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)

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."

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: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