All of these kinds of arguments at least with regards to medicine neglect to understand how drug discovery actually works. It's not like engineering where you c

All of these kinds of arguments at least with regards to medicine neglect to understand how drug discovery actually works. It's not like engineering where you can a-priori design your spec, then reliably build the product to meet that spec. At best in medicine you have a well understood disease mechanism (sometimes you don't even have that), where all the biological culprits are known and easily handled in an experimental context (that's rather rare at the outset of a medical project). Then you try to influence those players, but the process of finding those drugs looks a lot more like throwing darts at a board in the dark than it does like a coherent engineering task. When you aim for the bullseye cure you often fall short and end up with a maintenance med. If you don't initially shoot for something that's likely to massively affect the disease's course, you're likely to miss the board entirely. And all this assumes that the disease itself CAN be cured, which is not at all guaranteed. Biology is a wily beast, with insane, complicatedly interacting systems. In many ways, it's amazing we have as many cures as we do. In other words, when finding drugs you don't really have a choice between cure/chronic use/total failure.