What shall we do with medicine?

After we have won over all the scourge and pestilence, what is now the aim of medicine? Where to stop? Is its prime duty to keep people alive as long as possible? Is its charge to make people lead healthy lives or just to cure them when they are ill? Or is it but a service industry, to fulfil whatever fantasies its clients may frame for their bodies for instance, a facelift or cosmetic remodeling? Is developing an HIV vaccine the best thing we could put our funds into? Is the rate of human population growth healthy for this planet? Medicine has reached the point where Hippocrates, William Harvey and Lord Lister could only have dreamt of. What next?

-  Parikshit Sanyal