Ok. I’m a scientist at a pharma compnay, so I think I’m qualified to answer. I can say, unequivocably, that we would love to cure cancer and AIDS at my company tomorrow for both cure and profit.
If there were some vast conspiracy, I can tell you that I, personally, would have to be in on it. Obviously, me saying this could be part of the conspiracy, so I can only tell you that for myself, the answer to the OP is obvious.
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The pharma industry seems to me to be motivated to keep you a customer. But not to cure. To cure, you’d lose a customer. So, for profitability (and shareholders), why would you sink money into a cure rather than a band-aid?
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Why do you act like these are mutually exclusive? If we cured both cancer and AIDS at my company, we would save untold lives. We would also make buttloads of cash. Remember, my company (company X) is not in some sort of agreement with company Y to only make therapeutics rather than cures. If my company only made therapeutics for, say, lung cancer, when there was an obvious cure available, you can be damn sure that company Y would produce the cure. That would put the profits of company X’s product down the toilet and send millions of people a year to their doctors to pay for company Y’s cure. People are going to keep smoking, therefore customers, to use a bad term in the context of this OP, will always be created. Same with AIDS or virtually any other disease.
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But when was the last time any major disease was wiped out? I’m not speaking about advances, I’m talking about actual cures.
I know about polio. What else in the last 30-40 years or so has been terminated?
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Have you ever stopped to consider that curing a disease is freaking hard?! Antibiotics and vaccines cured diseases because those were the lowest fruits on the vine. Antibiotics target bacterial processes which are vastly different than mammalian processes; vaccines are simply killed or attenuated versions of the actual virus. In neither case was a molecular understanding of the treatments necessary. Now, think of AIDS, with its amazing mutation rate. Or cancer, which are YOUR OWN CELLS, that we’re trying to treat! These are impossibly complex to cure!
We need to understand, on a molecular level, what is going on with these diseases before we can home to cure them.
Also, consider the current climate where companies are terrified of having a drug turn out to be harmful after it gets FDA approval (which is no small feat). Now, I’ve done dozens of tumor studies in mice. These are, for all intents, genetically identical mice. I treat them in exatly the same way. They are fed exactly the same diet and kept in the same cage. Meanwhile, I have therapeutics that will work in 3 out of 10 of them in a given study. Try extrapolating that to humans, where genetic differences and lifestyle differences come into play.
No drug is going to work in everybody. Furthermore, there are going to be unpredictable results, and harmful side effects in some people.
As an aside, if you want to see drugs get produced at a higher rate, and with better quality, then protect the pharma companies from litigation. If a company gets FDA approval for a drug, and later it is found, through no fraud or mistake of the company, that there are harmful side effects, then no one can sue the company. You take the drug, and there are some chances involved in it. If a company puts forth a drug that it truly believes to be effective and safe, and the FDA agrees, then litigation should be disallowed. I’m not talking about Vioxx where there is evidence of wrong doing. My 2 cents, anywho.
