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."

Comments

The idea behind Gates Foundation

[jbrax]

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

Re:Oh, shit...

[TheSeer2]

Ummm. This has nothing to do with the Gates Foundation. This is just a general scientific community sentiment in not wanting to offend their backers (hence the mention of Rockefeller in the summary).

Re: It's affecting AIDS research too

[QuincyFree]

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.

Business as usual

[dedazo]

Ah, another Bashdot hack job. Just bringing home the bacon.

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:

The Gates Foundation has poured about $1.2 billion into malaria research since 2000. In the late 1990s, as little as $84 million a year was spent - largely by the U.S. military and health institutes, along with European governments and foundations. Drug makers had largely abandoned the field. (China was developing a drug, artemisinin, that is now the cornerstone of treatment.)

The World Health Organization is a United Nations agency with a $4 billion budget. It gives advice on policies, evaluates treatments - especially for poor countries - maintains a network of laboratories and sends teams to fight outbreaks of diseases, like avian flu or Ebola. It finances little research; for diseases of the poor, the Gates Foundation is the biggest donor in the world.

$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:

But Attaran said he believed that scientists were not afraid of the foundation, but of its chief for malaria, Regina Rabinovich, whom he described as "autocratic."

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:

His own experience with Gates-financed policy groups, he said, was that they are cowed into "stomach-churning group think."

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:

called the Gates Foundation's decision making "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself."

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.

Re:Surprised?

[ejdmoo]

Please read TFA people...
Some quotes:

In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."

Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."

They are pointing out a general fact about research funding, and then saying that there's a lack of diversity in Malaria research/funding, because most of it is coming from the Gates Foundation. Maybe if Sergei and Larry would stop buying 767s (and NASA airfield landing rights) they could fund competing research.

(just flamebait fun on the goog guys...could have easily used Michael Dell)

Re:private or public science?

[johnlcallaway]

I've got news for everyone ... scientific research is not the unbiased bastion that everyone thinks it is. There are many books that document the sagas (and if I could get into the room where my step-son is sleeping I'd get you a couple of titles) of how scientists and politics go hand-in-hand. Backstabbing, lying, and downright blackmail have been going on for hundreds of years. It's popular to blame the current administration, but they weren't the first and won't be the last to try and craft scientific theories to fit their beliefs.

Everyone does it .. everyone likes to quote the facts that support their favorite belief and don't offer up the evidence that refutes it. Be it arguments for and against cloning, genetic engineering, global warming, power generation, and on and on.

Recognize the conflicts exist, do your own sanity check, then move on. It's never going to change until our unemotional robot overlords take control. As long as people do the research, there will always be biased contamination in the reporting of the results.

Re:Surprised?

[Planesdragon]

then consider this: whether it's a tax write-off or not, charitable foundations depend on the generosity of wealthy patrons to continue their work. That's just how the system is structured. Don't like it? Okay, work to get the tax benefits of charitable contributions eliminated. While you're at it, please explain to those who benefit from the monies donated to medical research, food programs, etc why they don't deserve the help. I worked in "charity" for five years. In all that time, I cannot name one thing other than "not having to fire anyone" that we accomplished.

Cash-based Charities as a whole are one step above outright scams. This is underscored for anything called a "foundation." Yes, they spend money on good things. But i'm not convinced that the donor and the donnee wouldn't be better served by simply handing over money -- or buying goods and selling them at a loss as a better form of charity.

Gates Foundation and SCO

[Fantastic Lad]

Argh!

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. . .

Everyone and his dog knows that corporate philanthropy is PR, but what is not understood very well in the US is that there should be a certain decency about how it is done. Not so with the Gates Foundation. It uses plenty of professional PR to milk the donations, and the timing certainly correlates with Microsoft's desire to influence public opinion. Microsoft is after all only partly playing to Judge Jackson, where what is in effect special pleading ("we've been naughty, but we've given wagon loads of money to charity by way of a penance" ) is unlikely to prove helpful. Much more important to Microsoft at the moment is a hearts-and-minds campaign and to use the charity card to lull a gullible public into thinking that at heart Microsoft is OK. Former Novell boss Ray Noorda scotched that one when he observed (paraphrasing) that to have a heart-to-heart, you had to have two hearts. Looking at the Foundation's actions over the last six months, and analysing press releases announcing donations, we see that when nothing was happening publicly in April, there were three releases. In May, as things were warming up for the June rebuttal hearings, there were 12 releases. In June, the number shot up to 20, but immediately dropped down to just four in July, when the trial was quiet again. August saw 12 and there were 13 in September, in honour of the findings of fact and the oral hearing. A recent move is an invitation by Craig McCaw of Teledesic (in which Gates and Microsoft have invested significantly) for Nelson Mandela and his new wife to visit Seattle from 7-9 December "to raise awareness of issues in Africa". The press release was jointly issued by Teledesic and the Gates Foundation. You can bet that Mandela will be given a large cheque. This looks like a PR blocking move in case Judge Jackson's Opinion is handed down around that time. As has been said before, charity begins in the home PC. Several hundred million PC users around the world have been a victim of Microsoft's monopoly exploitation, pricing policies and software quality. This charity money comes from these users - us - yet we have no say in what happens to it. Microsoft is indeed a world leader -- in exploiting philanthropy.

-FL

Should be noted that

[djupedal]

...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."

Re:Should be noted that

[Eukariote]

in which the foundation has invested in companies that have policies that actively undermine the social welfare goals of the foundation

And that is not coincidental. The publically stated goals of the foundation serve to hide its actual agenda. To learn more about the actual agenda of the Gates Foundatation, watch this shocking presentation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646

Random ass-headed cruelty.

[TapeCutter]

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

Re: It's affecting AIDS research too

[15Bit]

I work in what is now called the "alternative energy" sector - fuel cells etc, and we have similar problems. The lot of money to a small number of groups is evident here too, though to be fair to the funding bodies these are people who have a track record of providing a "return" on the investment. There is a sort of critical size effect though, and once a research group gets beyond a certain size it seems to lose focus and the output per person drops.

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.

Re:Coming soon...

[ozmanjusri]

BillG isn't actually part of Big Pharm yet.

He is, and has been for years.

In 2005, the foundation held nearly $1.5 billion worth of stock in drug companies whose practices have been widely criticized as restricting the flow of key medicines to poor people in developing nations. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines