Zuckerberg to spend $3bn+ to rid world of all disease by 2100 (Starting with Facebook, right?) Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have promised at least $3bn in funding for a medical initiative to cure, prevent or manage all known diseases by the end of the century. The program, managed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) that the duo set up after the birth of their first child, will fund scientific research that …
Does make you wonder though... after it's been through our tax systems and the MP's have taken their expenses out of it, and the quangos have done there studies with it, and so on...(or US equivalents) which offers the most efficient way of making sure money does not get to where it should do...
And having paid those taxes how much would get spent on medical research instead of say... other pointless war in the middle east?
At least this way all the 3 billion is being spent on medical research and it is being conducted outside of the pharma companies so any drugs/cures produced will at least be affordable
Yes, but that doesn't just apply to Facebook. How many on here, come election time, vote for the party that promises them the lowest taxes? How many make sure that they use every little loophole available to pay the absolute minimum tax that they have to? How many are happy to pay "cash in hand" to get a lower price, knowing full well the recipient has no intention of declaring it to HMRC?
You currently have the NHS, the railways, the social services and the research grants you deserve, because YOU voted for them...
Age old argument - is money more efficient through private, uncontrolled enterprise, or government which has more bureaucracy but is not at one person's whim?
Also you do all realise MArk's taxes and Facebook's taxes are entirely separate. He's not spending FB money on this, as I understand, but his own personal fortune.
I mean after all the side effect of avoiding taxes by those "grand gestures" is that you create organisations where you can control a lot. Power is an important factor here, and even if you don't believe those billionaires to be power hungry, you can still see that a "non profit" organisation dedicated to fight X is still a place you can put your friends and family into so they'll have easy and profitable jobs.
There might also be the believe that somehow "private" organisations are "more efficient" than governmental ones. That's a mantra repeated over and over again, by certain people, particularly "Objectivists". However there has not yet been a grain of evidence supporting this, and lots of examples showing the exact opposite.
There is a chance that those billionaires are just "stupid" or at least claim to be stupid in order to have some non-selfish reason to justify their actions.
Well not really. As this would take governments ages to get organized to set up some research (see Zika story in US), and by the time the money has passed all governmental instances, hardly anything is left over to do the actual research.
So, if all companies who are avoiding taxes would use the money to start such initiatives : nice, go ahead.
On the other hand, when you take Apple, avoiding the largest amount of taxes, solely for filling their own pockets, or for buying another company, well, that's a different, more greedy, story.
Maybe this is a reaction Microsoft's statement recorded elsewhere ( https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/20/2111240/microsoft-will-solve-cancer-within-the-next-10-years-by-treating-it-like-a-computer-virus-says-company ) that they'll "solve" cancer.
Apparently they intend to treat cells as computers and reprogram them. Should work well unless too many BSOD at the same time.
This is all very nice, and thank you the Zuckerbergs, but the lofty ambition of ridding the world of disease is hardly likely to be achieved by splashing $3bn around three US universities, in fields cherry-picked by a privacy-loathing social media geek who seems to think that biology is just a messy form of software that needs debugging.
By comparison the Wellcome Foundation alone has an endowment of over $23bn, and its funding priorities are decided by real medical scientists.
"Do it like Computer Antivirus" MS said.
Except that doesn't work even for computers and often "kills" vital system files.
This is just PR and the bulk of the money going to San Francisco lab. There will be too much Silicon Valley input and too much emphasis on developing gadgets rather than real medical research.
Another Theranos in the making?
Who will have oversight of the research?
Looks to be a purely commercial play. $3B over the next 80 years won't go far. But if he has a team of scientists who can quickly analyse perceived threats and onsell that information to the mass vaxxers while opening the wallets of fearful governments then he could be onto a winner. After a couple of wins he might even be able to start harvesting national health data. However, like H1N1 before it, Zika as an example seems to be a way overhyped threat with the prize being billions of dollars in vaccination contracts rather than any public health issue that can't be explained as don't spray crap in poor people's drinking water. This also highlights the threat to the rest of us - do no harm will be discarded for some manipulated perception of the social good.
To see what's coming check out the past: Uncle Bills involvement in India's mass polio vaccinations and the massive costs and consequences that arose from a small (few million dollars) donation.
It's "do spray".
The way to prevent the spread of Zika is the same as the way to prevent the spread of malaria.
Kill the mosquitos. Remove their breeding grounds.
