Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100 • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#101

Post by Brakenshire » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

thaw13579 wrote: post #58

a13n wrote: post #2

"Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announce $3 billion initiative to ‘cure all diseases’" http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/mark-zuckerberg-and-prisci...

For a point of reference, NIH's annual budge is about $31 billion.

On the other hand, UK funded medical research is only about £500m a year. $3bn is a significant amount of money, and there's also potential that it could be spent in very targeted ways, or to pursue goals which might not get funded elsewhere. Seems like a very interesting project.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#102

Post by aestetix » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

Step 1: shut down Facebook.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#103

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #75

I'm glad they're putting money into medical research, but I kinda roll my eyes when people make big claims about curing X, especially when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer" or in this case, "all diseases." AI/ML has barely scratched the surface of its potential in medicine, however, I find it naive to think that you can throw AI/ML at any random disease and always get a cure. Even after a century. Will we…

One would roll one's eyes if someone promised to fix every single bug in a vast, buggy, fifty-year old software project.

But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#104

Post by danielmorozoff » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

In this vein, Some very interesting work is being done by the church group at Harvard to encode cells to withstand all viral infections at the genetic level.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101657-synthetic-super...

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#105

Post by jonknee » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

M_Grey wrote: post #93

jonknee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's all that ridiculous, it's over 80 years in the future. 80 years ago we were dying of all sorts of [now] easily preventable and curable diseases. Penicillin was not used until 1942!

And now it's practically useless. It's not a one-sided battle we're in, and we're heavily outnumbered.

The point was that so much has changed in the previous ~80 years that I don't think it's ridiculous to think things will be radically different ~80 years into the future.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#106

Post by jonknee » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #95

All disease with $3bn? https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

Why would an 80+ year project receive all of its funding on the first day?

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#107

Post by arxpoetica » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

hmate9 wrote: post #74

Not sure why there is a lot of negativity here. It doesn't seem that ridiculous of a goal. I think by 2100 we will have extremely powerful AI that will make fighting diseases extremely easy compared to methods available today. To be honest, it seems like an achievable goal. I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.

"Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future." – Yoda

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#108

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

mmaunder wrote: post #95

All disease with $3bn? https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/budget

3bn is, one assumed, being used as leverage rather than a primary mover.

If you have matching donations or can kickstart an otherwise self-sustaining process, the end-to-end cost doesn't have to add up to 3bn to be feasible with a 3bn pool of initial capital.

Think of it as venture research.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#109

Post by jonknee » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #96

idlewords wrote: post #65

Pharmacology is an interesting example where better technology and scientific understanding have made things worse than earlier, low-tech methods ("inject plant extracts into animals and see what happens"). The number of new drugs discovered per dollar of research has been dropping since 1960, and obvious explanations (like "the easy ones have already been found") turn out not to explain the phenomenon. [ http://www.…

I can't speak for the past, but I think the big deal for the testing of the future will be shifting from "forty percent of the test subjects responded positively to the drug; none of the side effects were that bad" to "80% of test subjects carrying thought-to-be-marginally-relevant gene Y showed positive responses to the drug but none carrying gene Yvariant; those also carrying not-suspected-of-be-relevant gene X exh…

And even farther in the long run make it possible to virtually test therapies against arbitrary genetic information.

Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

#110

Post by supergirl » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

any money spent on research is good but,

1. governments around the world probably spend hundreds of billions yearly on research in medicine alone. and zuckerberg wants to solve everything with his 3bn?

2. our current technology is not even close to good enough to make the kind of major breakthroughs needed to say we 'cured cancer'. for example, the biggest neural networks we trained have the order of 10bn parameters while the human brain has 100bn neurons, each, I'm guessing, having at least 10 parameters. similarly for very small scale technology. I think we need to tone down a bit the hype in AI and computing.