Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Announce $3 Billion Initiative To 'Cure All Diseases' (venturebeat.com) 161
Yesterday, researchers on behalf of Microsoft said they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion initiative to "cure all diseases." VentureBeat reports: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a company created by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to "unlock human potential and promote equality," today announced "Chan Zuckerberg Science," a $3 billion project that aims to cure, prevent, or manage "all diseases in our children's lifetime." "That doesn't mean that no one will ever get sick," Mark Zuckerberg later said. But the program hopes to eventually make all diseases treatable -- or at least easily manageable -- by the end of the 21st century. "Our society spends 50x more treating people who are sick than on finding cures. We can do better than that," said Zuckerberg. A press release from the Initiative says Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan will provide "at least $3 billion over the next decade to help jumpstart this work." "The plan," as Zuckerberg called it, is to "bring scientists and engineers together, build tools and technology, [and] grow the movement to fund science." That plan includes a program called Biohub, a partnership between Stanford University, Berkeley, and UCSF that "will focus on understanding underlying mechanisms of disease and developing new technologies which will lead to actionable diagnostics and effective therapies." You can watch the full Chan Zuckerberg Science presentation here.
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IGotCancerDoIHearAIDSGotAIDSFromTheManInTheHoodie (Score:5, Funny)
Yesterday, researchers on behalf of Microsoft said they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion initiative to "cure all diseases."
"I see how it is. Fine. I, Jeff Bezos, pledge an end to all human suffering by sometime in the next six months."
Re:IGotCancerDoIHearAIDSGotAIDSFromTheManInTheHood (Score:5, Funny)
Yesterday, researchers on behalf of Microsoft said they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion initiative to "cure all diseases."
"I see how it is. Fine. I, Jeff Bezos, pledge an end to all human suffering by sometime in the next six months."
I, Larry Ellison, will eliminate all humans in a week!
c'mon crank up the CRAYZEE! (Score:2)
John McAfee says he'll abolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons!
Top that Bezos!
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I, Larry Ellison, will eliminate all humans in a week!
This one I believe.
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Yesterday, researchers on behalf of Microsoft said they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion initiative to "cure all diseases."
"I see how it is. Fine. I, Jeff Bezos, pledge an end to all human suffering by sometime in the next six months."
[fineprint]Only for Prime Members[/fineprint]
Neat! (Score:1)
Throw money at it. That'll fix it!
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Exactly! Just like the time Mark Zuckerberg fixed the Newark public school system by throwing money at smart people!
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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The bureaucrats ALWAYS present themselves as smart people.
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Wow, spend $3billion? (Score:4, Informative)
He's like a part-time stock trader who just realized how much money you can make with options.
Drop in the bucket (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Mister Zuckerberg,
We think that you're grossly underestimating the size of the effort.
But thank you for diverting a bit of your fortune to our cause.
It's a refreshing change from counting on big pharma corporations to divert a bit from their marketing budget....
- The scientists in the life-science field
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Dear Mister Zuckerberg,
We think that you're grossly underestimating the size of the effort.
But thank you for diverting a bit of your fortune to our cause.
It's a refreshing change from counting on big pharma corporations to divert a bit from their marketing budget....
- The scientists in the life-science field
The one advantage that a not for profit has is that they can look for cures that might not be profitable. It's more profitable to treat a chronic illness than to cure it.
A not for profit also has an advantage over a government entity in that it can look for cures instead of spending its money on treating the existing ill.
Most of the money currently spent on medicine is either looking for a profit or taking care of already sick people so it's not necessarily a bad thing for some money to be spent on pie in
Re:Drop in the bucket (Score:5, Informative)
The one advantage that a not for profit has is that they can look for cures that might not be profitable.
You mean like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with an endowment of $18 billion and spending of $800 million per year?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or the Wellcome Trust with an endowment of 18 billion pounds (~ $23 billion)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with $44 billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And of course there is the research supported by the NIH (that spends $26 billion annually) , NHS etc.
Somehow it seems $3 billion is a rather modest (if welcome) addition to the overall scope of non-profit medical
research...