Oh yes, and don't arrange for a massive congregation of international visitors in the middle of an outbreak. That's probably how it got to Brazil in the first place!
Zika spreads faster because the mozzies that spread it are active during the day, so mosquito nets don't work.
The CDC website lists zika symptoms as being mild and many people do not even realise they have it. There are suggestions that the microcephaly was as a result of widespread spraying of pyroproxyfen in the affected towns rather than the zika virus. This of course is dismissed by anyone who might have legal liability for these actions. Zika seems to be a perfect example of a well hyped threat for which a bio-hub might influence governments to act based upon a potentially faulty or corrupt diagnosis.
"...to the mass vaxxers..."
Oh no, one of those...
Look, if you tinfoil-hat-wearing nutjobs want to expound on how our governments are secretly ruled by Illuminati reptoids that escaped from the hollow Earth through the polar holes suppressed by NASA and are brainwashing the masses with chemtrail-spraying airliners and mind-control rays beamed from communication satellites, be my guest, we're all entitled to harbour our pet whacky beliefs; that's what makes the world an interesting place.
But I draw the line when those beliefs start causing the deaths of thousands of innocent children whose lives might be saved but for anti-vaxxers citing long-debunked and fraudulent "studies" about vaccines causing autism and other such shit. The efficacy of vaccines in reducing the incidence of preventable and crippling diseases like polio has been emprically proven as fact time and again over the last century. That large greedy corporations profit from it is irrelevant to the fact that vaccines save lives.
Many diseases, such as polio and rubella, which we could have had eradicated by now, are undergoing a resurgence in the developed world because of the influence of anti-vaxxers. And for every child who will spend his or her life crippled by polio that a simple jab might have prevented, that's a tragedy that can be laid squarely at the feet of these tinfoil nutcases.
You aren't doing the world any favours by perpetuating such rubbish.
So all vaccines are good and beneficial and have no harmful side effects? No child has ever been harmed or killed by vaccines? No vaccine manufactures has ever been involved in corporate fraud?
Mass vaxxers is an appropriate label. They make profit by selling a product as widely as possible using fear as a marketing technique. It takes a great act of faith to believe that all the product they supply is benign or even necessary simply on the assumption that vaccines == good. You would not make that assumption for your food. Why would you make a blanket assumption for medical products.
From the FDA website drugs development and approval process
ADRs (adverse drug reactions) are one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in health care. The Institute of Medicine reported in January of 2000 that from 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur annually from medical errors. Of this total, an estimated 7,000 deaths occur due to ADRs. These statistics do not include the number of ADRs that occur in ambulatory settings. However, other studies conducted on hospitalized patient populations have placed much higher estimates on the overall incidence of serious ADRs. These studies estimate that 6.7% of hospitalized patients have a serious adverse drug reaction with a fatality rate of 0.32%. If these estimates are correct, then there are more than 2,216,000 serious ADRs in hospitalized patients, causing over 106,000 deaths annually. Also, it is estimated that over 350,000 ADRs occur in U.S. nursing homes each year. The exact number of ADRs is not certain and is limited by methodological considerations. However, whatever the true number is, ADRs represent a significant public health problem that is, for the most part, preventable.
But I am sure all vaccines are safe.
You've conflated drugs and vaccines. Very different things, with only a similar (broad) aim of "making people healthier".
Whilst it is trivially true that our economic system ensures that companies wish to maximise profit, making vaccines isn't really a good way to make profits. Treating risk factors for disease (eg hypertension, dyslipidaemia etc) is good for profits (lots of people to treat) and treating common yet oddly emotive diseases ("cancer") is good as you can charge lots to each patient. This isn't the fault of the drug companies. Or the vaccine companies, or doctors.
I'll get my (white) coat, as I've spent too long on this already... and doubt I will convince anyone, as views tend to be fixed and immutable, despite evidence.
Yes, yes, last year we had the first case of Diphtheria in Spain in thirty years because the parents of the child agreed with you.
The kid died, but I am certain the parents will take a lot consolation in your ADR figures, besides thanks to them the evil companies making the vaccines made less money. If that is not worth seeing your child die I don't know what could.
Meanwhile some of the kids that were with him in summer camp tested positive for the bacteria, but since their parents aren't complete morons and vaccinated them, those kids are alive and well.
