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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.
Once you're brain is full of holes, that's more or less it. There can however be preventative treatments.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Linus doesn't have the profits of decades of back-stabbing, under-handed shady deals with multinational corporations that Bill Gates has.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
It's also a universal problem, so regardless of what medical system you're born under, it still will be a social drain.
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
Now we know he has Alzheimer's. That explains a lot.
-- even for the people who stay alive -- S/B --ESPECIALLY for
This online community relies on its brain over our hands or bodies to an unusual degree. Losing mental capacity sucks, even the natural aging stuff. [five of you know what I mean.] Alzheimer's is living death.
But starting a VC fund to fund research rather than funding NFP research organizations is a model for guiding the invisible hand in the era of small government. It's not new, but its worth mentioning. This is not a part of the charitable foundation. This is funding formerly charitable work outside the charity. Kinda sounds "for profit" to me.
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
A lot of Bill's philanthropy is actually for-profit investments. A treatment for preventing Alzheimer's could be very profitable, so this may turn out to be a lucrative investment if it pays off.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with Bill's approach. Giving people money with no strings attached generally results in that money being wasted (see: the government). I think Bill's more commercial approach to philanthropy has a far better chance of delivering results.
...he forgot where he put the check.
Table-ized A.I.
Giving people money with no strings attached generally results in that money being wasted (see: the government). I think Bill's more commercial approach to philanthropy has a far better chance of delivering results.
That's a very libertarian sentiment, but it's sometimes true and sometimes not.
I am happy to live in the twenty-first century, and one of the things about our time that I am most proud of is that I live in a world in which smallpox does not exist as a disease. It was wiped out. It was wiped out by a deliberate, concerted campaign by the World Health Organization, by doctors who really had nothing personal to gain by eliminating smallpox from villages in the third world that they would never visit.
(On television, the planet has been saved by the actions of Doctor Who. For much of the planet, however, the real work in saving the planet was actions of the WHO doctors.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
One hundred million dollars is more money than I could ever comprehend. Actually one million is more than will pass through my hands through my entire existence. To Bill Gates it's a one week dividend (at 5%/yr) on his ninety billion dollars. Thanks Bill.
Yes, but that solution doesn't really scale well, we only need one president.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Bill Gates Pledges $100 Million To Find an Alzheimer's Cure, His First Commitment To a Non-communicable Disease "
The jury is still out, it still might be an infectious disease. There will have to be more studies.
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
Ann Landers wrote a column lobbying for increased funding for cancer research. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-katrandjian/retro-report-nixon-cancer_b_4182302.html) Richard Nixon signed the bill and we poured a huge amount of money into cancer research. Yet most of the progress we have made has been the result of prevention and early detection. What did we really get from that money? Some of the treatments that were developed were actually harmful. We know a lot more about genetics, the immune system etc. than we did then, but cancer is still with us. Are we ready to throw that kind of money at Alzheimer's Disease, or do we need to do some more basic research? I don't think the exact mechanism of this disease is very well understood. It sounds great to wipe out a disease, but let's make sure we don't squander this money.
The "experts" and governments who told us to eat high carb/low fat diets, were completely wrong. We'll be paying for that lie for a long long time.
Foolishness of the first order. You, may need to go, but there are many people who contribute in all sorts of ways - if nothing else helping their children and grandchildren.
There are many people who contribute greatly in their seventies and eighties.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
While I don't disagree with the sentiment, Gates' wealth is wealth that was created as Microsoft grew and gained value; only a small part of that is attributable to actual profits.
Do you have ESP?
The argument is NOT that companies aren't wasteful.
The argument is that as companies waste more and more money; as they become more and more inefficient they become less profitable and less competitive. Over time, companies that become wasteful go out of business.
Now, as governments and government agencies get more bureaucratic, more wasteful is there anything that stops this process?
Do bureaucracies magically reorganize themselves and become more efficient (ie removing, reducing positions)?
It's not that corporations are "magically" more efficient - it's that the more inefficient a company becomes the more likely it will succumb to a more nimble adversary. Governments (and their supporters) resist all efforts at efficiency.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Unrelated: Billionaire Bill Gates diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer's...
On the legal side, powers of attorney made while a person is competent help a little. (Otherwise you wind up having to go to court to have the person declared incompetent, which is possible but can be a lot of unnecessary drama when you're already dealing with a terrible situation. There is also the risk that the judge appoints the wrong relative or that you waste a lot of money fighting about it if you have to go to court.)
Advance health directives can also be helpful. They can speak only to end-of-life care or can be drafted with information about your specific wishes in case of Alzheimer's.
Real lawyers write in C++
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.quackwatch.org/11I...
Right?
There is a place for the "for profit philanthropy", esp. in medicine. Imagine a company that charged just over the bare minimum for their pills to cover the cost of production.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Billionaire Bill Gates is personally investing $50 million to help fund research to find a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia Gates says has struck members of his own family.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
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Ann Landers wrote a column lobbying for increased funding for cancer research. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-katrandjian/retro-report-nixon-cancer_b_4182302.html) Richard Nixon signed the bill and we poured a huge amount of money into cancer research. Yet most of the progress we have made has been the result of prevention and early detection. What did we really get from that money
At the time, not much. One of the few novel scientific discoveries coming from Nixon's War on Cancer, was the existence of previously unknown class of viruses associated with some uncommon forms of human leukemia. This novel class of virus was the called the "Retroviruses" for their unusual RNA-to-DNA reverse transcription mechanism used as part of their life cycle.
At the time not considered to be of any major clinical significance in human disease, although this opinion would later be revised.
