What Is the Price of One Child's Life?

Nworah Ayogu said medicine can now treat rare genetic problems one patient at a time, and said a million and a half dollars to make and deliver a treatment is worth it so a child lives. The answer given is yes: raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else if that is the way to pay.

The fight is over the total bill. Cancer care, a transplant, and gene therapy are each life or death, so a health system keeps deciding what to fund, what to leave unpaid, and where values sit. Underneath sits the price of a life, including the life of a child. The same push is to stop leaving development at a million and a half dollars. Infrastructure has to make the work scalable, repeatable, and cheaper, with manufacturing that holds up and a way to pay.

The frontier is exciting because the science can now do work people had dreamed about for a long time, with massive impact. As more of the work shows up, and shows up faster, the rest of the system has to be ready across the whole supply chain.