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Becky, I beg to disagree with you
Doctors would still have LOTS to do without cancer--and so would drug companies.
If people lived longer they would continue to suffer from all kinds of maladies that require doctors, surgeons and drugs.
Look at the difference in life expectancies between 1800s and now. People died decades earlier usually of infectious diseases. Effective treatments for infectious disease were developed and lo and behold, people started to die of cardiovascular disease and cancer (diseases of the elderly, now that there were more elderly).
There will be plenty of diabetes, and infectious diseases are becoming resistant to the old "effective treatments", as we age there will be more with Alzheimers and dementia--and more breaking their hips and needing their arteries "rotorootered"
In fact a recent article in the Wall St Journal described charities like the lymphoma foundation etc giving money directly to the drug companies rather than to university researchers to speed up the time between lab bench discoveries and useful drugs because the drug companies are not so interested. Why not? They ONLY want to spend money developing the BLOCKBUSTER drugs that a large percent of the population take, like statins, rather than anticancer drugs, where the number of people taking the drugs will never be that large (and new drugs being developed quickly usurp the market which never involved that many patients!)
Will try to find the article and post it.
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