I just can’t take it anymore.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching The Daily Show and was thrilled to see that Michael J. Fox was promoting his new book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. As someone who lost a grandparent to Parkinson’s Disease, his story is one that hits particularly close to the heart, so I’m always anxious to see him talking about his story and how he’s handling the disease.

He looked really, really good. Still, he is getting a little hard to understand, and you can definitely tell he’s struggling with uncontrollable body movements. But what really got me fired up was him talking about the whole debate over stem cell research and the infamous Rush Limbaugh “exaggerating the effects of the disease” commentary. (Oh, and Michael got extra props from me for dropping “Merry Pranksters” in his discussion. Kudos.)

Then today: Stephen Hawking is in the news because he’s sick. Honestly, he’s lucky to even be alive after having spent 40 years with ALS—one of the most heartbreaking diseases I have ever witnessed with my eyes.

So here I am. Continuing to find myself angry and incredibly frustrated over issues like the stem cell debate, which once again started when Obama overturned a Bush-era policy in March. Here’s what gets me: years ago, we started developing things like pesticides and food preservatives. We created asbestos and plastic. We started dumping trash in landfills and being thoughtless with our waste, which resulted in pollution, contaminating the water we drink and the air that we breathe.

So now we have decades of carelessness that we need to fix. Cancer is an epidemic, if not a pandemic. There are diseases like Parkinson’s, ALS, and Alzheimer’s, which we can’t figure out how to cure. And yet there are people who forget about how years of irresponsible growth in our world’s technologies have led to countless problems that must to be reversed. I absolutely understand that there are ethical questions about stem cell research; however, I also believe that we must take care of the people who are alive and dealing with such terrible circumstances on a day to day basis.

I applaud people like Michael J. Fox, who stays so optimistic with a disease that sees to end in sight. Stephen Hawking, who, fortunately for the rest of us, has a sharp mind despite the fact that he cannot move or speak. People like Nancy Reagan, who knows she’s on the unpopular side of the Republican Party when it comes to this debate, but is determined to take a stand. And, of course, my mom, who has battled sky-rocketing health insurance rates and physically exhausting treatments in order to kick breast cancer to the curb—all done with a perpetual smile on her face.

It won’t be easy, but stem cell research is a step in the right direction for those who are alive today and suffering. How many more people have to be given a hopeless diagnosis before we figure out it’s time to fix the problems we caused?