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Bill Gates Pledges $100 Million To Find an Alzheimer's Cure, His First Commitment To a Non-communicable Disease (reuters.com)
At present, there is no treatment to stop the Alzheimer's. Bill Gates wants to make a sizeable attempt to change that. From a report:He is to invest $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund that brings together industry and government to seek treatments for the brain-wasting disease. The investment -- a personal one and not part of Gates' philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- will be followed by another $50 million in start-up ventures working in Alzheimer's research, Gates said. "It's a huge problem, a growing problem, and the scale of the tragedy -- even for the people who stay alive -- is very high," he said. Despite decades of scientific research, there is no treatment that can slow the progression of Alzheimer's. Current drugs can do no more than ease some of the symptoms.
I'm sure this thread will be filled with pithy comments and shit-talking but at the of the day, I give the guy a lot of credit for dumping money into real-world problems.
Linus doesn't have the profits of decades of back-stabbing, under-handed shady deals with multinational corporations that Bill Gates has.
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Do you know how much stress is involved in a young person seeing their parents go through Alzheimer's? If so then this would directly affect the well-being of the young.
So what you should we do with you when you are demented? Let young people look after you? Turn you off? Itâ(TM)s not an old person issue - it affects everyone.
It's astounding how many tech billionaires see their calling in prolonging life.
As someone who has had to watch a close relative become a stranger before my eyes, I think you are talking shit. It's not just about the person, but those around them that suffer too. If Gates' money has produced no results and I'm struck by this horrible disease, I hope someone will put me to sleep.
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I assume you're being deliberately provocative, which is to say, you seem to be trolling for an intemperate response.
OK. You're wrong.
First: "Young people need a better future." Yes, and here's what's in the future of young people: they're going to become old people. Young people damn well do want an end to Alzheimers, because without one, it's in their future.
Second, caring for elder people who have Alzheimers is a huge drain on the younger people who have to do the caring, and it's a drain emotionally, physically, and financially. You really do not want to put your parents into an Alzheimer-care assisted living facility and watch them slowly deteriorate on the long road to dying. Trust me.
And third, it's not a dichotomy. Working on stopping one disease doesn't mean that you can't also work on making the world better in other ways as well; and understanding of biology learned from working on Alzheimers may very well have benefits to other diseases and brain injuries, some of which may very well also strike young people.
So, summary: no. Learning to stop Alzheimers would be a good thing for all of us, including old and young people.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Smallpox was eradicated because (1) it only infects humans, (2) the symptoms are highly visible, and (3) people who've had the disease are immune but no longer carriers. Once enough humans were vaccinated and infected persons were isolated, the disease was unable to find new hosts and was eradicated.
Unfortunately this is not the case for other diseases. We attempted to eradicate Yellow Fever in the early 1900s, but it failed because the disease can infect other species. Polio has been difficult because an infected person is often asymptomatic, and can unwittingly spread the disease. Likewise, measles has a long period between when an infected person can spread the disease, and when the symptoms first appear. Malaria is probably the disease we'd most like to eradicate, but you can get malaria multiple times. So vaccination only confers a low level of immunity.
The only other disease we're getting close to eradicating is Guinea worm. This is a parasitic disease, not a virus, but by educating people about drinking clean water or boiling or filtering before drinking, it was nearly eradicated. Unfortunately it ran into (1) above - it was thought that the worms could only infect people, and thus a global halt to infection for a short period of time would be enough to drive the worm into extinction. Then we discovered that dogs can also carry the form of worm which infects humans.
When faced with a myriad of different problem conditions like this, the best approach is usually a shotgun approach. You throw all sorts of different things against the wall in hopes of randomly finding something that sticks. That is the libertarian philosophy. Your insinuation that libertarians require personal profit as motivation is incorrect. Libertarians are free to donate their money to whatever causes they feel are worthy, and do so all the time. What libertarians are against is being forced to donate their money to causes they personally don't feel are worthy, or being prevented from donating their money to causes they feel are worthy.
What the GP is advocating is a market-based approach to combating diseases. A libertarian, being in favor of the shotgun approach, would approve of both for-profit and charitable means of fighting diseases. The anti-market folks (mostly liberal) would try to prevent for-profit approaches without even seeing if they would work. And likewise the pro-market folks (mostly conservative) would try to phase out charitable approaches in favor of for-profit approaches. To the libertarian, the anti-market folks can donate to the charities fighting diseases, the pro-market folks can donate to for-profit organizations fighting diseases, and everyone is happy (well, everyone except those who think they are "right" and feel they should be able to control how the "wrong" people spend their money).