Postaday for May 20th: Placebo Effect. If you could create a painless, inexpensive cure for a single ailment, what would you cure and why?
I read somewhere that when our cells reproduce, they can only do so a certain number of times. There’s some strand of DNA or alleles or something, I don’t know, that doesn’t copy well and after so many tries it just can’t do it any more. Cancer cells, on the other hand, don’t seem to have this problem, which is why they reproduce like crazy and eat everything. Which is pretty darn bad, and so I should say I’d cure cancer if I could.
But consider the case of Henrietta Lacks, who’s cancer cells have benefited so much oh humankind (if not herself or her family: read the book about her for more info). I’m sure there’s some moral logical fallacy in what I’m suggesting, but if cancer had been cured, what non-cancer ailments would the world still suffer from?
And while I appreciate the prompt’s call for an “inexpensive” cure, I am nevertheless a cynic, and I can’t help but feel that a cure for cancer would somehow be compromised by one lobby or another, and somehow even a cure as cheap as “rub an apple on your head” would be turned into a multi-billion dollar business.
Thus I find myself not considering the prompt’s spirit, but all of the ways I’d have to defend against my choice, mostly defend against my own warped imagination. Because no matter what horrible ailment I consider, somehow there’s going to be an argument for how my choice is a terrible one.
And therefore I will choose the ailment of “being a judgmental jerk” as the ailment I would like the cure the most.
Of course, many many people might insist that diagnosing someone a judgmental jerk is a matter of opinion, not fact. To those people I say, “get thee to a pharmacy, thou sick bastards.”
I’ll be first in line for the cure, by the way.
If only there were a cure for jerk-a-citis