Cure for cancer worth 50 trillion dollars?

My thoughts? The numbers are two big for a Friday afternoon......time to leave work and start the weekend playtime. Seriously....50 Trillion $$$$ mind boggling. I'll wait for TallAllen to return....he will make sense of it.

The article is from 2006.
If they came up with a cure for all cancers, other companies would create similar medications. And such a cure would go off patent within 15 years.
There is a bigger likelyhood of meds to control the advance of cancers and make them chronic illnesses.
Money saved by a cure might be balanced by longer years of social security and more nursing home expenses.
Just my guess.

Post Edited (robertC) : 11/21/2014 12:02:07 PM (GMT-7)

It would be nice if they did further research on that plant in South America which "might" contain a cure. However, the drug companies and cancer specialists would lose billions of dollars if there was a cure. My prayer is that they do extensive research on childhood cancer.

Yeah, they're holding back a cure for cancer because of a conspiracy. Sure thing.

I just imagine a 12 year-old boy hitting a home run OR a 9 year-old girl in her first dance recital.

Medical science will one day defeat the scourge of cancer like it has defeated so many diseases before it.

Oncas makes a very good point in saying "... Fame is just as addictive as cash to some."

It's virtually certain that there's a Nobel Prize in Medicine out there just waiting to be awarded to the person(s) who do come up with a true cancer cure. That's plenty of incentive for a lot of researchers.

In any case, the article cited above makes the point that a cancer cure may be worth 50 trillion dollars. That is, if a true cancer cure is indeed eventually developed and marketed, then it's for certain that vast amounts of money will still continue to be made from it, probably for years, decades, or for as long as the patent or such on the cure lasts and well beyond that.

Then there will also be licensing agreements, developers' fees, royalties of various sorts, and all sorts of other financial considerations that will apply, and go on generating huge profits for somebody for a long time.

So what will happen is that an enormous amount of money will continue to be made in the treatment of cancer for a very long time, it will just start being made in different ways than before.

But the huge change is that now treatments would be done to cure the disease, not simply treat it.