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Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In Research
An anonymous reader writes "There have been complaints within the World Health Organization of some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes by the Gates Foundation. Scientists who were once open with their research are now 'locked up in a cartel' and are financially motivated to support other scientists backed by the Foundation. Diversity of views is 'stifled,' dominance is bought, and Foundation views are pushed with 'intense and aggressive opposition.'" The article tries hard for balance. It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm on the Gates Foundation's unintended consequences on world health research is "an openly undiplomatic official who won admiration for reorganizing the world fight against tuberculosis but was ousted from that job partly because he offended donors like the Rockefeller Foundation."
Why is anyone surprised. These foundations are nothing but cash cows, money sinks and tax write-offs.
Very, very few rich people are genuine philanthropists.
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
(and no, I honestly am not sure if I'm joking, being snarky, or am genuinely worried about WTF that idiot egomaniac may end up blundering us all into...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Microsoft Medicine
For the low price of $500 dollars per copy.
You may not disassemble or reverse engineer this vaccine.
If you install this vaccine in a second body, you must delete it from the first.
You may keep a copy of this vaccine for backup purposes only. You may not install this vaccine in a body containing more than two souls. (Siamese triples, anyone?)
Maybe I'm a cynic, but I just don't see why everyone thinks that Bill Gates is a Good Person. While I agree that the Gates Foundation (or whatever it's real name is) is a Good Thing, I'm not sure that it exists for the right reason (not that this matters, particularly).
Bill Gates just wants his name to be immortal, because he solved any one of a million world hunger/malaria/etc. problems in the world, and the Gates Foundation is his way of doing that. We'll all love him and put his name on a pedestal, which is exactly what he wants. The Gates Foundation is a calculated move, just like every other he's made. The only difference is, this calculated move has the side effect of being good for the world population.
ah shit, not this again..
When I bash Gates, people always tell me that Bill Gates has donated more money to medical research than anyone else in history. Which is true. But I always say that he donates heavily to organizations he controls. And finally he has shown his true colors.
The main business of Gates Foundation is making money and avoiding taxes by giving away at least 5% of its worth every year. The Foundation is a major shareholder in many of the companies listed as "highest-polluting" in the United States and Canada.
What about the 5%? Gates Foundation awards grants mainly in support of global health initiatives, for efforts to improve public education in the United States (Live@edu for lock-in, anyone?), and for social welfare programs in the Pacific Northwest.
LA Times investigation of Gates Foundation, January 2007: Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
It's happening everywhere, a gradual chilling debasement of science and open collaboration. On one hand the internet has brought great
opportunity, and some great things like Gutenberg, the Internet archive, Hyperphysics, and of course Wikis that are gaining credibility more and more, but these are not real scientific repositories, real science is being buried. Some online journals have their archives open to download free pdfs, but they are the exception, in general things are getting much worse than better. 15 years ago I had to go to a library to get papers, but at least they were there and I could photocopy for free. Now all the records have gone electronic its a nightmare. Do a Google search on any serious topic and the first two pages will be istore, free patents online, and all those for-pay peddlers of knowledge. These guardians of information charge $30 or more for an electronic reprint, on 80 year old papers, IP that doesn't even belong to them! I expect many great scientists are spinning in their graves. I sometimes laugh when I hear the phrase scientific community. There isn't one anymore! Everyone is out to obscure and bury. How can peer review be conducted anymore? Everyone is too afraid to publish in case patent trolls sieze their work, and only the few in large institutions can afford to. I have to share papers on the sly with other researchers and certain old textbooks are becoming treasured items. This knowledge belongs to us all. The vast majority from the last few hundred years is public domain, payed for by your tax dollars to fund research on national levels.
I certainly don't expect Microsoft to help in any way, their track record is to squeeze money out of every chance they get. What have they ever contributed to real science? We must reverse this slide into private and secret science or eventually university students will be signing NDA agreements before being allowed to study and progress will only be the preserve of the wealthy.
