I don’t get this analogy at all. Who did Cheney ever heal? Who COULD he even heal that he didn’t? He shot his buddy in the face, fer chrissakes.
Cheney is a serial killer, with no redemptive powers, who never got locked away,
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned in all of the “keep him alive” scenarios is security. The word will get out about this guy eventually, at which point the price on his (alive) head would undoubtedly be huge. Whole countries would band together to finance operations to nab this guy.
Keeping him in a secure location probably wouldn’t be enough. He would probably need to be moved often (if not just being constantly on the move, which may hurt his healing mojo). There would have to be procedures whereby patients are taken to him in a manner such that the patients cannot determine his location and can’t be followed, and remember that some of the patients may not be physically able to go from a car to a hovercraft to a flying/diving sub/plane or whatever.
So, bottom line, security presents a huge on-going cost that needs to be weighed against the benefits (which, of course, is difficult, given that some of the benefits are non-monetary).
And made him apologize. That’s the scary thing. It’s almost like a Chuck Norris joke.
And again we have to remember that if we lose him we’re not just losing out on whatever miracles he can perform in his lifetime. If we lose the guy we’re missing out on the chance to dissect him when he dies and consequently a very good chance to discover the cure for cancer.
It’s not worth it, off with his head.
Sure it would. We put him in Leavenworth. It’s a military prison inside an Army base in the middle of Kansas. Are the Russians or the Chinese going to invade just to break him out?
You could cut out the middleman in this moral dilemma. Just ask what would happen if raping a small child cured cancer. Surprisingly (and disturbingly) this is not a completely hypothetical question. There was a real belief a hundred years ago that having sex with a virgin could cure syphilis so sick men (in both senses of the word) paid to have sex with young girls.
In some parts of Africa there is a belief that raping virgins will cure AIDS.
Even you anti-death-penalty types are okay with me decapitating guys who do that, right?
I thought that was just a cover story.
I doubt they’d do a full Red Dawn style invasion, but I’m sure there would be lots and lots of covert ops. And a prison may be the worst place to hold him–there would be lots of people around (ie, other prisoners) who could probably be incentivised to help spring the guy. I don’t think those in charge at Leavenworth would want this monkey on their back.
Come to think of it, whoever is responsible for this guy could probably trade the guy for a nice chunk of Chinese real estate and all the toys and doo-dads one could ever want. It would really be hard to trust anyone with him.
Nice, Dio–fighting the hypothetical and off-topic political sniping. You’re just a joy to be around.
I don’t really buy this. I think most people, including me, would brush this aside as some kind of quasi-religious hysteria. I mean, who knows, it may already have happened (without the serial killer twist) – there are tons of anecdotal stories of people with the power to heal by touch. Maybe one actually could, but was dismissed, like wheat being tossed with the chaff.
Honestly, if a story like this appeared on CNN, with a dozen healed people testifying and a doctor in a white coat saying, “It’s real and we can’t explain it”, I would shake my head and wonder how Glen Beck got in charge of CNN news.
Indeed, the only difference is that we didn’t build him—which actually makes him closer to Penicillin, or Cowpox vaccinations. How many people would properly died without those?
For that matter, we have no reason to assume that the killer’s power’s aren’t entirely natural and scientifically understandable, but were simply unknown until now. With sufficient study, we might be able to replicate them in other people, or even with machinery. So what, do we throw away a new avenue of science because there might be negative consequences? Because the weak aren’t being culled fast enough?
Hell, if we’re content to let people die because we’re afraid of what they might do, or what resources they could take up, why stop there? Just the pretense of keeping our hands clean—“I didn’t kill him, your honor, the sudden stop at the end of the fall killed him”?
I thought someone had been watching ST: Voyager, namely the episode where this … thing … invades B’Ellanna Torrez and the only one that can help her is a holographic recreation of what can best be described as the Cardassian version of Dr. Josef Mengele. Skilled surgeon, but B’Ellana, being of the heritage that’s on the wrong side of his “experimentations” wants nothing to do with him.
I beleive that what they did was use his knowledge to cure her then delete his program from the medical library.
Fiction, but I made the Mengele comment to make a point - the closest thing we have to a real-life application of the OP’s posit is Mengele himself, he may have done unspeakable crimes against humanity (I’d consider him possibly the vilest of the Nazis, and they aren’t a fun group to begin with) but his “research” did teach us some science with our ethics (which he had none of, apparently) would forbid us to do. I am not familiar, though, is anything that was learned from Mengele’s “experiments” used nowadays, or are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
People will flock to the side of a busy highway to look under a bridfe at a water stain that looks kindasorta like the virgin Mary. People still go to Portugal to see where some kids made up a story about seeing the virgin Mary (who only appeared to the kids, naturally).
Nope. Word would get out, and this guy would have people clamoring to see him or nab him, and some of these people will be well-financed and well-incentivized.
What if he is both The Green Mile and Pet Sematary? His patients are cured, but come out evil? It seems like this cure would have to go through the same process of approval as drugs do under the FDA. I guess you have some history from his prior results (or at least the sub-set of results you could confidently verify).
I’m not sure that dissecting him would be useful. What if his powers are not obviously observable? Or require two or more parts of his body working in concert? He wouldn’t need to be dissected for DNA study.
My vote is to stick him in supermax for life (easy since I don’t like the death penalty) and offer him the option to be studied. No incentive is offered other than he gets out of his cell more than the usual 1 hour a day solitary.
Dio doesn’t consciously suspend disbelief. 
The other prisoners? What are they going to do about it? If they knew how to get out of prison, they wouldn’t be there to talk to him.
Prisons are designed to keep people inside. And they generally work. Especially when a prisoner is high-profile. Criminals like druglords, mafia bosses, and terrorist leaders have been successfully imprisoned for decades.
Here’s what actually happens.
You don’t specify that he actually controls the power but it seems to be implied so I’ll go with that. Otherwise he could just shake hands with someone and a malignant melanoma will fall off their ass with no one the wiser.
He’s taken to a research facility that doesn’t exist and treated to drug and psychological conditioning until he’s so Stockholmed that he has no free will. He will then be used on suitable members of the reigning regime and rich benefactors that contribute to the cause.
J. Q. Public never has a clue.
My analogy wasn’t an exact parallel claiming Cheney could cure cancer, but just that we tried to harness his powers for our own uses despite knowing we were making a devil’s bargain.
We’re really wandering off topic, but I also don’t see any Cheney analogy here. We didn’t derive any benefits from anything Cheney did. It was more like paying a guy to work on your lawn and then having him seduce your wife. You’d be angry at anyone who ruined your marriage but you’d be extra annoyed that he was working for you when he did it.