There's a certain breezy arrogance behind software guys thinking that the core problems in medicine are much like computers. The world of software is founded upon a few simple and deterministic operations. Cellular biology? errr, not quite so much. We've been exploring the field for decades and we're still finding new tracts of unguessed behaviour. Witness the scale of expenditure on drug development and the dire rate of failure (pharma researcher Derek Lowe has plenty to say in this, e.g. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/04/02/silicon_valley_sunglasses - he also has amusing war stories under the tag "things I won't work with")
Even the limited goal of "cure cancer" seems fantastical. Take soft-cell sarcomas in children - the Royal Marsden Hospital reports that these form 1% of all the childhood cancer cases referred to them. And that 1% then divides into 80 subtypes, all with their own peculiarities of origin, progress, and treatment.
And the elephant in their room is senility - an average age of over 100 years is far less alluring if the final decades may be spent as a frail phantom, your erratic and sometimes hateful behaviour grinding the love of your family into weary dust.
"And the elephant in their room is senility - an average age of over 100 years is far less alluring if the final decades may be spent as a frail phantom"
I feel you on that one. I have many fond memories of my Nan when I was a boy, when I used to stay at her house in Reigate during the Easter and summer holidays, and then when we emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, a few years later she came out to live near us, so she was always a part of my life.
But in her last few years, she lost her memory and identity. One of the saddest moments of my life was when I walked into her room and she asked Mum, "Who is this?" She no longer recognised me, her own grandson. For me, that was the day she truly died, and I never went to see her again. Yet she "lived" another six years, and Mum would visit her every day, and in the end she couldn't even talk.
I would a thousand times rather die of cancer, or heart disease, or stroke, or even drown, even as young as 70, than die a slow lingering death of senescence in my late 90s like that. And yes, I've had friends and relatives die of cancer and stroke so that statement isn't hyperbole. Losing my marbles over years and becoming a breathing vegetable is the worst death I can imagine. I would rather be euthanased than suffer that. It's strange: when our pets get so old they find life unendurable we have the decency to put them to sleep and let them go peacefully, but we don't accord that same dignity to those we love the most.
Yes, my plan is to check out around 70; that seems to be the point at which my parents stopped enjoying life. My dad hung around for another 10 years, gradually getting worse and suffering unbelievable amounts of pain, and my mum is still around but not enjoying life; she's in pain whenever she moves, can't walk more than a few feet, and forgets things constantly. She doesn't believe in suicide, assisted or otherwise, with the law as it is at the moment, but she's told us that if she could go somewhere where she could have a nice meal with the family, tell us all goodbye, then lie down and go to sleep in the certain knowledge that she would never awake, she'd go for it.
"Yes, my plan is to check out around 70; that seems to be the point at which my parents stopped enjoying life."
OTOH both I and SWMBO are in our 70s and still functioning. When you get into your 70s you might find you stuff to do - such as looking after grandchildren.
The (unstated) assumption is that if we extend life, it will be either by just stretching out each period of life so you have more frailty, or by allowing the maintenance of life below levels of function currently achievable.
The 2nd is definitely wrong (or at least very implausible), as we haven't really changed this at all except in ICU, and few people actually spend their final days there, let alone months/years which is what we're talking about (at least, I am and I presume others are). The 1st is possible.
I think what is more likely is that we will extend the healthy lifespan - from age 70 to age 80, or to age 90. It is commonplace for me (and most doctors in developed countries) to look after 90 year olds who are still fit, active and enjoying life. (Because they need me to look after them it tends to all go pear shaped afterwards, but we'll leave that out of it :-) In fact, I am now routinely saddened when I see people in their 70s with multimorbidity as I feel they are "too young" to have such significant illness.
But I might be wrong. There's data to support both hypotheses: the extension of healthy life, with similar decline at the end, and extension of life with the same proportion of decline.
Either way, it's worth thinking about your lifestyle and considering the impact on your decline (ie stop smoking, eat less, exercise more). And when you consider your likely lifespan it's worthwhile making sure that you do things that aren't going to be achievable later (see you kids grow up rather than work).
My nan went the same way and it is truly painful.
If it's any consolation the average 'healthy' life expectancy keeps improving and they recently announced that a new drug is able to dissolve the protein plaques that destroy the neuron in Alzheimers.
So, medical research does work, even when founded by millionaires, Rockerfeller for example funded the eradication of the hookworm.
"The world of software is founded upon a few simple and deterministic operations. Cellular biology? errr, not quite so much."
