• Question: If you could cure one disease but have another one become incurable, which would you cure and which would become incurable?

    Asked by 857drud47 to Anne, Florence, Mark, Neil, Sinead on 9 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Mark Collins

      Mark Collins answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      I would like to cure all diseases, I would not be a position to decide what disease i could cure and what I could not. I do not think I nor anyone could live with the moral and psychological issues this would entail. There is already debate on moral and ethical questions facing potential driverless cars of the future as to what the car would do in some situations. This question would certainly relate to that. I know I for one could not answer this, I along with my colleagues and the wider science community along with medical professionals will continue to try to make incurable diseases a thing of the past and if we cannot solve this then at least prolong the onset of the disease or prevent the disease taking hold in the first place.

    • Photo: Anne Moore

      Anne Moore answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      I would cure childhood infections like diarrhea, which could be prevented by vaccines but we can’t get enough vaccines to these children or we don’t have a vaccine for them. Of course, with limited resources, focussing on one vaccine means that you may not be able to focus on another. TB, malaria, HIV are massive issues also

    • Photo: Sinead Balgobin

      Sinead Balgobin answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      An impossible question! I hope one day we will find cures or treatments for everything, but if I had to choose something that we never found the cure for it would be something like the common cold- for most people, their immune systems can kill off the cold virus, so it’s not so bad. The disease I would cure in the trade off would be one that affected the most vulnerable people in the world, like malaria, TB or HIV.

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