Even though the genome hasn't unleashed a flood of new cures, it's still a great thing that we're getting excited over each new potential avenue of fighting disease. That way, one day we'll get enough knowledge together to make medicine as effective as we would like.
A few false starts along the way is fine as long as we keep going.
imo, progress usually can't be made without mistakes. There may be many 'coming soon' cures, but a lot will fail, some will cure other things than original disease, some will advance understanding of the disease and gradually, progress is made from different directions
I don't understand the vitriol. They may, or may not, reach their goal, but it's certainly worth trying.
Even if they don't cure all diseases - if they advance our understanding of some of them, or help cure some, then humanity will be advanced by that much more.
We can help find cures for future generations, I bet reading this might make someone want to go in that field. Every year people improve lives via new drugs.
This is so exciting. I feel like we're really at the cusp of a complete change in our expectations of how we treat disease, what cures look like, what they cost, and the range of improvements that can be made to people's lives.
Diseases like Hep C were actually cured (a personal favourite counter to people who think medicine doesn't cure anything any more). Plenty of good things have happened, it's just you can spin any tech improvement as 'actually dooming us all' if you want to.
On the bright side, if we assume that developing a drug (i.e. treating the symptoms) is easier than developing a 'fix' for the root cause (if the root is genetic- we don't have a long track record of fixing your genes) then we can possibly surmise that the drug is still a good thing, because at the very least it buys time for the afflicted until a root fix is found.
I've been hearing about upcoming cures to horrible diseases two or three times a month for several decades and the number that pan out is a rounding error. The only noteworthy development I can think of over the past decade is a 'cure' for peanut allergies (and when I looked into it closer, it turns out it's not even a complete cure). There's apparently neither any incentive nor stomach for humanity to be realistic about how much progress we really make, which, though considerable, is not breathtaking.
I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we have a cure for trisomy 21? For antisocial personality disorder? For obesity and addiction? These things are far more complicated than just creating the right drug.
But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.
Maybe it's wrong, but I'm happy that cases are exploding because that (hopefully) means there will be more research into better treatments and preventions.
A few false starts along the way is fine as long as we keep going.
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