For a computer, I can install Photoshop on it and Photoshop will work the exact same way on every computer, even if it is a HP, Dell, Lenovo, or a custom made one. For a person, I can give them a drug and it does not work the exact same way on every person. I was once given a drug to make my mouth dry so that I could have braces installed; it did the exact opposite. This is why drug commercials of any kind spend so much time listing side-effects which may or may not effect you.
I don't think people from a computer world really understand how marvelous life is. They are trying to make self-driving cars and are finding it difficult to overcome what comes naturally to people. Life is not a series of 1's and 0's. It would be better for software giants to give money, discreetly (not discretely), to medical charities who better understand life.
"For a computer, I can install Photoshop on it and Photoshop will work the exact same way on every computer, even if it is a HP, Dell, Lenovo, or a custom made one."
Clearly you have never worked in IT support! You can install an application on 100 PCs built from the same batch by the same manufacturer by using a single image and on at least one of them something will not work properly. I don't think anyone has ever satisfactorily explained why this is...
Spending $3 billion on the world being able to grow and farm good, (preferably) organic, nutritious food (no Monsanto) as well as clean water, sanitation AND education about what constitutes a healthy diet (hint: it doesn't come out of a packet, is not loaded with HFCS and is not low fat and full of carbs) would be far more effective in curing disease by not allowing the body to become ill in the first place with the chronic, modern diseases spreading across the planet. Hippocrates was always right.
- AI software for mapping and scanning the brain for neurological issues.
- Applying machine learning to cancer genomes.
- Building an implantable chip for disease diagnosis.
- A tool for continuous blood monitoring.
- A map of human cells to aid drug designers.
Now why does all this talk of mapping and scanning people's brains, building implantable chips, and continuous monitoring, coming from the inventor and owner of the most invasive and Orwellian method of communication surveillance system ever devised, send shivers of horror down my spine?
Please, let me die of old age before any of this becomes reality!
Well luckily we are talking about a .com company. In 10 years Facebook probably won't exist anymore. We are already in the phase where more and more people are ashamed of having a Facebook account.
Of course the data will be sold over and over again until it finally reaches the company that can do most evil with it.
Like it or not there is something which is called international obligations, treaties, contracts and being true to your word.
It was an extremely and phenomenally rare occurrence of US government complying with them.
It usually does not and USA signature on an international treaty has the approximate value of a IOW note scribbled by a spoiled 5 year old on a piece of toilet paper. As Iran is learning now. The hard way. Being isolated from dealing with USA for 20 years they forgot how things work (TM). They will soon understand it once more.
Given Zuckerberg's attitude (remember he called everyone idiots for pouring their hearts out on Facebook?) you can't really blame us for being cynical.
He isn't doing this to be altruistic or to advance humanity. He's doing it because it affords him even more invasive ways of getting inside peoples' heads and bodies so he can monetise their life data.
Facebook is getting a stigma, not only for its users being vacuous morons, but also for its image as a giant corporate evil monster. $3billion over 80 years, which probably won't all get paid anyway is a small price to pay out of the marketing budget to try and change its poor image.
Hmm, implantable chips, technology, etc. All sounds like it's aimed at rich people's diseases.
One thing you can say about Gates is that he's not chasing the money. Malaria? Dysentery? These are all things he's put good resources into helping improve the lot of our fellow earthlings with no hope of ever making money out of the deal. One problem he did encounter was the strange kind of discrimination present in the scientific medical research community - no scientist wants to work on better treatments for diseases like dysentery, there's no scientific kudos given out to "simple" things like that. All they want to work on is things like cancer, were not uncoincidentally there's a lot of money to be made...
It can give the top 200 universities another 60 PhD students each, or thereabouts, without equipment, consumables, travel expenses (conferences are not cheap), or compute power. This is rather less than the total of PhD students in these universities at this point in time, even if we only count those in medical sciences and AI research (our university medical centre has a few hundred PhD students, alone). If he expects the 3 billion investment to solve the problem of all disease, he must apparently think we are already halfway there. I (and my colleagues in the medical centre) beg to differ. This isn't to say the extra money isn't welcome. It is just that the money provided can hardly be expected to attain the stated goals
No!
I count at least 4 PR comments here as usual, plus I must say I am in agreement with those who are less than impressed. 3 billion is undoubtedly useful to medical reserch but like Gates, the Zuck thinks because he is a billionaire he knows better so instead of listening to the guys on the ground he has his own (tax avoiding) solution to all the ills of humanity. I will be interested to see what kind of society it will be when humans are an integral part of The Internet Of Things via Farcebook medical.
