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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

#271

Post by crimsonalucard »

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…

Stay optimistic? How about stay realistic? Lets not dream of fantasies but rather attempt to make accurate predictions unfettered by the biases of optimism or pessimism.

There is a line that can be crossed if I make a prediction and say that by 2100 humanity will become as powerful as Gods. That statement is ludicrous when judged by common sense. It is not unrealistic to the say the same of having ALL diseases cured by 2100.

I'm basically "rolling my eyes" at your comment.

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

#272

Post by zamalek »

jaggederest wrote: post #108
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.

Baldness receives a disproportionate amount of funding when compared to serious diseases. Why? If it's cured someone is going to make a whole ton of money. A quick Google to back up my claim yielded this article[1]. $2bn/y on hair loss, $1bn on HIV, $547m/y on malaria. Contrary to my point I do find the HIV funding interesting: further funding for HIV and an HIV vaccine (as mentioned in the article) is a dreadful route for making money. Just think of all the money that could have been made from a life-long smallpox treatment had we not eradicated it.

I'm not saying that I support that line of thinking, there's just a fair amount of evidence suggesting that this is how funding is allocated in practice.

Throwing down $3bn to "cure disease" is very different from throwing down $3bn to "cure things that are easily taken to market." I'm not sure if Zuckerberg and Chan are taking the former more philanthropic route, but all diseases do not currently receive the same amount of monetary attention.

[1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bill-gates-...

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

#273

Post by afarrell »

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 whole world was connectable in 1950. The problem was just the cost of manufacturing all of the telephone/telegraph equipment and laying all the cable.

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

#274

Post by lunula »

mattwg wrote: post #243
stevefeinstein wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. Unless everyone has some skin in the game, the research will be biased towards curing those with money, perhaps using the rest as guinea pigs.

How is this true of the Gates Foundation? Or Good Ventures? Chan Zuckerberg is specifically aimed at improving equality. Do you have any actual examples of wealthy philanthropists using "the rest of us" as guinea pigs to cure themselves of disease? ryandrake's point is an important one, but I don't think this level of cynicism is justified.

> Chan Zuckerberg is specifically aimed at improving equality.

Do you really believe this? They are doing so using a private company. The Gates foundation, for all their hubris, are at least a foundation and a nonprofit.

I hope the pitchforks come out against Chan Zuckerberg.

They are doing everything possible to build exactly the opposite kind of world that they claim to promote.

I always hope the smart people of HN can see through this. But I guess the folks here are too smitten by wealth to care.

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

#275

Post by lunula »

thaw13579 wrote: post #117
Brakenshire wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Funding open source scientific software is a huge part of what the NIH does!

Unfortunately there isn't a requirement that the code developed under grants is released as open source, but there is a lot of movement to make it so. Furthermore, researchers have strong incentives to provide reusable software implementations of their research. (I know many people say the incentives run against this, but it is now clear that useful software gets more citations and scientists forget so at their own risk!)

I don't have a recent budget handy, but at least 10% of research funding is going to various forms of software development. I am happy to be shown wrong but 10% seems like a low estimate as literally all analysis is mediated by software. It's not like people crack out slide rules when they get a data set from a sequencer or mass spec. They go to GitHub and download some obscure domain-specific open source analysis package. Point being: a tiny administrative change could ensure that we direct $3B a year to open source scientific software in biomedicine! And further, it nearly looks this way already.

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

#276

Post by smsm42 »

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…

> Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%.

85% looks wildly optimistic too. And "giving it a shot" is not exactly new idea somebody needs to be convinced in - people are giving it a shot since the idea of medicine was born, which was probably before recorded history started. If the money they use for research bring fruit - excellent, but I'm not sure money is what limits us (and that 3bn is going to fix that if it were the problem), and certainly arbitrary date and bombastic goals is not what was missing from medical research field before.

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

#277

Post by smsm42 »

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…

I think the problems are known to many in the field. Getting to the solution for it may be trickier.

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

#278

Post by vibrio »

BurningFrog wrote: post #116
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…

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.

I agree that medical research is broken in many ways. A steady stream of 'outsiders' set out to shake it up, from hedge fund billionaires that discover their kid has an incurable disease to google's calico grabbing some of the most renown industry leadership. I continue to pray for rain, but the advances from such initiatives have been incremental if any, rather than revolutionary. I would say the most impactful model to date has been the Howard Hughes Medical Institure, is focused on fundamental science discovery---where the bulk of the uncertainty lies in drug development. I am glad to hear of MZ/PC generosity and focus on helping others. Some might take the same money and build the worlds ugliest sailboat, or endow a business school and it would be their right. All that said, from a biotech start up biotech perspective, $3B a ton of cash. From a Pharma R&D budget, it's significant but it just ain't that much. How they will use it will matter if we are to remember this in 15 years (which is only 1-2 product life cycles for biopharma currently.)

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

#279

Post by smsm42 »

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.

Blowing stuff up is usually easier than fixing stuff. Do we have cold fusion yet (not Macromedia :)? Do we have fusion reactors yet? In fact, we seem to be slowly losing ability to have any use of nuclear energy except blowing stuff up - it's next to impossible to get a new nuclear plant built, and old ones are being closed down. By the same 2100 we may have the atomic bomb as the only way to use nuclear energy we have. And still no fusion.

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

#280

Post by MasterScrat »

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…

> when X is something incredibly broad like "cancer"

Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer":

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...

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