Zuckerberg and Chan aim to tackle all disease by 2100
bbc.com
bbc.com
But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.
You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
The fundamental discoveries necessary for the nuclear bomb weren't discover until after Leo Szilard [0] proposed the weapon. Given that none of us were alive between 1906 and 1945 it's hard to fully grasp how the scientific understanding evolved over those 39 years.
Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard's vision but that vision was in no way a given. If it weren't for WWII, and Einstein's support, Leo would not have been able to garner the $2 Billion (1940's money) in support that was necessary to build the bomb.
Even then, there was a coin-toss level certainty that it would do anything.
Similar to Einstein's work preceding the discovery of Fission and the Atomic bomb. We have a great deal of work in biology around aging, telomere's, transcription errors, and more that hasn't been leveraged by the medical industry for varying reasons.
I'm not ready to be a naysayer on this topic, historically as a species we've had remarkable success in accomplishing things that were considered impossible before we did them.
That's totally different than the current situation with say cancer. In the world of physics and engineering, a "coin-toss" shot at working is actually a pretty well-developed idea. There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
> By the time someone wrote a check, the basic mechanism of the runaway fission reaction was understood.
I find that to be a gross simplification. I would challenge that the basic mechanisms of the fission reaction were as well understood then as we understand the basic mechanisms behind cancerous mutations now.
> There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
Over what time-horizon? We've achieved a great deal in the last 100 years that would have received less than a coin-toss probability if one were to be having this same argument in the early 1900s. The Haber Process [0] is a great example of something that we had no way of expecting we could accomplish (the energy efficiency aspect) before it happened.
What would you prefer Zuckerberg does with his money? I mean, he could build a massive yacht like Jobs before he died... As a species we have consistently accomplished feats that were as unlikely as the mitochondrial symbiosis that allowed us to exist in the first place, is there a reason to discount our abilities to continue this trend?
The relevant time is right now. If the U.S. government had said "yes, we can do it!" and invested $20 billion in building an atom bomb in 1915, they would've pissed that money away. It would've been mindless optimism. Doing it after fission had been discovered was a calculated investment.
The issue is that we're quite a few "Nobel-worthy" inventions away from curing Cancer.
I mean, biologically we're not in the equivalence of 1950's physics. We're holding in 1300's physics.
I saw that someone once compared curing Cancer to landing on a moon without knowing basic Newtonian physics.
I expect that before we cure cancer, we'd have found ways to cure all "normal" diseases, have "designer babies" without side-effects, have "instant, proof-perfect medicines", etc.
I'd want his to work on those issues.
Right now it'll probably end up like Google X. A great lab, makes great prototypes, but practically get left behind by incremental technology.
The question if Nagasaki would work, which is why they did Trinity.
The theory was there when the Manhattan project started - it was an engineering hurdle, not a scientific one.
Manhattan Project : Curing Cancer :: Apollo : Warp Drives
Nagasaki was the second practical test of the plutonium implosion method.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html
Edit: Reflecting on this, without quantum mechanics (which stemmed from Einstein's relativity work), Oppenheimer would not have had the mathematical tools that were heavily leveraged building the bomb. The bomb is more than throwing together two sub-critical pieces of material, knowledge from quantum mechanics was critical in the prediction of which fissile materials could yield a functional weapon (of which there are very few).
A population of cells is more complex than an atom as it requires more parameters to be fully specified. It is also harder to predict because there are several levels of non-linear feedback interactions within an environment that can never be fully given ahead of time. A population of cancerous cells is more complex than a population of cells because their dynamics are not stationary in time. Unlike a typical population of healthy cells, cancerous ones are able to, in effect learn and more effectively than even the immune system. Extend this to the full class of cancers to see why a simple mathematical theory of the kind we find in atomic physics is highly implausible.
As such, we have an object of higher descriptive and predictive complexity than atomic physics. Searching for this theory will take longer and is much, much more difficult in a formal sense.
Could you elaborate as to why you believe that?