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Or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with $44 billion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Gates Foundation as well as several of the other ones you listed tend to mostly focus on distributing existing cures rather than trying to find new cures. I agree that it's pie in the sky idealism but $3 billion is still a considerable amount of money that could go a long way if focused in particular areas. I'm also not saying that the Gates Foundation is not doing a very good thing but discovering new cures is not really a huge focus of theirs because there are plenty of people already dying from kno
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Actually, it's not likely to go very much of anywhere because on some disease we either have very little clue right now where those 'particular areas' are, and a decade is the minimal time needed to get a drug developed and to market...using very optimistic numbers.
It doesn't exactly help that sometimes what we may have been framing as a disease is, in point of fact, within the normal healthy range of human variation--we just don't necessarily want to admit it.
...If I thought Zuckerberg would do anything mo
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So, in 2014, we spent:
3,400,000,000,000... in 12 months
Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) claims that he will eliminate ALL diseases. Price tag?
3,000,000,000... in 120 months
So, just to be clear, Mr. Zuckerberg will cure _all_ the diseases on a budget of 1% of one years' expenditures, over 10 years? Quite frankly, it does seem like we already tried the "throw money at it" solution.
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You're quoting just US figures. Now ponder how much money is dedicated to medical research throughout the industrialized world; in places like Britain, Europe, Asia and even in places like South Africa. I suspect Zuckerburg's $3 billion might pay for a week or two's work in the global medical research community. Not that such money would be unwelcome, but it is a drop in the bucket.
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Re:Wow, spend $3billion? (Score:4, Interesting)
Like his previous do-gooder effort by throwing money at a problem. Zuck gave New Jersey's failing school system $100 million, and other matching contributions added up the total to almost $200 million. All that money was pissed away on various things and today the New Jersey school system is still failing.
Zuck seems to think that just because he's brilliant with computers (and making money with computers), he's brilliant at other things.
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Like his previous do-gooder effort by throwing money at a problem. Zuck gave New Jersey's failing school system $100 million, and other matching contributions added up the total to almost $200 million. All that money was pissed away on various things and today the New Jersey school system is still failing.
Wow, what did they spend the money on?
Zuck seems to think that just because he's brilliant with computers
He's not.
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Zuck seems to think that just because he's brilliant with computers
Is he? I only know him for one thing, and that is shit. Sure it's making tonnes of cash, but so is Bieber or the Kardashians, and they have no talent at anything (apart from maybe making money)
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Zuck seems to think that just because he's brilliant with computers (and making money with computers), he's brilliant at other things.
That's not his fault, it's an american culture deficit. In the USA, success equals smart equals good. People read all these "do these 10 things successful people do" without stopping one second to think that there's zero evidence for a causal relation. Or in simpler terms: Yes, maybe twenty successful people do X, but so do thousands or millions of unsuccessful people.
But yes, throwing money at a problem seems to be a typical response these days. Don't even look at what the problem actually is, just throw m
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Zuck seems to think that just because he's brilliant with computers (and making money with computers), he's brilliant at other things.
It takes some finesse he doesn't have.
There's two real requirements to fixing arbitrary massive problems in the world: be a polymath, and understand where and how to leverage effort. Being a polymath means you actually have to approach new and interesting problems by learning about them; and that learning will always be incomplete, so you have to take what you know and lean it against people who can pick it apart.
Zuckerberg wants to solve disease. I want to solve a great many of the United States's e
spend $3billion? Good for him. (Score:2)
My second reaction was to not really care. I hear a lot about fancy pants billionaires buying and selling companies, and promoting crazy ideas, but rarely do they seem to have much of an impact on society.
I settled on: It is a good thing if the latest billionaire dick measuring competition is to see who can cure the most diseases
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Yeah I don't think 10 years is long enough for him to figure out how to make dopamine great again.
I might be a little cynical, though. I got Modafinil for ADD because I had major trouble focusing, and because I had an ADHD diagnosis (and shitloads of drugs) all through school since I was 8. Can't focus? Keep starting things, but not finishing? 5 years of piles of shit I have never attended to? Must be ADD. Seems legit.
Seemed legit until the ADD went away.
I crashed hard after 2 weeks of Modafinil.
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Totally agree. Mental health is our number one problem. These other diseases suck, sure, but the difference is that a person with cancer, HIV, or diabetes doesn't affect me in any significant way, but people with mental health problems can be a big problem for everyone they cross paths with and society as a whole.
