• Question: Do you think man will find any cures to diseases in the next 50 years, if so which ones?

    Asked by 11wiloma to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 14 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by mikeyswann101.
    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      That’s hard! A lot of the diseases that are big killers in the west are probably easier to prevent than to cure. Heart disease can be prevented by diet and exercise, and lots of cancers can be linked to environmental factors, which can be improved. Curing these diseases will probably get easier as we learn more and more, but it’ll probably be easier to stop them happening in the first place.

      For other parts of the world, things like AIDS/HIV and malaria are much bigger problems. I suspect that there will always be diseases that are very dangerous to humanity.

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Well there has been much promising work on malaria as it happens. Just this year two new proteins have been found that are critical to Plasmodium, the organism that actually causes malaria’s symptoms, infection of red blood cells. It’s hoped that these could be use as vaccine targets to protect people from infection at a low cost.

      The big problem with preventing a lot of diseases is that the organisms that cause them are constantly evolving. This is why it is so difficult to stop the common cold. There are several hundred virus’s that cause the common cold, It would take about 2 years to become immune to them all if you caught one a day. Besides this they are also very bad at copying their DNA leading to many ‘mistakes’ or mutations. If these mutations occur on a region of DNA that codes for a protein it will be changed and if your immune system recognised this protein then it won’t anymore and so the virus will infect you again.

      The interplay between pathogen and host is something that many biologists have been fascinated about for quite a while. It’s a constant arms race whereby hosts find new ways to defend against pathogens and pathogens find new ways to avoid these defences. This is something known in biology as the ‘Red Queen hypothesis” in reference to an event in Lewis Carrolls ‘Alice through the looking glass’. The wiki entry for it is pretty spot on if you are interested in learning more:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_Hypothesis

      Also Lewis Carroll’s stories are also always worth a read 😉

    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      Hmm, tough question. Some stuff we’ll hopefully be able to find vaccines or cures for. Things like cancer can be quite complex, and while it would be great to cure cancer, there are two things that would be better. 1) preventing it from developing in the first place by figuring out what causes it and 2) detecting it early enough. A lot of times by the time a person is diagnosed with cancer they’ve already had it for a lot of years, so the earlier we find it the better we can treat it.

      Personally, I’d love to have a cure for asthma, but I don’t see that coming along any time soon. What might happen is that my future children are prevented from getting asthma instead, which would be pretty cool.

      (There’s also a really cool book called Feed where there’s a cure for the common cold, and a cure for cancer. When the two cures accidentally mix, it creates zombies! Oops! But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.)

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