Having worked on both biological and physical simulations the limits from a ground-up perspective are quite similar. While there are no well-understood analytic forms to describe biological systems, unlike in quantum systems, the fundamentals of the problem are the same: we can't predict things because there are too many interactions to easily model.
There is a whole world of non-traditional techniques opening up with increases in computational capacity.
We also don't know to what extent quantum computation would aid predictive modeling of protein interactions. It's possible that there are no leaks at the classical level of abstraction as to hurt predictability. But the problem still remains that experiments to fix parameters are hurt by the fact that the system is changing under you and interacts in a complex way with its environment which can't be known ahead of time. So the computational complexity is not necessarily easier (in a practical sense) even if we assume that there is no utility in modeling quantum effects.
One very theoretical idea of solving cancer (per cancer) would involve searching for a 'problem', an insult, outside of the learnability class of evolution which also does not harm healthy cells. This is computationally likely harder than BQP. Anything less, even if equipped with a quantum computer, would be evolved out of and with any survivors less attackable. Any way you look at it, it is a far harder problem than working out fission.
The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
That's where this part comes in:
"The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"
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.
That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars.
So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
[0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf
[1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj...
The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today.
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 probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth
Sometimes the right solution doesn't deal with existing problems but tries to go somewhere else entirely.
It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
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 flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.
This general topic sometimes comes up on HN (most recently, yesterday†). Here's a good starting point:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2...
Mark was reacting to this:
Zuckerberg should give you all his money.
But first, we need to understand the cell. For this we believe we need not only statistical learning, but also formal methods. See e.g. a slightly dated but brilliant paper from Luca Cardelli:
http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20S...
Constant blood surveillance is already a fact--that is, perhaps we don't need more blood. Instead, we just do the immune sequencing on the stream that's already available. Spread out over the whole population, that's a lot of information. Firmware updates, if necessary, could be handled on an as-needed basis, or more generally like flu vaccines.
I'm not sure how the giant cube-shaped space ships will be handled--that's definitely a hurdle to consider.
Fixing the existing body is nice, but you're forever limited by what nature intended, and what it intended is just not very good.
TLDR:
"Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots" ... "The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."
[1] http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome...
We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.
It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.
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 same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time.
Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.
Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version connecting a handful of places and think, "Wow, this could connect EVERYONE!" They didn't stand there, looking at the terminals of two connected computers, and imagine a connected world like the one we live in today. They didn't talk about ecommerce and social media global events being reported on in near real time. No one had to roll their eyes, because no one was making these grand claims.
I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there.
When you look at all the big tech moments in (recent-ish) history, the car, modern computation, the PC, aviation, you don't see people coming out with these grand declarations before the fact. And it's not for lack of intelligent, visionary people.
So it makes me wonder, whenever a person makes such grandiose plans, and they're not fiction writers, what's so different about them that they'd be able to see so far ahead?
Maybe they're different. How would I know? But history makes me skeptical.
The truth is the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433966
Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent. They were so adamant about the patent that they didn't do any public demonstration of flight for years until they were literally forced by competing claims. In those times people making claims for "heavier than air" flights were numerous and it was hard to take anyone seriously unless they do demonstration. They not only chose not to do so until they got patent but also did almost nothing to enhance their technology meanwhile. Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal and their rest of the lives are dominated by nothing but patent worries, bringing massive lawsuits on others and getting royalties. They also made a very generic patent claim essentially asserting that any system that produces lift is covered by it. This produced a lot of friction in bringing new innovations to market leaving USA significantly behind of Europe.
In addition to this, there were flight enthusiasts all over the world, and particularly in France. They were hang-glider enthusiasts at the time, as that was the cutting-edge flight technology. One of the famous hang-glider pilots died due to his belief that a hang-glider ought to be controlled by shifting one's body weight, which led to a fatal stall. This further convinced the Wright brothers that "the control problem" was the most important problem to focus on.
A lot of people wanted to fly.
This is all tangential to your point, though, and wasn't meant to take anything away from it.