Zuckerberg is lying anyway. He hopes by putting up the 3 billion, the rest of us will chip in a few trillion to find a way for him to live forever.
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It's not just that; mental health is one of the most complex problems available, and it's a big part of disease.
Cancer is hard to fix. HIV is hard to fix. Congenital defects (genetic diseases) are hard to fix. They're easy to identify, easy to understand, and easy to describe; and even knowing everything about them, it's hard to find a way to fix them. When we do, the fix is difficult, complex, error-prone, and severely harmful to the patient. Most diseases are handled by vaccination or by ignoring t
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And by "cure all diseases"... (Score:5, Interesting)
If he wanted to make a meaningful difference in the world, he'd work to make existing medical care affordable, not piss away money on pie-in-the-sky initiatives to "cure all diseases".
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he'd work to make existing medical care affordable
You're proposing corporate thinking for fixing an American problem caused by corporations. Key point there is "American problem". Much of the world has very affordable healthcare that is far better than what you get in the USA and it hasn't taken a kind donation by a billionaire to achieve.
My last broken arm $0
My last doctor visit $0
My last hernia operation $20 (I asked someone to get me some real food post op)
Mylan EpiPens cost $75USD for foreigners visiting, and $28USD for residents.
You guys can fix your
LOL, software weenies (Score:1)
They will be stunned when they try to find out how just a single cell organism works. Software, even the large kind of wankery like Facebook, while large, is a piss in the ocean compared to the complexity of biology.
Richard M Nixon, remember him, declared a war on cancer 50 years ago...
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No Ego There (Score:2)
http://www.usnews.com/news/art... [usnews.com]
U.S. Spending on medical research 131 billion there. Hey he is just that good.
virii (Score:5, Insightful)
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umm they created win10, once the cancer is the body ... you have eradicated the disease (healthy cells) by inverse
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If they are treated like Uber... (Score:2)
If such an invention, whatever it will be, that really cures all (or even merely most) illnesses, ever comes to fruition, why should it not be treated as Uber et al are treated today?
That is, why wouldn't Mark and Priscilla be asked pointed questions about doctors and nurses who — despite spending years and thousands of dollars on education and certification — will become obsolete? What of the hospitals and other health-care infrastructure, that is no longer necessary?
Will we be expected to sy
Scream Queens (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not gay, but I did see the first few minutes of the Scream Queens season 2 premier yesterday.
The rich dean bitch character had a thing going about how she wants to CURE diseases instead of profiting off of endlessly (and unsuccessfully) treating patients and their symptoms. She was starting a new institute with her own money to find cures for everything. Obviously, it was some sort of evil plot.
That said, this leads me to conclude:
- Zuckerberg watches Scream Queens (and you know what that means)
- This new plot Zuckerberg is evil, like all his other plots
- This new plot will fail spectacularly
Since we're talking out of our ass ... I haz pony? (Score:2)
Deciding to spend money on research is good and all but not completely realistic.
Throwing money at a problem doesn't a guarantee that a solution will be found.
i.e.
There will always be the homeless and the poor. Money isn't going to change that.
Making grandiose, over the top statements, is laughable at best. Especially when they fail, and fail they will. Hard. Being more discreet would be more prudent in the long run.
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We can "cure" all diseases just as easily as "ending" all "homelessness", "hunger" and "Facebook".
cure=treat
ending=hiding
homeless=long term pedestrian
hunger=foodeater
people=distractees
facebook=distractors
Problems solved. Now wheres my cut of the money ol' Zuky?
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There will always be the homeless
Why would you believe that? Houses aren't even all that expensive.
Good luck (Score:2)
Well, the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon earned about $2.4 billion from 1966 to 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jerry_Lewis_MDA_Labor_Day_Telethon) to look for a cure to muscular dystrophy.
So good luck to this attempt with $3 billion instead.
Humm... (Score:2)
Will Facebook be on the list? He did say all diseases.....
1% Pissing Contest (Score:5, Funny)
It's like they are trying to one-up each other:
Microsoft: "We'll cure cancer."
Zuck&Chan: "Oh yah? We'll cure everything!"
Trump: "I'll cure everything twice as fast and make the germs pay for it!"
Hillary: "I already did all those, but unfortunately misplaced the emails with the formulas."
