In the last 50 years, medicine has seen:

• Genomics and personalised medicine, allowing therapies to target an individual’s unique genome.
• Immunotherapy for cancer, making previous metastatic diseases curable.
• Robotic surgery, enabling unprecedented levels of precision with minimal invasiveness.
• Stem cell research and therapy, promoting the regeneration of cells and tissue.
• Dramatic declines in heart disease, smoking, and deaths from HIV/AIDs.
• Advancements in biotechnology, including robotic prostheses and 3D printing, allowing us to recreate broken body parts.
• Gene editing through CRISPR-Cas9, creating treatment and cures for germline genetic diseases.
• The normalisation of digital health and telemedicine, making medical care accessible to far more people.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is easy to ruminate on how our world is regressing. Harder to recognise that in a short period of time, we have progressed an unbelievable amount. Half of these things would have been utterly unthinkable 100 years ago.

There is hope in human ingenuity.