"Some day there will be, say, six great wireless telephone stations in a world system connecting all the inhabitants on this earth to one another, not only by voice, but by sight. It's surely coming."
I'd suspect that most innovations would have had plenty of experts and other people saying why they weren't possible.
But I think it needs stressing that being skeptical is not the same as being dismissive or ridiculing or having a hostile attitude towards things.
I think that the reason people tend to reject new ideas tends to be more on emotional terms rather than for truly skeptical reasons.
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.
Virtual and digital switching, or better, packet-based networks, remove that problem. At the heart of most messaging systems now is the directory -- either of individual addresses, or of systems on which those addresses reside. Hence: DNS, MXs, and the like, for email.
(This makes me realise that one way around the Global Directory of Everyone problem of current messaging systems is to split up the address space again.)
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.
If we're talking about the same time frame, 84 years ago, I don't think most people would doubt that it could happen. This is a period where there was an enormous growth in telecommunications, and I don't think most people thought it was obviously going to suddenly stop and stagnate for 84 years.
My guess is the idea wouldn't have seemed implausible even earlier. Once the telegraph came along, it probably seemed like at least a possibility.
However, if a wealthy individual 84 years ago who hadn't been involved in telecommunications decided to throw some money at it and said they were going to connect everyone 84 years in the future, people would probably be skeptical - and rightly so. Especially if the amount of money was less than many of the smaller players in the industry.
As the article points out (about the Zuckerberg effort), "One British charity - Cancer Research UK - is likely to spend more in that time on just one disease."
And "connect the world" is vague enough that it's easier to claim success with low hanging fruit. This is more like "I want to be able to instantly transfer anything anywhere in 84 years."
Summary
1. Lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness of molecules (Van der Waals force), constant random interactions (Brownian motion) at the microscale of cells means mechanistic intuitions from the macroscale don't apply.
2. High surface area (combined with VdW force) causes problems related to friction and energy dissipation.
What a boring criticism! All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. His conclusion seems to be "mechanical engineering as with gears and pulleys won't work with nanobots". Duh! No one claimed otherwise.
> mechanistic intuitions about the microscale don't apply.
Obviously. Why would you or the author think nanotechnology optimists don't know this? Half the reason we don't have nanobots is because we don't yet have the engineering expertise and practical tools for these scales. The other half is that we're still working out efficient 3D nanofabrication. They are related problems. These are not physically insurmountable issues (as demonstrated thoroughly by organic life). There are a hundred different fields of study that are slowly eating away at the edges of the general purpose nanofabrication problem.
If they are so "easily approachable," feel free to solve them any time. I think you'll find that solving problems in living systems (let alone in the clinic) is much more challenging than it might appear from a CS/physics perspective (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1).
I'm not saying it's not worth trying (it's certainly a more worthwhile endeavor than getting people to click on more ads), but that it's important to be realistic (for example, that all disease is unlikely to be cured by 2100).
In fact, I am currently working in a nanotech lab, so I am hopefully helping a bit ;)
None of the problems you linked to are things that need to take a hundred years to solve. It's probably more accurate to measure development barriers in R&D costs than years. At the very least, we could just reverse engineer biology.
Doing experiments on animals (and especially humans or other vertebrates) is the exact opposite of something you can just go ahead and do. The best way to see that is to give it a go yourself.
> At the very least, we could just reverse engineer biology.
Many people in the past with a CS/physics mindset have made similar claims. If you try to work with living systems, I'm sure you'll see why these problems aren't just a matter of spending R&D dollars.
Perhaps you can explain it to me, so I can skip becoming a bio researcher.
I know optimism in and around computer tech is through the roof, but the levels of delusion on tech disruption topics in our community never ceases to amaze me.
If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).
Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer":
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...
The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.
Further reading from Vinod Khosla: http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-...
Then there will be species conflicts. Merck people won't be able to mate with Novartis people because they'll be too different genetically.
I don't think this will be a problem if you get to the point of genetically engineering people. You just can't mate the old fashioned way, but if anything that's a benefit- free birth control. IVF + genetic modification of the egg cell, assuming your technology is that advanced, should be the easy solution.
