I just feel this is too broad and unbounded. They should have focused on a specific diseases and a shorter timeframe. By 2100 most of us will be long dead by current standards.
Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
111–120 of 344 posts
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#112Including aging as a disease?
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think your opinion is probably interesting and potentially valid, but your tone in the original comment is limiting your ability to communicate effectively. Less sarcasm would serve you well.
sarcasm is better part of life, it's not limiting it's enriching :) I fail to understand why people hate it?
Because it's juvenile and lazy.
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#114I'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.
That's doesn't even account for the probably larger number of bugs that develop over the lifetime of the system. Then, once a cancer develops it evolves further mutations over time.
You probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#115All 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.
> If you have matching donations or can kickstart an otherwise self-sustaining process
They won't have been the first people funding research to have thought of this... it's a criteria sometimes used in evaluating in NIH grants, for instance.
> Think of it as venture research
As opposed to?
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#116I'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…
I think the current medical research system is badly broken in several ways, and it's possible that a few billions spent on alternative approaches would bear a lot of fruit.
It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
True, in particular, it would be great to see an organization like this help scientific software development and distribution, which something incredibly useful that is hard to fund through NIH (not sure about elsewhere).
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#118"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.
yes but those people aren't silicon valley smart. Now that the tech billionaires are working on it we should have human health solved in a jiffy. It's like how medical informatics was in a pathetic state for decades until James Clark decided to take it on. After Netscape it was a simple matter and thanks to Healtheon all our healthcare software is good enough!
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#119I'm sick of this contrarian disruptive nonsense.
Redd Foxx got to choose his fate, but what am I going to do while forced to sit around the hospital dying of nothing?
Find a socially acceptable alternative to disease before you eliminate it.
(Ok, to put it more clearly: get off my damn lawn and my damn planet you stupid non-exponential function understanding kids.. Please!)
Re: Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
#120Not to take the wind out of anyone's sails, but there is a concern to be raised about relying more and more on charities to fund the public good. When a democratically elected government funds the public good, at least in theory, the public at large has a small say in choosing what counts as "public good". When you leave it to charity, you're relying on the morals of individual wealthy donors to decide what counts as…
The super rich have been doing this sort of thing at least since the robber baron era. Government funding of research went up dramatically anyway