Forgot one (Score:2)
Megalomaniacs (Score:2)
I guess the megalomaniacs at Microsoft and Facebook should be given some credit. Unlike megalomaniacs of the past, like Hitler or Stalin, they're not interested in curing the world of all the Jews or Capitalists, but target diseases instead. Still, there's something both amusing and tremendously idiotic about grand narcissistic declarations like "We're going to fix CANCER" or "We're going to cure all the diseases!"
A 'feel good' idea that really won't go anywhere (Score:1)
they are so rich (Score:2)
Affordability (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally tone deaf given that many treatable and manageable diseases today go untreated thanks to strong profit motives and broken healthcare systems. It is more profitable to squeeze every penny out of the richest half of the desperate and sick people than to set a price that provides modest profit and widespread availability for virtually everyone with the need.
Today there would be a lot more bang for your buck spending the $3B to fight shady patents in medicine, and to bribe politicians into doing the right by the population than finding more treatments that will get sucked into the Wall Street and DC maelstroms of greed and corruption. Until medicine is working primarily for the patient's good with profit secondary (not zero) I don't see our current frigged up mess getting better no matter how many cures we have.
Get working on that spaceship (Score:1)
3 billion cash = ~ 1.5 new drugs (Score:2)
The average cost to develop a new drug, advance it through all clinical trials and bring it to market in the US, Europe and Japan is currently about 2 billion USD. 3 billion of donated funds are *nowhere* near the investment needed to make a sizable impression on the pharma landscape.
Texas Did It First! (Score:5, Informative)
I know that's an odd subject for this thread, but Texas beat them to this by almost 10 years.
CPRIT (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas) was founded in 2007 and chartered with spending $3B over 10 years to develop new approaches to cancer prevention and treatment. If you're in the cancer research space, you know about CPRIT. It's the single largest research fund for cancer outside the NIH.
To get an idea of what $3B can do, check out the CPRIT site http://www.cprit.state.tx.us/a... [state.tx.us].
If you don't want to do that, basically you can fund a few companies and a number of research projects, but it's nowhere near enough to make a dent in the problem.
There's also the problem of fairly allocating the funds. CPRIT ran into this problem early on when it was found that many of the early, large grants were awarded without proper review to friends of the board. This prompted the entire scientific board to resign and CPRIT to essentially reset. It's moving along OK now, but it's still an open question as to how many of the investments will yield actionable results.
Given Facebook's proclivity to reward friends with purchases at outrageous valuations, I won't be surprised if this fund runs into the same nepotism issues CPRIT did.
There are many other lessons that they can learn from CPRIT, but the most important probably is that $3T is probably a more realistic number.( See also all the comments about the tech industry's hubris when it comes to these types problems - curing cancer/disease is not the same as slapping together some APIs to create a "world changing" app. )
-Chris
Solve the aging problem (Score:2)
A lot of diseases happen more frequently as we age. If we could affect the aging process, many of those diseases would go away.
medicine and silicon valley aren't the same worlds (Score:2)
Ok, a $300M annual charity gift is a big deal, and that's great. But this is not going to drastically change things. Nationwide, the NIH annual R&D budget is about $30B. The USA as a whole has spent over $100B annually on medical research for several years now. This is ~60% more than the total VC investment across all fields in the USA last year.
Evolution anyone? (Score:2)
So - seems that biologists are hot and heavy on this thing called Evolution. Zuck must be low on Science creds - seems to me that attempts to "kill" disease would cause them to mutate and get around whatever road block is in the way.
$3 billion fighting evolution? Who will win? Place your bets!
and AI (Score:2)
Just figure out how to create AI and raise it in such a manner that it views humans as somewhat dumb but amusing pets. Then stand back and let it cross reference all the existing medical knowledge and figure out how to save us. And it could probably solve a lot of other non-medical probl
OH HELL NOES! (Score:2)
I believe the real solution would be to invest the billions in AI.
Do you want terminators? Because that's how you get terminators.
Build an AI and ask it to eliminate all diseases.
Better to blow it all on beer and dressing monkeys up as civil war reenactors. That way we keep the number of gunshot wounds down to a reasonable level.
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Yeah, it's one of the classic great ideas like world peace. To give credit for originality though, I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion. Doesn't it typically cost a couple of billion just to develop one new drug? ( http://www.scientificamerican.... [scientificamerican.com] ) Oh I know... develop just one drug but have it be a drug that cures everything! That's some kind of genius.
