If you knew you could direct medical research funds so as to find a cure for one specific disease within 15 years, but make little progress on any others, would you target a single disease? If so, which one and why?

This is a difficult question to answer, being ignorant of how much progress we actually make toward curing diseases on a regular basis anyway. I mean, I know there’s constant fundraising for cancer research, diabetes research, Parkinson’s research… The list goes on and on. If there’s a disease and people are suffering from it, there’s sure to be a group trying to figure out how to eradicate that disease.

So the question I have is, with all of these fundraising efforts and with things working as they are, how much progress is made on all of these individual efforts? I guess that means I’d say yes… Throw all that research money at whatever is the number one killer in the world and let’s find a cure in the next 15 years. Then we can focus on the next… and the next… and so on.

But I’m more interested in how you would handle it? Would you be willing to redirect funding for this kind of research or keep things the way they are? Let me know in the comments!

*The Question of the Week can be found in The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock, Ph.D.