I think I'll stick with cancer for now
I read in some article of the Google equivalent version of this, Calico, that even if you cure all of cancer the average life expectancy will probably only increase by ~5 years (off the top of my head, can't find link).
I'm glad he's spending his money this way but how about the way he makes it. Facebook is not a particularly benign product and when you throw in the rising privacy, censorship, and "Free Basics" concerns, I would argue it's creeping towards having a net negative impact on the world.
I would have much more respect for Zuckerberg if he took a profit hit to fix his product and how his company interacts with the world. It's worth noting that Bill stepped away from Microsoft before he got deeply into philanthropy, in part to avoid conflict of interest. He knew he had a checkered past and he made a break with it. Zuck has a checkered present. Curing diseases in the developing world while pushing your product on it at the same time is somewhat morally ambiguous in my view.
(*) Not to be confused with depressive disorder, a clinical condition that Facebook cannot create on its own.
Do you always assume that people who have differing opinions from yours must be heartless monsters and insult them? That must be a serious impediment to constructive discussion.
To put my point succinctly Zuckerberg hasn't demonstrated a great deal of social responsibility in running his business. There are problems much closer to his influence (literally caused by his product) which he doesn't even discuss in public, let alone try to solve. So when he announces he and his wife are going to effectively end the greatest cause of human suffering, some skepticism about his motives is totally legitimate. For instance, what strings will be attached to the receipt of this money?
You may find life more rewarding to assume people are good and try to see the best in people. As Dale Carnegie says in How to Win Friends and Influence People, if you assume the best in people and encourage them, they're more likely to want to live up to that image.
So I'm not sure how you expect Mark Zuckerberg to "fix" a problem with his product that he probably doesn't think exists.
And may I add that, if every time someone decides to donate money to charity, people "beat up" on them, it's a pretty big disincentive to donate to charity.
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.nature.com/nrd/journal/v11/n3/fig_tab/nrd3681_F1....]
This is something we should try to understand better, since it goes against the intuition that technology is an unalloyed good in scientific research.
I applaud the money they're spending, but the level of technophilia in the announcement gives me pause.
That should make initial testing a lot more expensive, but in the long run launches of new drugs less risky.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_Law
the 'better than the Beatles' problem is at least superficially compelling. When Benadryl was discovered, the bar for allergy drugs was pretty low. Today you have to improve on drugs that have several advantages over Benadryl (and cost ~$0.50 a day OTC in the US).
I'm not convinced technology and understanding are the causal factors here.
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.
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?
I assume they're looking for a "billion dollar exit" from their research funding.
Moreover, many discoveries that went on to make a lot of people a lot of money had no obvious commercial application when they were first being researched... Predicting future markets is hard.
I mean "achieves their targets by reducing the total burden of disease on humanity", which is a different radical exit.
Could to elaborate?
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-...
I really don't understand your worry. I'd like to see more public and private money put to work.
ryandrake's point is an important one, but I don't think this level of cynicism is justified.
Peter Thiel wants to make himself ageless and immortal by injecting himself with the blood of the young. How's that?
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.
Do you have to be a non-profit to do good?
> 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 don't know enough specifics about Chan Zuckerberg to respond to this. Sounds like I need to do some more reading, are there any particular resources you've found useful?
---
From Wikipedia:
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not a charitable trust or a private foundation but a limited liability company which can be for-profit, spend money on lobbying, make political donations, will not have to disclose its pay to its top five executives and have fewer other transparency requirements, compared to a charitable trust. Under this legal structure, as Forbes wrote it, "Zuckerberg will still control the Facebook shares owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative".
LLCs exist in the court system - they can be liable for things done under the legal umbrella of the LLC, meaning they be sued, and so on. This is the "Limited Liability" part; the members of an LLC are, for some things, not personally liable for any legal trouble. LLCs do not exist, as far as the IRS is concerned.
