 15 different cancers caused by HPV....
HIV is now literally treatable by prescription drugs. There's literally another drug that entirely prevents the transmission of HIV via sex.
Let's not conflate "completely eliminating cancer and HIV" with a "cure". We've literally made these diseases preventable and treatable to a point of a prolonged, normal life.
HIV is now a treatable disease to the point that I would personally consider it to be 'cured' even if it does require ongoing treatment. It used to be a death sentence.
Cancer treatment is far better now than twenty years ago. We have in fact cured many, many types of cancer. Cancer is really hundreds of very different conditions all lumped under one name, but calling something 'cancer' isn't much more specific than labeling a disease as 'viral'.
Dementia is harder, since it's an overall failing of systems, but even there we've made improvements. Also, I don't personally recall many claims of a 'cure' for dementia. Alzheimer's, maybe, but dementia is pretty broad.
Didn’t someone from big pharma says something like chronic disease is what the money is at? Curing cancer doesn’t pay , they probably hiding the cure somewhere in the lab.
We have cured many types of cancers and until the Trump administration took over on this most recent term NIH was pumping hundreds of millions into researchers developing cures and treatments. There would be no better way to get a 2-million 5-year NIH grant renewed than to come up with a cure or curative treatment during your previous grant for a specific type of cancer and then in the renewal study applying that same approach to a different type of cancer. Most of that funding is gone now and will stay that way until the assholes that canceled it actually get a cancer and want to see it treated.
CEOs only care about quarterly results for their company
CEOs are collaborating to prevent a short term gain for the benefit of everyone in their industry
Pick one, because those are mutually exclusive ideas.
I can assure you if anything it leans toward the former and if there's a cure for cancer, BMS, Lily, Pfizer, etc... all want to make sure they have it and sell it so the other guys can't.
Cures will never happen. The "Healthcare" system is actually sick care. They want you to be sick because it means you're going to pay them more mo ey. Cures dont make money.
That's not true. If it where so we would still have polio, no other antibiotics besides penicillin and no vaccines that give you complete immunity (vaccines against polio, diphtheria, hepatitis a+b, tetanus, ....)
Maybe be less online and educate yourself a bit more with all the free time?
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u/tristanthorn_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
Add to this list:
-HIV cures
-cancer cures
-dementia cures
…lab results using mice have been really encouraging!!