Google scholar is a step forward, but if you use it a lot you will see more than half of what it links to isn't actually available, it just leads to pay-for sites. They should block those so that only info that is actually available to read is presented.
*insert generic warning about goatse.ca here*
to Embrace and Extinguish
I work in AIDS research. The conflicts that are emerging in the field of malaria research are very similar to what we are experiencing in our field, which in both cases is a consequence of the severe funding bottleneck for biological sciences. The Gates Foundation has been an extremely important source of funding for basic science as well as providing resources for prevention and outreach in areas of the world suffering from the heaviest burden of these diseases. Unfortunately, the current funding philosophy seems to be to reward a massive sum of cash to a very select subset of scientists in the field. This has created some unfortunate divisions in our field. If you can access the article, see: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/abs/nm0507-515.html (I've also been able to Google for excerpts from the article.) Basically, both the Gates Foundation and the NIH have pumped massive funding into a single research consortium, leaving many other labs scavenging for funding to sustain their clinical research. Throw in some questionable data-sharing practices and lack of scientific collaboration by the consortium, and you'll obviously create a lot of resentment.
If you inject this vaccine into a siamese multiplet, you must purchase one license per individual.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
But let's quote from TFA, since no one really reads it - it's enough that Slashdot publishes something to add it to the repertoire of the FOSS advocate army on the internets:
$4 billion dollars. Since the WHO is a UN body, I'm sure we can imagine where most of that money goes to. But that's really irrelevant.
Having worked with privately funded research NGOs in the past, I'm pretty sure that the turf wars and petty rivalries are as common at that level as they are everywhere else. Let's quote again:
So, twenty bucks this is some sort of institutional or personal rivalry of some sort. I don't buy the "openly undiplomatic official" bit at all, not from someone who works for the United Nations.
It is of course quite possible that the person responsible for malaria efforts at the Gates foundation is a certified bitch - that alone does not justify the retarded "some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes" bullshit in the submission. From an anonymous reader, no less. Nowhere in the article is it claimed that the malaria campaign by the foundation is wrong or not working. No, it's just that it's not proceeding the way the UN bureaucrats want it to:
That's institutionalese for "they're not doing things the way we do them around here".
The gist of the article involves Kochi's dislike of how the Gates foundation goes about using it's $1.2 billion dollar malaria program:
Perhaps the people who run the Gates Foundation have read about how inefficient and ineffective the WHO has been in the past twenty years, and they prefer not to be accountable to a group of people who are supposed to be helping humanity but instead spend their time trying to hold on to research grants for dear life, witholding information about radiation poisoning from the public at the bequest of the IAEA, and fighting turf wars over juicy postings in well-to do countries.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/25/magazines/fortune/charity4.fortune/
If I gave $30 billion (I don't care how it was made, it was) of my money and decided I wanted the recipients to figure out how to make monkeys dance while playing cards and whistling Sheena is a Punk Rocker, than they better damn well figure out how to do it.
You retards who still do the "Bill Gates is Evil, Micro$oft is the devil"...grow up. You wouldn't be even typing on your computer right now if it wasn't for Microsoft. Its business, deal with it.
You don't like it, steal something better, make something better, market it better, and convince everyone that you're product's better.
And when you do and you're successful and rich...what would you be willing to do when someone comes up with a better idea? Will you kill it, will you buy it, or will you pour money into a competitor?
For all the crap that you think Bill Gates has done, he and his wife have done a lot more for the planet than you mouth breathers.
I'm going out on a limb and saying the dude has a chip on his shoulder. He'd like the people who fork over their money to do so and go away. Meanwhile they're in it to put their stamp on things. I'm not saying anybody's right and anybody's wrong. I have no experience on which to base an analysis of the ethics of the superrich. On the other hand I do have plenty of experience on which to base an analysis of the ethics of working in the public sector.
Rule one is don't bite the hand that feeds you. This guy's rabid.