Because of this, an organization can be an LLC in it's local state, registered as a corporation of some kind with the federal gov't - and that corporation can be Non-Profit; eg; an LLC can be Non-Profit, and nothing can be "a" Non-Profit, because Non-Profit is not an entity, it's a tax status.
So.
You are Mark Zuckerberg. You hold a lot of Facebook stock, and you want to commit that stock to Philantropy. Cool. You could start a federal corporation (which would be recognized by the IRS) and file for Non Profit status.
But why would you? You're not accepting other peoples donations, so you don't need to help them make tax-deductible donations. Your money, "moved into" the LLC, still goes on your personal taxes (remember, the IRS does not care that your state has invented some court construct called an LLC - unless you're a federal corporation, your money goes on your regular tax return), meaning any donations made to, say, a Non-profit research fund, will be tax deductible just like it would any other day, so you don't loose out on any taxes.
Creating a Non-Profit of some kind would mean a lot of legal work, a lot of complexity in terms of how this new federal entity uses it's $3B Facebook stock to vote, if you set up as a foundation there are rules around holding too much stock in individual companies, et cetera et cetera. TL;DR: There's a lot of downside and the only upside is that some guy on Reddit would whine about how you're a fraud in some other way.
If I wanted to set aside $3B of my personal stock and tell the world "I'm gonna donate this money, over time", I don't see why I wouldn't just pay the $50 filing fee to get some legal distance from lawsuits in the form of an LLC and call it a day.
Edit: I should say that this is a short-term perspective. I would expect, as Mark grows older, he may want to move this money into an actual non-profit entity of some kind, with a board and so on that could oversee the management and dispersement of the money over the long haul, or whatever. But in the short term, it just seems like a lot of legalese for no benefit.
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?
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.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/09/21/mark-zuckerberg-and-prisci...
[1] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/PolioBoth groups are needed, of course. But you giving the example of "curing" polio as an example of what the Chan Zuckerberg foundation is trying to accomplish is inaccurate.
I just think other than the prestige argument (which is likely what this is) they could actually do more work working with someone who literally spends more on this than the entire USG.
http://www.polioeradication.org/Portals/0/Document/Financing...
Which I don't mean as a criticism, it's just that they aren't really driving the effort, they are participating by providing a lot of resources.
I'd consider the entity with the most money in the game as the driver of really anything.
Based on what? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has plenty of money. Better for the Zuckerbergs to focus on other areas.
While we've had Polio vaccines and Malaria pills for years in much of the western world, much of the poorer parts of the world aren't so lucky. So instead of duplicating something that already exists and works well, partner with them and get it done faster together.
References:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Negl...
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development...
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Health/Mala...
What is the point that I'm missing? They don't really want to cure all diseases?
“Thank you mark, it’s an honour to join you all after this incredible milestone. The Chan Zuckerberg initiative is already doing some very promising work in terms of improving education for all students (and so) that is a really thrilling thing.
And it is amazing that today they are taking on another bold challenge, this idea of curing and preventing all diseases by the end of the century. That’s very bold very ambitious, and I can’t think of a better partnership to take it on,” Bill Gates said.
But it's not clear there's any reason or benefit for them to be under the same central organization.
Plus they will be greatly incentived when working under their own label 'Chan Zuckerberg Institute' to make their own lasting impact on the world. Just pumping more cash into Bill Gates existing project isn't a very exciting driver. And motivation/morale is important with any big project.
Curing "all" disease is a bit more ambitious.
Not to say that in the end, Gates isn't helping more people today.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announce $3 billion
initiative to ‘cure all diseases’
s/initiative/investment/
Today’s announcement follows the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s
investment in Andela, a startup that trains and outsources work
to developers in Africa.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.
I hope this money does not go into some sort of "in 100 years from now moonshot" as opposed to, we have huge urgent needs for money right now.
