Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 344 posts

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

#281

Post by isolli »

segmondy wrote: post #226
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…

People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that s…

The human body is orders of magnitude more complex than the (admittedly uplifting) achievements you mention.

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

#282

Post by NicoJuicy »

I don't think it's a good thing to make us disease-free in terms of evolution.

I think it's better to just cure the diseases that kill us ( long/short-term) eg. cancer, aids, ... or make us immoble for longer term ( parkinson, ..)

Why? Because i think the best defense is a good immune system. You don't get a good immune system by staying inside and infection free and using medication all the time. Let people become sick ( not lethal ones) and let nature fight it off.

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

#283

Post by supercoder »

projektir wrote: post #245
joe_the_user wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can fix all the bugs in the fifty-year old software project... by writing a new version of it. Sometimes the right solution doesn't deal with existing problems but tries to go somewhere else entirely.

So you're suggesting they're going to just give birth to a super race of people ?

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

#284

Post by bonoboTP »

calsy wrote: post #131

I know it's more of a western problem, but it would be good if someone could find some real solutions to the obesity crisis. If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century. Im not s…

People often think it's just because the food is there in abundance. But it was there even before! But obesity is still rising. And poor people are fatter than the rich.

I'd say it's a mix of specifically engineered flavor additives, advertisement, marketing and product placement and similar things.

But the usual approach is that people are simply stupid and it's their own fault so there's no problem. Anything the food industry does is simply the beautiful free market at work, and it's every citizen's duty to see through it all and choose a healthy lifestyle despite all the crap thrown in their face every waking hour.

Fat people are great business. They eat a lot (so they can be sold food), they stay at home a lot (so they can be sold entertainment and shown TV ads), they become sick (so they can be sold medicine) etc.

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

#285

Post by vegabook »

jonknee wrote: post #27
vegabook wrote: post #17

Very nice. Some context: Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth. Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment. The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative wo…

> Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment. That's not how it works. Whatsapp was an investment, Chan Zuckerberg Science is not an investment. If he had announced a new for-profit drug company with $20bn of Facebook's money you would have a point. It still doesn't work out as a personal commitment though, Mark's shares of FB weren't suddenly wo…

100% agreed. Investment vs consumption. Though maybe, just maybe, this thing has an "investment in reputation" angle to it too? More generally I wanted to contextualize the amounts.

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

#287

Post by jamesrcole »

vectorpush wrote: post #266
segmondy wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would have rolled their eyes, if someone said. I wanted to connect the world. I want to connect virutally everyone, where you can just reach anyone at anyplace at any time for cheap. 30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that s…

Hindsight is 20/20. You can look back on many innovations and say that they'd be impossible to imagine in the past, but that doesn't have any bearing on the inherent viability of a given idea. I'm not saying that the Zuck/Chan moonshot isn't a worthwhile endeavor, only that examples of past skepticism prove nothing about what is actually possible.

> You can look back on many innovations and say that they'd be impossible to imagine in the past

I'd suspect that most innovations would have had plenty of experts and other people saying why they weren't possible.

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

#288

Post by pokemongoaway »

Such a joke. If they were anyone else we would be calling them out. Is there any evidence that this wealth won't be concentrated in the same industry, whose stock prices would decrease if their drugs worked to treat any disease causes. A claim like this can be dismissed without evidence.

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

#289

Post by Thimothy »

nicklaf wrote: post #179
euyyn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What approaches do you mean? In which ways do you think it's broken?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou... He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky: Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and…

That Slate Star Codex article is one of the most depressing things I've read for a while, thank you.

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

#290

Post by kbart »

calsy wrote: post #131

I know it's more of a western problem, but it would be good if someone could find some real solutions to the obesity crisis. If you ask many GPs in the west they will tell you that a majority of illnesses they address are related to weight and diet. With an aging, increasingly overweight adult population alongside a sharp rise in child obesity come big consequences for health care over the next half century. Im not s…

It's a political problem. Tax sugar and junk food heavily and the problem will solve itself over time.
Post reply on HN