Racing for cures, matching fundraising, money culled from the taxed and extorted in order to fund efforts to provide further medical benefits to a hypochondriacally overinsured plutocratic elite, of a society which chooses to pour out wealth, ironically exhausting their gold in an attempt to transmute lead into it, all in order to chase the alchemy of immortality.  For the ultimate irony is that this society is so incompetent at economic evaluation that it fails at recognizing that it already has found a cure for cancer.  Yet instead of stopping smoking, people would rather opt to pay pounds of a foot-stompingly presumably cure rather than a fraction of known prevention.  Even when most sufferers will not even benefit from their suffering; they will have to repurchase a presumably discovered cure should it even be discovered.  Like the Northwest Passage, future historians will laugh at our folly.

And yet, maybe I am wrong.