backhand.slap.of.reason: I'm pretty sure that a process akin to DRACO can be tuned to eliminate cancer... But do you know how much money that would cost the medical establishment?  Same with HIV.  Or most anything, really.

Modern medicine isn't about curing the I'll, its about squeezing every last drop from wage earners.  That's nothing to joke about.

If a way was found that I could avoid cancer merely by not having sex with someone who has cancer, I would consider that a cure.

Science works on what the wage earners consider to be important. Legislators apportion funds based on what is popular with the wage slaves. Cancer isn't popular b/c it just doesn't happen to enough people, and as one doctor put it, the dead can't march on Washington. The space program isn't popular and would garner zero interest if we weren't sending actual humans into space (I've been told this by astrophysicists - as one put it when I asked why we send people to space, "because of *you*"). Diabetes - again, most of us don't have it, so most of us don't care.

AIDS gets all the funding and we now have all these medicines that seem to have come from the 23rd century b/c sex is very popular and everyone takes in interest because naughty stuff is so interesting and important to 99.999... repeating of the population.

If Einstein had figured out how a bicycle stays up, no one would care. He figured out how space and time work and the power of the atom, and still not many cared that much until there was a big huge splozhun.

So, the wage earners get exploited, but that's because the wage slaves themselves aren't overly bright and often insist on being exploited. Waddya gonna do? Look at me. I design fjords. Where's the sense in that? None that I've been able to find.


/80s kid memorized THHGTTG in high school