My first thought when I saw this? How much did the launch event cost and couldn't that money have been spent saving someone's life? I don't remember the Gates Foundations having big press launches for his initiatives other than when he wants to raise public awareness on an issue, not to announce he's spending money.
Vanity much? If it was true altruism they wouldn't need a PR launch.
Zuckerberg also said that he would be bringing his engineering skills to setting up a global communications network to link scientists, researchers, engineers, and other specialists so that they could share that information.
Some form of packet switched computer network, perhaps, with many independent cooperating networks exchanging routing data so that any one node can communicate with any other?
Once they've cured all the diseases there going to be even more people in need of food, energy, housing and generating a lot of co2 directly and indirectly.
Wouldn't it be best to figure out a solution to the world over population problem first?
Nuke them all, let God sort them out..... gazthejourno
A tad radical and fundamentalist be that solution, gazthejourno, .... and quite delusional too if you be not joking and laughing out loud at the nonsense being spouted :-) God has surely much better things to do in the mad house that is bedlam and mayhem. It is probably only in there that he/she/it is believed and their plans are perceived and conceived.
:-) .... Mad Monks 'R' Us is certainly an acquired taste, Doctor Syntax. And by Rasputin Rules is an Exhilarating Root for Great Games Plays. Success there is rewarded in Earthly Measured Pleasures to XSSXXXX.
It's a valid argument, though one that's hard to have since it requires billions to die, but generally isn't high birth rate a sign of a nation with poor healthcare and life expectancy? As countries become developed, birth rates naturally seem to drop to closer to 1 in 1 out?
"It's a valid argument, though one that's hard to have since it requires billions to die, but generally isn't high birth rate a sign of a nation with poor healthcare and life expectancy? As countries become developed, birth rates naturally seem to drop to closer to 1 in 1 out?"
And that is also a problem, because those nations need constantly growing economies and tax bases to pay for their Ponzi scheme like entitlement programs.
Over 200 million people worldwide are infected with HepC. The drug Sofosbuvir presently seems to offer the best chance of a cure. The production cost is about $1 a pill, one a day being taken for a 12-week course along with other relatively inexpensive medicines. In the UK the price that the NHS would pay for such a course of treatment is currently about £35,000.
A firm called Gilead Sciences had bought the patent for the drug, paying $11 billion to a startup company, Pharmasset when their results showed promise. Their development of the drug had in turn been based on a research breakthrough at Cardiff university which had not been patented.
Sofosbuvir came to the market in 2013. By the first quarter of 2016 Gilead had collected £35 billion in revenue from HepC medicines.
There are maybe 5 million people with HepC in the USA alone, and Gilead is asking $84,000 each for its treatment. That's a total in Zuck's own back yard of more than a hundred times his £3 billion for just a single disease. It's not money that needed, it's an ethical approach to medicine.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-07-financial-acquisition-buybacks-threaten-access.html
Well put, David. This drug is just the tip of the iceberg in quest for profits among big pharma. Most have basically shut down their research and go looking for startups with the next big profit maker. Since government and insurance are paying for these meds, there's nothing in the mindset of the average patient to insist on lower prices as it's paid for by someone else's money... or so they think.
Corporates and their major stockholders have no shame, no ethics. Pretty sad world we're in.
The implication in that tall tale is that throwing paper money at problems solves them although the evidence of Quantitative Easing which is being used to try and kickstart economies and deliver prosperity in a world of austerity and conflict has proven otherwise. Such simply reveals the nature of Man's slavery and those responsible who are not held accountable.
And they be increasingly aware of being clearly identified as persons of particular and peculiar interest and strategic targets for specific attention. Lurking in shadows pulling strings remotely nowadays, in order to act with impunity and enjoy immunity, is not just so easy as it used to be. It is an unprecedented and unpresidented novel state of affairs.
Do intelligence services monitor and mentor to maintain and protect a system in crisis because of the failure of its actions, or would they be reasonably expected to provide alternative means and new modes of mass administration for memes to follow and present as future viable reality substitutions? And be they far from being practically intelligent and useful should they fail to provide greater novel solutions to endemic systemic problems ..... and thus be they operating fraudulently, aiding and abetting in the crashing of systems?
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