The school of life has a good video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAE5m3ZO2E
http://czbiohub.org/projects/infectious-disease/
Looks like Chan and Zuckerberg's initiative on infectious diseases is focused on a rapid response once a disease establishes itself in humans. There is certainly a lot to win there, but it is still acting after the fact, rather than prevention. Would have liked part of the effort to be focused on monitoring wildlife to understand which diseases are at risk of jumping over.
Greger, M.Crit. Rev. Microbiol. 33, 243–299 (2007). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18033595
Woolhouse, M .E.J. Trends Microbiol. 10, s3–s7 (2002). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12377561
I wish Zuckerberg and Chan the best in this.
Right. Just like the jetpacks and lunar colonies we have easy access to now, as promised in the 1960s.
† And in ML's case, ridiculously successful branding (per the sibling comment of yours).
Because there is a widespread dislike of Zuckerberg on HN and most other similar discussion forums. Happens in every thread about him. He's an uber billionaire that got rich serving ads on a social network that couldn't be any more mainstream at this point. Facebook is viewed mostly as a privacy invading corporate monster now by the crowd that dislikes Zuckerberg. He plans to donate all of his wealth and what you mostly saw on here in discussion was venom and conspiracy theories about how it was nothing but a tax dodge (which only betrayed the vast ignorance on tax laws).
For those comparing this to pharma companies. Pharma companies invest in drugs that they can make money with. It sounds as though this $3 billion is aiming at more general research and making it publicly available.
And they also do a lot of philanthropic work:
http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/16/leadership-philanthropy-cha...
The idea the "Pharma companies" act any one specific way is only something you'd read on HackerNews. This is great of Mr. Zuckerberg, but it doesn't require us to downplay the charitable work of other people, or in this case other industries.
But he is in a much better position to work on the curious problems of ever increasing political polarization in our new Post-Factual world.
If I were to guess, over the next century that problem is going to result is a vastly more misery than a slight speed up to medical technology could compensate for.
Sometimes technological/medical/governmental/etc. changes do move the social forward so there's hope there.
His company is now a key part of the way people form their view of the world. The algorithm/process that selects what ideas they are exposed to chooses only the most outlandish and memorable ideas that also serve to reinforce the viewers already existing preconceptions. This, after all, makes facebook quite attractive: an echo chamber of stimulating impressions that always reconfirm your world view. Obviously accuracy is irrelevant in this model and evidence is unheard of.
This is a specific problem that is contributing to a completely credulous world view, worsening political gaps based on untruths and, worst of all, creating the belief that fact is just another word for opinion. And this problem is exactly in his area of expertise on a platform he has control of.
At any rate, if not worked on pretty quick, a re-established House Un-American Activities Committee will make it awfully hard later.
But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void. And if you wanted to get pedantic, it could be said that Humanity is a disease of the Earth. Eliminating that infestation might qualify under the goal. Perhaps AI is not going to solve the problem by eliminating disease, but eliminating that which can be diseased. Kill the prey, and the predator dies.
Removing humans would do nothing more but restart the misery process again, until another intelligent vehicle appears to try to resist it, assuming that intelligent vehicles are a low energy state that evolution-style processes like to reach. Such a vehicle is our best bet for the disease truly going away. The intelligent vehicle, of course, will be highly influenced by the natural world it came from.
You could go for a Sargeras-style crusade and decide to extinguish all life in the universe and make all planets uninhabitable so that nothing can ever evolve again to cause diseases anywhere, but you would still need such an immensely powerful vehicle to enable that that you could as well stop wasting your time and make utopias instead because if you can handle FTL travel you can handle some microbes.
> But in the history of the world, every time you conquer one disease, a worse and scarier one seems to fill the void.
There are plenty of awful diseases people used to get from unsanitary conditions, malnourishment, and direct contact with nature that we don't talk about anymore because nobody gets them in first world countries or because they have been eliminated.
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 would fund them for 5 days.
Very generous, but let's keep some perspective.
That wouldn't be an issue with this initiative, and I think it's very significant that they're partnering with academia on this.
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 worth $5.6b less (in fact shares have surged since!).
