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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.
As usual the summary isn't quite accurate. "Curing" the disease, as in reversing it once it has damaged a person's brain, is not the actual goal. From the article (emphasis mine):
Through talking to experts in the field over the past year, Gates said he had identified five areas of need: Understanding better how Alzheimer’s unfolds, detecting and diagnosing it earlier, pursuing multiple approaches to trying to halt the disease , making it easier for people to take part in clinical trials of potential new medicines, and using data better.
Better known as 318230.
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.
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.
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