The Gates foundation provides funding so long as there is adequate proof of where the funding is going and so long as it aligns with the broad vision the Gates foundation has. It sounds like this guy has problems with some of the scientists receiving Gates funding and he has problems with the fact that the Gates foundation has its own internal, closed decision making process that is only accountable to itself. But, that's to be expected. The Gates foundation introduced a level of accountability not seen before on a large scale. They did for international philanthropy what organizations like Pew did for philanthropy within the US.
The Gates foundation had to fight to bring any real accountability into these fields. If the WHO feels threatened its probably because they were pushing funds into opportunistic pockets up until the Gates foundation forced real accountability to happen.
Given the state of affairs up until now, if the Gates foundation did just create their own WHO-like organization, there's a good chance more people would be helped per dollar invested than are being helped by the WHO now.
The gates foundation is far from perfect. But they are inevitably going to take heat from threatening the lifeblood of the people at all levels of international philanthropy that have been skimming off the top of a very broken system.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Actually the problem with the theory that humans cause global warming is even worse. Those that doubt this theory get little or no funding and proponents of the theory try to gag those that would disagree. The INTENDED consequence is to monopolize the discussion.
Just as the theory at one time said that the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the earth and twice that we are experiencing global cooling, this is the second time in the last 100 years that the SAME people have said that we are experiencing global warming, and WE are causing it!
It is also interesting to note that those that favor the theory that humans cause global warming are the same people who told me in 1972 that our landfills would be full by 1990 and are the advocates of large government control...with by extension leaves us less free.
Yep, I've been saying this for ages, and nobody believes me. It's like the old joke by Craig Kilborn:
"Bill Gates announced his initiative to eradicate the AIDS virus. He plans to buy all competing viruses and use his power of monopoly to drive the AIDS virus to extinction."
But this is no joke. Gates has established a monopoly on philanthropy and the addition of money from Warren Buffet has given even more power to the Gates Foundation. They don't fund charities, they assimilate them. It is impossible to fund any alternative charities when the overwhelming majority of monies are going to the Officially Approved Gates Foundation Charities. Those charities have become a monoculture, as this document asserts. And those charities are designed to get third-world companies hooked on first-world Big Pharmaceuticals. Guess what? Bill Gates is a major shareholder in Big Pharma, from Merck to Schering-Plough to a dozen others. Gates can't help but apply his business mindset to everything he does, he seeks to rebuild the world in his own image, even if this means working his will through phony philanthropy.
But what galls me the most is that the billions of dollars he's "donating" came out of the pockets of Microsoft customers: governments, corporations, and individuals. What diverse charities might WE have funded, if Bill Gates hadn't stolen those dollars from OUR wallets?
It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm...
Uh... you mean Pete Townshend?
This 'Joe Average' says he can be both.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
--------------------
William H Gates, III
--------------------
CATHERDER
billg@phdsrnotrouble.org
--------------------
Doesn't allow all the scientist into its group for funding. I really don't see anything with wrong with that, they just pick the people they feel are the best for the job and provide funding... Prior to gates coming in with the money, there was no real funding of drugs. Also, I recently read somewhere that drugs were going to manufactured so they could be affordable or free... ie priced like generics.
What is Gn4a?? Is Bill Gates a member? Who is the Goatse guy? Is that pic real?
Inquiring minds want to know.
So that's why booster shots are now called Service Packs in Africa.
The Gates Foundation can operate however it pleases. If you don't like it, then let the heads of SourceForge Inc (owners of slashdot), Google, Apple, Red Hat, Ubuntu, or some other slashdot-approved entity start their own foundation and they can operate it more in keeping with slashdot's principles.
(Of course the only slashdot "principle" here is "Gates = evil"; a foundation run by ESR or Steve Jobs (yeah, that'll be the day) that operated in the exact same manner as the Gates Foundation wouldn't be ripped over and over on slashdot.)
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
There is a great book by a primatologist named Franz De Waal ("Our Inner Ape"), and the book largely deals with this subject, by speaking at lengths to the behaviors of various primates. The conclusion is, of course, that humans are not innately good or evil-- we have the capacity for both compassion and uncaring selfishness.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Gates demands results from people to whom he gives money.