But how much of that spend was actually targeted at curing diseases, versus things like hair loss treatments, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, or other first world problems? It's well known that big pharma corps generally ignore the low hanging fruit of curable third world diseases because there is no monetary incentive for it. See why there was no viable Ebola vaccine until the latest outbreak, even though we've been dealing with it for decades.
Horrible as it is, that's not a great target for a vaccine. Especially not an expensive, hard to administer one. So it remained largely of academic and specialized interest.
The recent Ebola outbreak was a recontextualization of Ebola, from a sometimes scary disease where it would be handy to have an infrequently used vaccine for special circumstances to "This might be an endemic disease in West Africa".
Yes, throwing money at it helped, but it's hardly the only reason priorities shifted.
I'll also note that there's promising work on Dengue Fever vaccines, which are third world diseases, and most of the diseases that are near-term eradication targets are third world diseases. Often these challenges aren't "Pharma hasn't developed a drug yet" but "How do we get this drug to everyone?"
Pharmacy companies are are not aiming to cure diseases, they aim to invent drugs that make good money. Eradicating diseases is harmful to their business.
So what if a big leap in computational biology happened? Making faster machines is relatively easier and largely unregulated.
So you focus on simulating disease and some form of automation that tries to cure it. We have the problem of building these models for the computer to crunch on. So why not build them from people. Continuously monitor everything about someone. DNA, the various omics, self reports. All the while machine learning is trying learn these models. So other automations can change them.
So the first thing we need is a way to collect all this data. Itself a major medical breakthrough. How much data do we need to build the models? This seems to be the first breakthrough we need to even approach this.
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.
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.
Even aside from evolution - we are reliant on our gut microbe to survive. Unfortunately, in some cases, what makes us sick is stuff from our gut microbe! We're literally a biome unto ourselves - and who knows what would happen if we removed all X. Our immune systems are pretty damn good at killing stuff off, and we've also seen that the elimination of worms (ew) from our biome may have cause or contributed to a number of autoimmune conditions.
This sounds very much like an unintended side effects scenario. I definitely agree that we need to eliminate lethal and incapacitating conditions. However getting rid of "all disease"... it may cause more problems than it solves.
And then there's the sociological angle too
I am saying that getting sick is not a bad thing, a sickness that kills is.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2101657-synthetic-super...
Whatever exists needs to be challenged continuously to keep existing. Any naive attempt to suppress all adversity forever will backfire.
I guess I was briefly taking the donator's unicorn propaganda literally. Sorry.
It's called Facebook.
We won't have cure for diseases until first we have a cure for greed.
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!)
Companies like Facebook (and people like Mark Zuckerberg) actively avoid paying taxes whenever they can, in a lot of countries that, for example, have public healthcare and other public institutions that would normally benefit from these taxes.
It's a bit like repeatedly stealing some kid's lunch, and then making fun of the kid for her weakness while appearing strong (and stronger in comparison to the weak kid) and compassionate when the kid passes out and you carry her on your back.
Some skepticism here would be appropriate. I guess it's still better then them buying more, eh, yachts.
Still, I can't shake the feeling that instead of making a horrible closed product, Facebook, that's basically eating the internet like a cancer, itself -- how about fixing that too?
These people are so powerful they have presidents kissing their ass.
Archive.org link because JWZ dislikes HN- https://web.archive.org/web/20160818144913/https://www.jwz.o...
JWZ has some referrer detection so you might want to open it in a private tab to get around.
Yes, this is a commendable effort, but I don't think they have the smarts/money for this. Even at an investor/patron level.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245251.php
Facebook is by some considered an addiction, so in some regards a disease that should be tackled along with others.
For example: MS Office used to cost 4-500 euro for the average home user a few years ago. That was ridiculous.
If you have a small shop and 2000 Facebook page likes, Facebook rips you off each time you want to reach them.
Maybe market dictates these prices but then again, they would be in the position to dictate the prices in the first place.
