I’m a bit cynical as to whether ANYTHING will be cured in the next 20 years. When’s the last time science actually CURED anything? When you think about it, as long as the majority of research into disease cures is done by pharmaceutical companies, the incentive is to find “treatments”, not “cures” because with a “cure” you administer something at one period in time, and that’s it, you make revenue one time for each person who contracts the disease, and the revenue dries up forever. You find a “treatment” however, you can sell pills for $500 a month to each person who contracts the disease for 11 years (which is how long a drug patent lasts), then generics drive the price down significantly, but you still have a constant revenue stream, just a much smaller one.
Now having gotten my cynicism out of the way, I personally think that the genome is huge, and I see a lot of hope in stemp cell research…I would think that most of the really BIG killers could be theoretically elminated in 20 years with the proper focus, that would include everything mentioned, plus diabetes, cancer, AIDS…and certainly I believe it would help with regenerative therapies for paralasys, MD, CP, etc. Personally, I think just about ANYTHING is curable if you throw enough people, money and time to it. Unfortunately, I think that with the rise of the profit motive, the motive for finding these cures has all but disappeared.