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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Announce $3 Billion Initiative To 'Cure All Diseases' (venturebeat.com)
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.
...Zuck means "patent all the medications, so I can get fat off the overinflated profits".
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".
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.