To achieve what you suggest there would need to be a controlling majority of shareholders that also hold this philanthropic view, otherwise the execs are required to do the normal thing, optimize the returns of their shareholders. (To have this criteria while raising capitol will severely restrict who you can work with / have on your board)
This is often why I feel bad for execs who take flack when their company optimizes / minimizes their tax burdens as its their shareholders who require them to do so and the law that allows it.
For people like Zurkerberg the way they can achieve their philanthropic goals best is to build a massively profitable business with the support of other investors who will share that goal and then take their personal profits and use those to achieve their goals.
Just like the other commentors have pointed out, who is better qualified to launch and run a major project than those who already spent their lives building and scaling great businesses.
If people spent time focusing on increasing government tax revenue from the rich rather than increasing tax rates on the rich - which just pushes more and more wealthy people to stash their money in tax shelters (see Ireland) rather than investing it at home - they'd actually succeed in improving the inequality situation. And most importantly boost the economy and create more middle income jobs (by keeping money as job-generating capital instead of sitting dormant in off-shore shelters).
Instead of expecting humans to stop acting out of self-interest, how about:
a) Creating incentives for businesses and the wealthy to not move money elsewhere by having competitive tax rates. The simple fact is having them pay something rather than further incentiving them to pay nothing would massively increase revenues without increasing rates.
b) Massively simplify the tax system to close the myriad of loopholes that allow these wealthy people to continue operating locally while shifting all tax liability elsewhere. Make it obvious exactly how much each person owes their governments at the end of each year.
Creating a tax policy that's grounded in the reality of human behaviour (you can call it evil if you wish) rather than idealistic fallacies of how people should act is the real solution here.... Assuming this whole thing Zuckerberg is creating is partially a form of tax sheltering in the first place.
I guess it is easy to make empty statements if you make them apply to a far enough future. Mars colonies from Musk (still working on getting the colonists there in one piece of course), and all disease tackled!*
*With $3Bn
With $56 billion, I'm inclined to take Zuckerberg a lot more seriously. He currently has eight times the annual R&D budget of Pfizer in paper wealth that has been increasing in value at a rapid clip (emphasis on paper, in that of course it may go up a lot more or down a lot, who knows). Tackling all disease is beyond grandiose; wiping out numerous diseases however is not - that would be an extraordinary accomplishment.
There is $3B on on one track, with a note pinned to the top.. "To cure all diseases - <3 MarkZ".
A train is barreling down.
On the other track lies you, with a hoodie and a ham sandwich.
Watching to the side is HN...
HN can pull the switch and change the points, thereby saving the $3B, but killing you... in the hope the $3B will cure all disease.
On the other hand HN can say screw the cash and let's save a ham sandwich, because (ummm, let's face it, sorry kid, you aren't going to amount to much)
Little did HN know, you ARE MarkZ!
For all we know you might have billions or a machine for curing all diseases already working. (Or be MarkZ).
Yes, probably time for my bed, it's rather late. And far too late for moral philosophy.
I don't know whether their passion loses momentum inside 'initiative/fund' or it was doomed to be opposite of it's cause from the start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundat...
If I've spent 80 millions on Vaccines does that mean that I've saved hundreds of lives? No.
I don't want to be a truther here, nor I'll paste links that would confirm partial statement wrapped inside my question, but it would be great if one could be open to critically observe actions of our beloved philanthropists, there is complete universe beyond local news feeds.
Less sarcasm would serve you well.
There are entire organizations devoted to assessing the effectiveness of various kinds of charity and measuring how many lives they save (e.g. http://www.givewell.org/ and https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/), and their reports can be found within 20 seconds of googling, less time than it took for you to type your based-on-no-actual-information sarcastic judgement.
Sarcasm plus knowledge would be fine.
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.
Peace ;)
So it's not so much that people here hate sarcasm as that they value the differences between Hacker News and other places on the internet where people type text in boxes.
Well it's impossible to know exactly, but with statistics we can estimate that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has saved millions of lives. 7 million is the current estimate for just the vaccination program:
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/infographic-...
http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ourworl...
That's great what they've done, but saying they've eradicated polio is brutal exaggeration.