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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.
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."
"I see how it is. Fine. I, Jeff Bezos, pledge an end to all human suffering by sometime in the next six months."
Wow, spend 3 billion dollars? If only someone had thought of that solution sooner!
He's like a part-time stock trader who just realized how much money you can make with options.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...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".
Dear Mister Zuckerberg,
We think that you're grossly underestimating the size of the effort.
But thank you for diverting a bit of your fortune to our cause.
It's a refreshing change from counting on big pharma corporations to divert a bit from their marketing budget....
- The scientists in the life-science field
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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."
"I see how it is. Fine. I, Jeff Bezos, pledge an end to all human suffering by sometime in the next six months."
I, Larry Ellison, will eliminate all humans in a week!
Shouldn't Microsoft actually cure computer viruses before they go on to use the same method for cancer? Just sayin..
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, it's one of the classic great ideas like world peace. To give credit for originality though, I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion. Doesn't it typically cost a couple of billion just to develop one new drug? ( http://www.scientificamerican.... ) Oh I know... develop just one drug but have it be a drug that cures everything! That's some kind of genius.
I'm not gay, but I did see the first few minutes of the Scream Queens season 2 premier yesterday.
The rich dean bitch character had a thing going about how she wants to CURE diseases instead of profiting off of endlessly (and unsuccessfully) treating patients and their symptoms. She was starting a new institute with her own money to find cures for everything. Obviously, it was some sort of evil plot.
That said, this leads me to conclude:
- Zuckerberg watches Scream Queens (and you know what that means)
- This new plot Zuckerberg is evil, like all his other plots
- This new plot will fail spectacularly
Last time I was in the hospital, they charged me $3 billion for four Tylenol and a disposable bed pan.
It's like they are trying to one-up each other:
Microsoft: "We'll cure cancer."
Zuck&Chan: "Oh yah? We'll cure everything!"
Trump: "I'll cure everything twice as fast and make the germs pay for it!"
Hillary: "I already did all those, but unfortunately misplaced the emails with the formulas."
Table-ized A.I.
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.
I suspect Zuckerberg is the first person to seriously think he could cure, prevent or manage all diseases for just $3 billion.
He doesn't think that, and he didn't say that. The quote about "curing all diseases" is taken out of context. If you look at what he actually said, it is clear that he meant that as an aspiration for all of humanity over the next century, not just for his project. So the headline, summary, and TFA are yet more examples of garbage journalism. They are are more than just distorted and misleading, they are outright lies.
Totally tone deaf given that many treatable and manageable diseases today go untreated thanks to strong profit motives and broken healthcare systems. It is more profitable to squeeze every penny out of the richest half of the desperate and sick people than to set a price that provides modest profit and widespread availability for virtually everyone with the need.
Today there would be a lot more bang for your buck spending the $3B to fight shady patents in medicine, and to bribe politicians into doing the right by the population than finding more treatments that will get sucked into the Wall Street and DC maelstroms of greed and corruption. Until medicine is working primarily for the patient's good with profit secondary (not zero) I don't see our current frigged up mess getting better no matter how many cures we have.
I know that's an odd subject for this thread, but Texas beat them to this by almost 10 years.
CPRIT (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas) was founded in 2007 and chartered with spending $3B over 10 years to develop new approaches to cancer prevention and treatment. If you're in the cancer research space, you know about CPRIT. It's the single largest research fund for cancer outside the NIH.
To get an idea of what $3B can do, check out the CPRIT site http://www.cprit.state.tx.us/a....
If you don't want to do that, basically you can fund a few companies and a number of research projects, but it's nowhere near enough to make a dent in the problem.
There's also the problem of fairly allocating the funds. CPRIT ran into this problem early on when it was found that many of the early, large grants were awarded without proper review to friends of the board. This prompted the entire scientific board to resign and CPRIT to essentially reset. It's moving along OK now, but it's still an open question as to how many of the investments will yield actionable results.
Given Facebook's proclivity to reward friends with purchases at outrageous valuations, I won't be surprised if this fund runs into the same nepotism issues CPRIT did.
There are many other lessons that they can learn from CPRIT, but the most important probably is that $3T is probably a more realistic number.( See also all the comments about the tech industry's hubris when it comes to these types problems - curing cancer/disease is not the same as slapping together some APIs to create a "world changing" app. )
-Chris