Susceptibility to Alzheimers is only partly genetic, so it can affect anybody. Alzheimers is estimated to cost the American economy over $100B per year, so this $100M is only 0.1% of a single year. It helps, but overall we invest way way too little in finding a solution to dementia, even if you only look at the economics. As our society ages, the problem is going to get even worse.
The scalable cluster supercomputer software that will certainly need to be used in the pursuit of possible treatments will not have been possible without open source Linux.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Some people here on Slashdot don't understand how big of a wildfire Alzheimer's is going to be for an upcoming generation that is going to have to give up their lives to be full time caregivers for the boomer generation.
Mr. Gate's contribution is a much needed boost for something that has no other approach other than dread. Thank you, Mr. Gates, really.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
If old people don't need help why do hospitals have more old people in them?
...
Or do you mean "need" like in the USSR constitution which is sort of a disguise for having significance to the Party?
It's one thing to practice age discrimination, it's another to think it's the answer to all the world's problems.
You seem to have taken a blatantly false premise to ridiculous ends
The argument is that as companies waste more and more money; as they become more and more inefficient they become less profitable and less competitive. Over time, companies that become wasteful go out of business.
I generally see services/products without much innovation, huge barriers to entry and/or little change as candidates for being public services. Any kind of insurance is a good example. Government bureaucracies can be very efficient: consider private health care insurances vs. medicare.
In these scenarios private organizations often drive up cost/inefficiency, because they only way to introduce more profit is to drive up inefficiency.
Now, as governments and government agencies get more bureaucratic, more wasteful is there anything that stops this process?
Politicians... And yes, in other countries we do from time to time see massive reorganizations of public institutions. I guess a crazy person could even argue that Trump is reorganizing or disorganizing a lot of US government agencies, hehe :)
As with software: it's all about picking the right tool for the problem at hand. I for one wouldn't want to see a government run clothing line attempting to deliver the latest fashion -- just to give a extreme counter example.
On topic: a for-profit investment might be what it takes to attract even more private capital. Especially, with the amounts of capital currently in play on the markets today. Granted I don't have the qualifications to know if there is enough basic research to foster hope of finding a cure.
I think the philosophy behind the Gates Foundation (Seattleite here, not affiliated with the foundation or Gates himself) was to build a self sustaining foundation that would not drain the endowment. Bigger, longer projects with a very broad scope. It is a noble idea, I don't think there is anything wrong with capitalism particularly if the driver is the betterment of mankind but these things have a way of changing over time. Remember when Google's motto was do no evil? Just saying it isn't as nefarious as "he's trying to make money with his gifts," the message is a bit more nuanced than that. Whether they achieve that dream is another matter.
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).
Meh, I'd be happy with people who want to pay no taxes if we could also exclude them from any and all benefits from public services, public education, public roads, emergency services, military and so on. It's a software pirate's mentality taken back into the real world, I didn't really want to pay for it anyway. But you're reaping the benefits every day, it's basically a smug way to freeload. It's more selfishness than ideology, if you're below average let's all pull together. If you're above average, every man for himself. Who needs universal healthcare, I can pay for mine. That's easy when you got a winning ticket in life's lottery...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The insurance industry is sclerotic for what reason? Could it be the layers and layers of regulations? How many hours per week do doctors need to spend to fill out bureaucratic information as requested (no demanded) by the government.
Government is horrible at deciding insurance - look at the idiots that want everything, including the kitchen sink, to be mandatory in insurance policies.
If the market was more involved there would be simple - high deductible catastrophic insurance available. I want to be covered for cancer, car crashes and the like. But no, government requires that so many other things from birth control to mental health to sex-change operations be included. (Kidding - I hope re the sex change).
But of course governments are wonderful in creating long lines. The wait times in Europe for health care compared to the US is horrendous.
You think I'm wrong? Prove me wrong. Create a wonderful health care system in your state. Show me how wonderful it is. Make me a believer. The US allows for states to act in such manners. Do not make it a federal solution. Western Europe couldn't make Greece and Germany and Portugal work. What makes you think we can have a one size fits all solution here?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So what you should we do with you when you are demented? Let young people look after you? Turn you off?
Most Slashdotters are demented, and turn me off. Now get those young people off my lawn.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am an old person
I doubt it. More likely, you're a really crappy troll, but still apparently good enough to fool lots of people here. So well done I suppose.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That's easy when you got a winning ticket in life's lottery...
Nah, people like that give luck zero credit. Everything was down to their 'hard work'.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Wait times and all, I would never swap for your barbaric system. Yours would work if the healthcare was priced reasonably. It isn't. Not even close.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
That's a big pile of shit you just wrote. I should browse at +1 so I don't need to read further stupidity.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Don't. Give. A. Fuck.
Sorry.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Lead by example then mate.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
A lot of people (Gates included, usually matching Rotary International's efforts) have been working long and hard to make the same thing happen with polio. We may see the end of THAT crippling disease Real Soon now.
More on topic, the CART effort has been trying to push and fund research into Alzheimer's and dementia research for years now:
http://www.cartfund.org/
Again a Rotary-based initiative.
Yeah, throwing money at stuff doesn't always work, there's gonna be waste, there's gonna be fraud ... but guaranteed, NOT throwing money at it won't get anything done either.
Yeah, but the governments of the world, working together, ELIMINATED THE MOST DEADLY DISEASE IN HISTORY. No disease killed as many people as smallpox, and it's gone. They're working on polio, which was widely feared when I was young. I don't care about someone saying "that was easy", because it wasn't. It took massive coordinated government effort. Smallpox was what started inoculation, and if the free market was going to eliminate it it would have been done long ago.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes