Really? Because the amount of money put into researching how to cure life-threatening diseases, as well as prevent and vaccinate against them, seems pretty high.
Pharmaceutical companies spend billions trying to research drugs to cure diseases, and so do governments, universities, private research funders, and charities.
There are people who dedicate huge portions of their lives to raising money and resources for charities trying to research cures for diseases that kill millions of people.
And we've had some success. Just the other day, there was an article published about the men who thought they were going to die of AIDS in the 80s, but whose lives are now in their 60s and approaching retirement age because of the provision of highly active anti-retroviral therapy. (And now they face issues because they never thought they'd survive and so didn't plan to have a career or a retirement etc.)
http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/living-with-aids/story/
I just don't see how anyone can claim that society isn't "doing serious focused R&D" on life-threatening diseases.
You talk about death as it is some kind of disease... Dead is part of life everywhere you look and not in the disease sense. There's a cyclic constant in all nature. You have seasons. You have day and night. Even stars that "live" for millions of years wither and "die" at some point. Why do you think we, as humanity, deserve to be the exception to that rule and escape a cyclic order that's been around like... forever?
Also, "life" feeds from "dead", no the other way around. It's not a coincidence that it's this way...
Death sucks. It would be better if it didn't happen.
Barring some discovery that allows us to hit the reset button on matter and energy every trillion or so years, time will end for us all, no matter how long it seems.
> The really unpleasant truth is that if we as a society began doing serious focused R&D on these life-threatening diseases earlier, the OP and many others wouldn't have to die.
I absolutely agree with that and the fact that fighting death is so low on social priorities is something that boggles my mind. However even if we dropped everything and started working on it, many of us will still die. I am regularly afraid, in the back of my head, that I'll go down young because of some cancer. Or that my loved ones will. I need to be able to handle this, both dying and dealing with the dying. That's why I'm grateful for this article. It has solid points about communication.
As I said - it's not either/or. Many - maybe all - of us will die, but this is not an excuse for not working on curing death.