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Last time I was in the hospital, they charged me $3 billion for four Tylenol and a disposable bed pan.
Does that include (Score:2)
i.e. The list of diseases ?
Re:you are forgiven... (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion.
He doesn't think that, and he didn't say that. The quote about "curing all diseases" is taken out of context. If you look at what he actually said, it is clear that he meant that as an aspiration for all of humanity over the next century, not just for his project. So the headline, summary, and TFA are yet more examples of garbage journalism. They are are more than just distorted and misleading, they are outright lies.
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I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion.
He doesn't think that, and he didn't say that. The quote about "curing all diseases" is taken out of context. If you look at what he actually said, it is clear that he meant that as an aspiration for all of humanity over the next century, not just for his project. So the headline, summary, and TFA are yet more examples of garbage journalism. They are are more than just distorted and misleading, they are outright lies.
'' The statement of intent is to cure all diseases within a decade. I doubt he meant his $3 billion alone would do the trick or even that he'd stop at $3 billion. That is not chump change so even if it's only $3 billion toward medical research that helps make some progress, then that's good. Normally when people say we're going to get somewhere far away or solve some massive problems, they don't plan to write a check and forget about the whole thing, they plan to stay engaged and they expect some help. I a
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Funny how data-mining moguls are now touting miracle cures... https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
That's some kind of PR.
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This works out in their favor somehow. Almost guaranteed.
So? If people cancer victims benefit from this, they don't somehow benefit less just because Mark and Priscilla also benefit.
Do you really need to denigrate the efforts of others, just so you can feel smug about doing nothing?
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All I mean to say is, don't act like they open their wallets and take 3 billion out and give it away.
Why not? That is what they did.
Instead, give more credit to all the people our there who make $20K a year and do give $50 out of their wallets.
Why "instead"? Can't we give credit to all donors?
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Why "instead"? Can't we give credit to all donors?
I can't recall seeing an article on slashdot about such donors, so apparently not.
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Why "instead"? Can't we give credit to all donors?
I can't recall seeing an article on slashdot about such donors, so apparently not.
There are no articles giving "credit" to big donors either. Rather there are snarky articles attacking them for their hubris and questioning their motivations.
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And that is far from what they did. They get something for that money, somehow. It's not unconditional.
Will the cancer treatments work better if their development is funded with "unconditional" money?
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Should we denigrate charity organizations that give 1% to charity and 99% to themselves?
If they are diverting contributions from more worthy charities, then they are causing real harm and of course they should be criticized.
But there is no evidence whatsoever than Zuck is doing that, or anything like that. The GPP was criticizing him for his impure motives, and not because of any actual consequences of his actions. If humanity benefits from this contribution, we don't benefit any less because of the motivations of the donor. If the donation can be a win-win, that is even better.
Do we really
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Can you ascertain from this article if Zuckerberg did anything at all?
Can you ascertain from this article if Zuckerberg isn't a hologram?
Possibly went to a meeting and instructed people to reallocate the money in a way that it wouldn't affect him in the end.
Possibly. But the important thing is that by the clever use of cynical innuendo, totally unsupported by any evidence, you have firmly established that you are a morally superior person, because you just sit on your ass and do nothing for anyone rather than making donations that are not provably pure.
You should be very proud of yourself!
One disease we can't cure is hubris. (Score:2)
"ohhhh, I'm a billionaire, me so smrt!"
Tech Company arrogance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Now I applaud them for using their money to try to help people. However there is a degree of arrogance common in the tech/business sectors that they have the formula to success. While working in technology and in medical uses a lot of similar types of thinking there are a few major differences.
1. Technology isn't alive. You can copy it, test it, break it, completely gut all the parts and rebuild it. Ethically you cannot do that with people and animals. And right now if it dies, it is dead you can't undead yet. Unlike technology, it dies you can bring it back to operational again.
2. We know how technology works at its most fundamental level. We know the chemical properties of semiconductors we know how to make gates and memory... You can take the world's most advanced computer and software, and every part and component there will be someone who can explain it. Technology we build from the ground up. And every step has a degree of documentation for it. The human body is something that needs to be discovered (That sounded bad) We are learning more and more about it every day. While we had mapped the GNOM the interaction with all the parts is still to be discovered. As well we are finding things that we thought were dormant or useless actually do important things.
