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Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100

bbc.com

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

#131

Post by calsy »

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 saying its an easy task you can just throw money at, but if trends continue as they are now the health and economic impact on society will be huge.

Bar some sort of national catastrophe (for e.g. war, famine, disease) is it a crazy idea to think we could see a reduction in obesity levels? Are we simply resigned to the fact that we will just get bigger and bigger in the future?

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

#132

Post by roadnottaken »

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…

Um, I know a solution to the obesity crisis....

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

#133

Post by maus42 »

nenadg wrote: post #26
stanleydrew wrote: post #23

Earlier 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?

After a while, overtly sarcastic tone gets a bit boring when you get to read it every day in the every corner of internet over any possible issue.

And in my experience, it's rarely very effective in changing people's opinions, if they are not tending to agree with you already in the first place.

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

#134

Post by fredgrott »

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…

cancers are not broad, yes the areas of the human body they affect..yes that is broad..

Mark was reacting to this:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/

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

#136

Post by prewett »

user731955373 wrote: post #90
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…

"yes we can!" built the atomic bomb.

"Build an atomic bomb" is a lot more specific than "cure all diseases." In fact, "cure all diseases" is kind of the opposite of a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based). Whereas, to goal to build a device capable of detonating via nuclear fission is pretty specific, particularly to a physicist. Also very measurable and highly time-based.

Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.

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

#137

Post by qsymmachus »

Animats wrote: post #73

Probably not feasible without some genetic re-engineering to design out vulnerabilities to common diseases. That's how aging will probably be solved. There's a big debug time problem, though. It takes about two generations to be sure you got it right. We'll probably have very long lived mice decades before it works for humans. (Many cancers in mice can be cured now. This doesn't translate to humans.) Then there will…

> Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people

I think I'll stick with cancer for now

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

#138

Post by Hondor »

unknown_apostle wrote: post #80
hmate9 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so you would rather Zuck not spend his money trying to cure diseases?

No, but the sanguinary headline made me imagine a future where all biological stressors have actually been eradicated. Our species would be at its weakest. I guess I was briefly taking the donator's unicorn propaganda literally. Sorry.

We're already partly there. Infant mortality is way down, allowing weak babies to live on to reproduce. Antibiotics and immunization of course. A lot of the good things we do for individuals are probably bad for our species because they remove stressors.

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

#139

Post by calsy »

roadnottaken wrote: post #132
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…

Um, I know a solution to the obesity crisis....

Eat less, exercise more? Easy to say right, but the simple message isn't working obviously. Obesity levels have doubled over the last 40 years. Its not sporadic either, it's affecting the entire population now. Why is this happening?

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

#140

Post by theptip »

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…

I've been thinking along these lines recently; we currently design treatment plans using statistical methods, i.e. averaging effects across 'representative populations'. But imagine if you took your car to the garage and they said "90% of cars showing this symptom respond well to this treatment".

When we truly understand how these biological systems work (which could be more than 100 years from now) we'll be able to measure what is different from the individual's baseline, rather than extrapolating based population averages.

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