In the criminally overcompetitive environment of Microsoft,
this generated a meme pool of ferociously competitive behaviors
that were optimal for maximizing Microsoft's profits.
However, in an environment of scientific research, the same meme pool
has two disadvantages. First, it is unfamiliar to scientists
who have never been exposed to it, and therefore their ideas
suffer in comparison to ideas defended with Gates-level ferocity,
not because of the merits of the ideas themseelves, but just because
of the ferocity of the defense. Second, the ferocity itself
interferes with communication among scientists, forcing them to be
mutually suspicious and mutually destructive to defend their own
livelihoods. This phenomenon already exists in scientific research,
but it is electrically intensified by the Microsoft meme pool.
> If the WHO feels threatened it's probably because they were
> pushing funds into opportunistic pockets up until the
> Gates foundation forced real accountability to happen.
From the outside, it is difficult to differentiate anticorruption
struggles from dysfunctional overcompetition. However, it seemed
to me like the article alluded to specific examples supporting
the claim that this is overcompetition rather than anticorruption.
slashdottagsshorterthanhaikunewartform
I ran across a rumor about the Gates Foundation using its muscle to persuade a private investor to make that $100 million dollar bailout to SCO, and that it was linked to some Saudi Prince.
But I can't find a single reference to it anywhere. Was I just dreaming? Does anybody have anything on this?
Although I did run across this item while searching. .
-FL
...the B & G Foundation/MS statistically donates less money than most all other US corporate behemoths. It acts more like a giant investment fund rather than a savior.
Quote from the LA Times, Jan, 2007: "the Los Angeles Times looked into how the foundation invests some of the billions of dollars that are in the portfolio of the world's largest charity, and it found a number of instances -- perhaps 41 percent of that portfolio -- in which the foundation has invested in companies that have policies that actively undermine the social welfare goals of the foundation."
If only there was another billion dollar organisation funding medical research into diseases in the poorer areas of the world... Oh wait: http://google.org/predict.html
Since it is not safe or practical to give Fansidar constantly to babies because it is a sulfa drug that can cause rare but deadly reactions and because Fansidar-resistant malaria is growing, World Health Organization scientists had doubts about it. Nonetheless, Kochi wrote, although it was "less and less straightforward" that the health agency should recommend it, the agency's objections were met with "intense and aggressive opposition" from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation.
Sounds like a specific allegation to me.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I think De Waal would agree that 'You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go inside the monkeyshpere'. part1, part2
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Charity has always had the problem that the person performing the charity will invariably attach some conditions to the charity. The simplest clearest example is religion related charity. Take for instance orphans raised by the catholic church. Yes ain't we nice, we raise these kids society has ignored. Why yes, offcourse we raise them as catholics, why do you ask?
It is not evil perse, there is nothing wrong with a catholic upbringing and since the religion apparently is 'good' enough to donate money to the raising of kids they clearly do something right BUT where does it stop? Would an orphaned child of a different religion still be allowed to the freedom of religion we so value in the west?
It is even simpler with straight cash donations, lots of slashdotters claim that politicians who accept cash donations from special interest groups are just one small step away from bribery.
If I donate a million dollars to my childs school, just how much say does this give me in how this school is run? If a school becomes totally depended on money from Bill Gates just how unbiased towards MS software will its IT department be?
Because at the receiver ends an old saying goes, "don't bite the hand that feeds you".
The article makes it clear how far this go, a worker who did excellent work was nonetheless fired because he upset one of the donors. He bit the hand that fed him.
The money that flows around Bill Gates has been linked more then once to attempts to influence the world in a way that clearly benefits Bill Gates. Look at the money that flowed around SCO, around OOXML etc etc. Just how come that the case against MS was dropped so quickly when the guard changed in the white house? How much did Billy boy and his old boys network donate?