3. Money can't buy Eureka!. It can put more people onto the project hoping to increase the chances of an Eureka! moment. But still it could take decades for that one person in a billion to make the right connection, and then be able to explain it to the next guy. Or a little more further away from Eureka, would be just the luck to look for something that no one looked for before.
4. Institutional attitudes. The tech sector is rather modern Academia and Health Care as Institutions are rather victorian in nature. The people you hire, may not want to find the cure for all, and share the credit, they want the credit and recognition so they may hide information until they can provide it in a way they will gain further credit.
Wise man once say (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
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Nice observation. It's always "they just need to ..." or "all you have to ...", it's never in the first person.
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It's always "they just need to ..." or "all you have to ...", it's never in the first person.
Except "they" will be paid by "him", so it is reasonable for "him" to say what "they" need to do.
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Nothing to do with who pays for it.
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The human body is something that needs to be discovered
We are explorers in the further regions of experience...
Sorry was just reminded of Pinhead (perhaps not the misinterpretation you anticipated). I agree with the other points you were actually making, though; there's a bit much hubris on display.
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When tech company arrogance buts against medical industry arrogance, the results are going to be...interesting. On the Torino scale.
Re:Tech Company arrogance. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Technology isn't alive. You can copy it, test it, break it, completely gut all the parts and rebuild it. Ethically you cannot do that with people and animals. And right now if it dies, it is dead you can't undead yet. Unlike technology, it dies you can bring it back to operational again.
And this one is the blocker for the really interesting research now, which is combating aging. This graph [www.ssb.no] is in Norwegian but it should be pretty understandable, it's number of deaths by age for each sex and in total. If you look at age 1-17 it's almost zero. from 18-40 we get to make our own stupid choices but still very low, 40-60 people start to check out, 60-80 it's climbing rapidly and 80-100 almost everyone dies. If we were all as resilient as 20 year olds we could live 1000+ years, we're fighting disease in a more and more frail body. I'm not saying it's pointless but it will get exponentially harder and harder to improve.
The problem is though that nobody wants to experiment on healthy people that don't suffer from anything but aging, that you're in good shape for a 60yo but considerably worse than when you were 20yo is only natural. Beyond that you should eat healthy, exercise and all those other lifestyle choices we're not going to make any real medical effort to make you young again. Could we for example clone a new heart and give me a heart transplant, for no other reason than it got 50 years less wear and tear? Can we fix presbyopia that from Greek literally means "see like old man"? What about a way regain lost hearing, that almost everyone loses with age?
This is not how you would maintain a car, you don't wait for it to break down first before you start doing anything. Parts have life spans, parts need service, parts that start showing signs of wear and tear gets replaced. Humans? Don't fix it if it's not broke, in fact we often can't even fix it when it's broke. You're just supposed to accept that you're not a spring chicken anymore, half your body's systems are failing and doctors are running around with the proverbial duct tape. At some point we have to try experimenting on making healthy people even healthier, to rejuvenate them. We haven't really started yet and we certainly won't finish in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of anyone I'm likely to meet.
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The word "science" is often used as if it is the pinnacle of perfection of knowledge and trustworthiness. Your list makes clear that there are many ways to do science and some ways and findings are very well understood whilst some things remain very hard to investigate. So I wish more people would, when they hear "it is science!", would simply ask, "and what did they do to find that out?" Nutrition for example -- if Gary Taubes is right -- is gradually starting to show signs of reversing a huge misstep whic
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upsetting the boat... uh, good grief.... rocking the boat.
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If there is anything I said that was bad about FaceBook I take it back.
This is an awesome idea !
Don't be so quick to unjudge. That's a 3 billion dollar tax deduction which they still control, most likely to back healthcare startups in Silicon Valley and gain more power. At least wait until they actually cure something.
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That's because there's no money to be made curing people. Better to keep them sick and hooked on pharma.
Who cares about money? There's more political power in keeping people hooked on government. DHHS's budget is $1.15T for next year.
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Other than the ~$5B that we spent to cure cancer last year (http://blogs.reuters.com/stories-id-like-to-see/2014/09/09/the-money-spent-in-fighting-cancer-and-alibabas-risk-factor/).