Jr High Drop Out

Creating a single antiviral drug that could kill lots of different viruses is a longstanding dream of medical researchers. Beyond all the obvious benefits of such an honest-to-goodness wonder drug, an all-purpose antiviral would give us a much better chance of fighting back against outbreaks of exotic viruses like SARS and swine flu. As a minor but still rather nice bonus, it could also be that long awaited cure for the common cold.

via io9.com

Curing the various virii that plague us (quite literally) would be transformative to our culture and our species. I look forward to the day when we are no longer worried about bacteria and viral infection. And on a more personal note, I'm excited about the idea of dramatically increasing my lifespan. Each such advance, even those that don't pan out, improve the collective survivability of our species, but also the individual survivability of each of us. In other words, awesomesauce!