Pharmaceutical companies will never ever find the cure for things, only the treatments, if they found cures, their whole profit margin goes down.
If “cures” were found, think of how many millions of jobs and trillions of dollars would dry-up in employment, funding, sales etc. It’s a worldwide “cottage industry” mega-business. Won’t happen. You’re right.
You mean like for the polio vaccine? You’re confusing drug companies with independent researchers.
What's the cure for the problems of old age?
This is a common notion, and is often applied in other areas, as with the notion that the car companies conspired to cover up the 70 mpg carburetor.
The problem is that it shows a total lack of understanding of market economic incentives.
If a cure for cancer were discovered tomorrow, the market for all drugs treating cancer would plummet. But the company that came up with the "cure" would make immense sums of money.
The notion that this company would keep the cure quiet is therefore based on the idea that it would avoid making a lot of money for itself in order to protect other companies in the industry.
Does not compute.
Similarly, any car company that came up with a device that doubled mpg would make immense sums by putting it into its own cars and licensing it to other companies.
Their deep-sixing it is based on the peculiar notion that they'd pass up immense wealth for themselves in order to protect the profit margins of the oil industry as a whole.
Again, does not compute.
Adam Smith covered this in detail in Wealth of Nations. Industries have an incentive to conspire against the public good by price-fixing, but any single company that breaks the pact benefits itself. So the incentive is for them to cheat, which makes price-fixing much more difficult to enforce. In fact, absent government or other coercion, it is essentially impossible.
I believe this is also covered by Game Theory, where there is usually an inherent conflict between what is best for the group and what is best for an individual within that group.