Note this is NOT simple corruption. It is far more dangerous. Simple corruption in away is open by its nature. If everyone KNOWS it costs 1000 bucks in unmarked bills in a brown envelope to get a permit, then that is just the cost of living. Openly corrupt societies are actually very easy to deal with, just have enough cash on hand to get things done.
The charity/donations corruption is far harder to deal with. It ain't just Bill Gates you have to deal with, but all his friends as well. Even if you don't get any money from Billy you still have to watch out because you might be dependent on an organisation which does, or from one of his friends.
The article already shows this, upset the rockefellers and loose your job.
Say Bill Gates visits one of the schools he sponsors, do you think that any administrator of that school would allow a student to wear a penguin on his t-shirt? Show a BSD project? Have a demo class with Mac's?
It doesn't even matter if Bill Gates would cut his donations, the fear of it is enough.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anyone heard of it? http://www.oshca.org/
ciao
The bigger problem seems to be continuity of funding. You can get a grant for 1-3 year project, during which time you may or may not achieve something positive. But after the time is up, you are subject to the whims of the funding system again, and your chance of getting money to continue the project (even if it was wildly successful) is slim. You keep applying, and perhaps 3 years down the line you'll actually get the cash, but by then all the researchers on the project (and hence all the knowledge and experience) have gone and you're starting again from scratch. It also tends to lead to research group leaders having lots of money for specific windows of time, meaning that for 5 years they may need lots of lab space and stuff, and then within 6 months go to needing absolutely nothing cos they have no funding at all. The labs and equipment are then "lost" before the next set of funding ensues.
If the Gates foundation did something toward fixing this they'd get my vote.
Your foot bone is connected to your head bone. Not only by a series of other connecting bones, but through a network used to transport substances throughout the body, including the foot bone and head bone, which is called the cardiovascular system. And again, the cardiovascular system is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
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It's private money. As far as I am concerned those scientists could be hired by the foundation full time. As long as their drugs are approved by FDA or another independent organization for treatment of malaria, I do not care. I also do not care if they are created their private WHO.
It's not about "freedom of science", it's about results. If WHO or another governmental or intergovernmental organization thinks that their principles of funding could do better, go ahead, raise your budget, apply your rules.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Welcome to the world of Science. This is not the same world that had Einstein and Bohr in it. I wonder if there is any genuine research being done anymore. Being a Scientist is a career now and you have to sell your research to someone. What happens when your research disagrees with the person who is funding you.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Diversity of views is 'stifled,' dominance is bought, and global warming views are pushed with 'intense and aggressive opposition.
1. Do you have any evidence for this?
2. Well, then. It's not science, is it?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Not that the Rockefellers are any better than Gates.
What diverse charities might WE have funded, if Bill Gates hadn't stolen those dollars from OUR wallets?
Based on your ignorance I'm glad you didn't get a vote.
The video linked to by parent is complete quackery. The autism-vaccine link has been thoroughly disproven many times now. In countries where vaccinations are not combined or where vaccines do not contain thimerosal (e.g. Denmark, Japan), autism rates rise as much as anywhere else; the obvious and correct explanation is better diagnosis and a significant loosening of diagnostic criteria. Contrary to what the "doctor" in the video claims, most autistics do not have anything like the gastroenteritis symptoms that are supposedly indicative of "vaccine poisioning". His claim that 100% of autistics have such symptoms is am intentional lie. Here is some more real information on these issues from the good folks at Quackwatch.
You are kidding, right?
Pew has funded some of the most expensive failures in philanthropic history, with very little to show for it. But it's not just Pew, its most of the old-line foundations and a substantial percentage of the new money foundations that have continued on this path.
Both foundations and nonprofits in this country have a lot of 'splaining to do. Foundations because the aren't accountable to anyone for results or their grantmaking practices. Their accountablility is with their peers in other foundations; mentions in the MSM and their visibility at A- and B-list social events. Often, the criteria by which they are judged by their peers differs significantly from what they profess to provide to their grantees and affected populations. They typically (but not always) are staffed by synchophants (primarily), and academics who hate teaching, students, or critical challenges to their approaches. They typically approach huge problems with and underwhelming array of resources and impossible demands for progress and accountability given the sizes of their grants.
