The Cure Is Always Five Years Away

There was a story doing the rounds this week about a small clinical trial where some people with Type 1 diabetes were able to come off insulin entirely. Early days, small sample size, the usual caveats. But the headline alone was enough to light up the comments, and what I found in there was more interesting than the trial itself.

A lot of people with Type 1, or parents of kids with it, showed up to basically say: yeah, we’ve heard this before. One bloke said he’d been hearing “the cure is five years away” for going back to the ’90s. Another said an endocrinologist once told him, flat out, that a cure would never come because treating the disease is more profitable than curing it. That line stuck with me. Not because I think it’s necessarily true, but because of how easily people believe it. And honestly, who could blame them.

I don’t have a dog in this particular fight; nobody in my family has Type 1. But I recognise the shape of this disappointment from other places. We’ve all got a version of it. The battery technology that’s always eighteen months from changing everything. The fusion reactor that’s perpetually thirty years out. The self-driving car that was meant to have replaced my commute by now. There’s a pattern where genuine incremental progress gets reported as an imminent breakthrough, over and over, until the people actually living with the problem stop believing any of it. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just what happens when science journalism, university press offices, and funding bodies all have an incentive to make early-stage research sound further along than it is.

What struck me reading through the thread was how the most grounded comments weren’t the cynical ones or the hopeful ones, but the ones from people who’d actually lived with the disease for decades and had made peace with the technology they already had. One person talked about their dad, fifty years with Type 1, backpacking through India with insulin in a cooler bag, more active than most of his mates without diabetes. No cure, but a continuous glucose monitor hooked up to his watch and a life that looked completely normal. That’s not nothing. It’s just not the story anyone puts in a headline, because “Man Manages Chronic Illness Reasonably Well For Five Decades” doesn’t get clicks.

I think about this a bit with AI, actually, which is a strange thing to type in a post about diabetes. There’s the same gap between the incremental, genuinely useful stuff happening quietly in the background, and the breathless framing that gets slapped on top of it to make it sound like the singularity’s arriving next Tuesday. The profit-driven suspicion around pharma isn’t wrong as a general pattern, insulin pricing in the US is a genuine scandal, but I don’t think it’s usually a case of companies deliberately burying cures. It’s closer to: biology is savagely complicated, autoimmune conditions in particular are a nightmare to solve properly, and the economic incentives mean every tiny step forward gets dressed up as a leap.

None of that is much comfort if you’re the parent of a five-year-old who was just diagnosed, which was one of the people in that thread. I don’t have a tidy answer for that. I just hope that somewhere between the overhyped headlines and the justified cynicism, the actual slow grinding work keeps happening, because it clearly has been, CGMs and insulin pumps today are unrecognisable compared to what existed when I was a kid. Whether that trajectory ever reaches an actual cure, I genuinely don’t know. But I’d rather sit with that uncertainty than pretend either the hype or the despair has it fully right.