The Cure for Cancer.Makes one unhappy citizen content in all your cities.
According to New Scientist magazine, we have a pretty viable cure for cancer on our hands. Dicholoroacetate has been used in the past to treat lactic acidosis, and except for a few side-effects (pain, numbness, dizziness), it seems to be safe. Better than that, there's no patent on it!
Oh, wait.
All Headline News says it best: "Shrinks tumours, costs $2, can't get funding." (And if you don't like New Scientist, check out The Economist.) There's just no money in producing a cure for cancer when you can't monopolise on owning the patent. In fact, there would be far more money in the myriad symptom-relieving drugs for cancer sufferers. So rather than doing what a sane system would do - start clinical trials on the drug - we have to rely on charities and state funding to achieve where capitalism fails.
The idea of capitalism makes sense. The market mechanism shapes supply to demand by providing incentives to individuals to work in those fields that create the supply. The problem is that 1) not everyone's demand is shaping the supply (ie., those with no money, no matter how much they need something like clean drinking water, cannot shape industry to provide it); and 2) what is actually worthwhile to society is not always profitable, and what is profitable is not always worthwhile to society (ie., the advertising industry, military industry, carbon emissions, etc.) These thoughts are interesting whether or not this particular drug turns out to be the hoped-for cure.
Anyway, DCA sounds pretty good so far. It's shrunk tumours on rats and stuff. It doesn't attack healthy cells, because it affects the fucked up part of a cancer cell that doesn't tell it to top itself for being an asshole. A cure for cancer would rule. Now, if we could just get clean drinking water to everyone...
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