This is not to say that EVERY foundation behaves this way. I have worked with a few that have very smart, dedicated and forward-thinking staff, but these are by far the exception rather than the rule. Most, like the Gates Foundation, have a singular focus: to get their name out front and associated with high-profile wins, rather than sustained improvement over time for lots of people.
On the nonprofit side, foundation-supported nonprofits tend to lie about ("spin") their impact as a matter of course, the best of them have figured out foundation dynamics and play to those dynamicsm, rather than competing on the basis of their ideas, or ability to deliver results. The best nonprofits have executives who can overlook their funding/service-delivery paradoxes with a straight face, and who come from the same social milieu as foundation staffers.
I'm inclined to believe Dr. Kochi's views in this area based on my past experience with philanthropic organizations. I find many of the old-line philanthropic attitudes insufferable, and reading accounts of Dr. Kochi's career, I suspect that his pragmatic, inclusivist approach to reducing tuberculosis and malaria directly conflicts with the agenda of the major funder in that domain.
It has not been disproven. Studies have been done that show an epidemiologic link. Other studies have been done that claim there is no link whatsoever. The authors of the latter studies were often found to have close links with the pharmaceutical industry. The statistics employed in these "nothing to see here, please move a long" studies are often highly questionable.
As to David Ayoub, as opposed to what you suggest, he is a qualified and well-informed MD. If you doubt that, read this paper http://www.jpands.org/vol11no2/ayoub.pdf he co-authored. People without qualifications do not get published in medical journals.
I suggest you inform yourself better. A good place to start with plenty of source references is the following book http://astore.amazon.com/medical-bookstore-20/detail/1881217302. Moreover, I would refrain, in the future, from claiming that medical studies can "prove" anything. You can show correlations and do statistics that offer relative certainty as to causation. But that is a far cry from proof given the complexity of biology.
they can't play nice so they don't get to keep it.
What I hear from the vast majority of successful people is that giving and charity, however little, anonymous or not, has always come back around as good karma. Also I have been told that sometimes giving especially when you most feel unable can be the most beneficial, both for your heart and wallet.
It is all a tradeoff. I could donate 10% of my net worth simply by giving up cable and selling my car, instead riding a bus, and perhaps I should. On the other hand, maybe a better sacrifice is working early and late nights, saving and investing so that one day I can give away a huge lump sum. I believe the best choice is somewhere in the middle, and I strive for it, and have begun donating to open-source and freeware programmers, and my local radio station. I can say for sure that I feel better as a result, so in a way my quality of life has improved.
Gates, having been the wealthiest man in the world, donated publicly to great effect, I believe, inspiring at the least Warren Buffett to do the same. Perhaps the best legacy will be an inspiration for others to give. Realizing he could give such a large amount while still enjoying life (and still being able to live well enough to inspire others), is not something done by the majority of the wealthy, and I don't think you or I are in a place to judge him for it.
The oft-quoted comparison here in Seattle is Gates vs. Paul Allen, whose 'charitable' buildings and land development incite much more controversy than Gates supporting local schools or fighting malaria.
I don't aspire to devour companies or create a monopoly (like Microsoft), but to be able to direct so much of the worlds resources towards helping others is certainly commendable.
Charles
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
The parent would appear to bracket contemporary epidemiology researchers and their supporters with 2 generations of ecologists, and 4-5 generations of climatologists - oh, and 500 years of astronomy since Copernicus.
I believe the group referred to is "dang-scientists-in-their-stoopid-white-coats-what-do-they-know", who have all been around since roughly the time of Dracula, according to a well-informed 10-year-old of my acquaintance. And, of course, spouting their dam' fool the-o-ries that no-one can understand, which are always irrelevant to "real-people-with-common-sense".
I say, let some RPWCS catch malaria, then ask them again how important it is that this research is conducted with integrity and professionalism, and without influence from commercial interests.