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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Cascade's investments are roughly 1/2 of his wealth. Bloomberg is currently estimating he's sitting on $43 billion in cash.

https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-ga...

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Honest question: can half of it for example $20B in cash, cure cancer? or HIV/AIDS?

Gates seems to have put far more thought than most people into how to get the greatest net benefit to humanity from donating large sums of money. For example, he decided early on to fund development of a malaria vaccine, because it would save the greatest number of human lives for the amount of money he was donating.

So if anyone would know the answer to your questions, it would probably be Bill Gates.

All these things are open research questions; there's no roadmap to curing these things, there's a bunch of promising experiments that may or may not pan out. IIRC getting a new drug candidate through the full trial process costs maybe $1B for those that get as far as stage 3 trials (the final stage; most candidates will fail out earlier; conversely if a drug passes earlier trials there will probably be people willing to invest in return for a share of future profits, so you don't necessarily have to fund the full $1B yourself), but there's simply no way to know how many candidates you're gonna have to try to get one that works.

Its important to understand, when anyone says "cure cancer", they are saying cure 100+ (mostly) unique diseases. $20Bn is not even close, try around 200Bn and 50+ years of research.

Maybe we will get lucky and find an amazing immuno-oncology drug that takes out half of them in the next 20 years, but I wouldn't bet on it.

I see it a bit differently, if you can figure out both all of the functional relationships in our bodies and devise a mechanism to precisely drive any and all of them, not only will you 'cure cancer' but you will be able to cure any other disease or ailment that is expressed as an undesirable functioning of that system.

I don't know if you can do that with $20B but I feel these days that its more likely to occur rather than the opposite (which is to discover some underlying uncertainty principle that would prevent directing cellular action in a predefined way.)

We are barely able to simulate a simple reptile brain and you are asking for complete understanding and simulation of any human body. I think you are vastly underestimating the complexity of biological system.

What's the project for simulating a reptile brain? I know we've not fully nailed the ~1000 cells required for simulating a whole worm, though we're getting there: http://www.openworm.org/

I'm not sure a it follows that a perfect understanding of how our body functions leads to a cancer switch.

Mostly because cancer tends to be associated with dysfunction and it isn't necessarily the case that dysfunction can be externally corrected.

Here is how I reason to my conclusion;

We know that every cancer is the result of a genetic change in the cell DNA which disables apoptosis (cell death).

We know that we have a system in our bodies that is tasked with destroying cells with damaged DNA. (our immune system)

We know that when the immune system attacks cancer cells, it reliably removes the cancer from our systems.

What we don't know is how to reliably program, and deprogram, our immune systems on demand. If we knew both exactly how the immune system programming system worked, and could build tools to enable us to use that knowledge to actually program or deprogram our immune cells ...

Then we would be able to cure all cancers and autoimmune disorders.

> I don't know if you can do that with $20B

You can't.

The NIH budget is ~$30B/year and we don't know the basic mechanism of action for many of the drugs we currently rely on to treat disease. It turns out biochemistry is pretty complicated.

Cure is a hard thing. Research can get us closer, but until you do it you never know if the research will pan out. Someone smart gets an idea (someone who already knows enough about the subject to have a reasonable guess as to what might work), then they go into the lab and try it. Over the course of larger and larger studies - eventually something fails and they start over with a new idea (often a refinement of the last one), until it gets through all studies and is shown to work. Nobody knows how long this process will take. It isn't known if a cure is possible though we have had enough success in similar problems to believe it is.

Gates is focusing on things like Measles. We already know to cure it. The only thing left is rolling it out. Gates can easily calculate that $x hires so many nurses, and buys so many vaccine doses. Thus eliminating measles is something that we can do with money. Unfortunately there are a lot of vaccine deniers claiming measles is not harmful and pushing to skip the vaccine which makes elimination less likely. You can help here without spending any many: talk about it with your social circle and importantly remind them that youtube, movies, and blogs are NOT a valid places to do research.

I don't understand why you were down-voted for asking an honest question. Here's an up-vote to encourage fair play.

+1. I often have anti-pg approach opinions that I think got me on some sort of "downvote him" list.

Also my upvote doesn't seem to work. First I had impression myself, then asked fellow HNer to see if I'm wrong and my downvote for his comments didn't go through.

Thanks for upvote though.

Not to go too meta here, but hn has a very unique algorithm for vote count, it's not a direct 1:1, instead they use a combination of your hn rank, the account you're voting on,who else is voting on it, plus a couple other factors to determine whether your vote will leave an impression.

Well, it wouldn't hurt.

Great progress right now: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...

The total money spent on cancer is bigger than 20B though.

I didn't see anyone else point how much money is already spent on cancer research. For perspective, the National Cancer Institute has a budget of about $5.4 billion for 2017, and that's not the only source of funding for cancer research. So in short, more than $20 billion has already been spent on cancer research and while an extra $20 billion would obviously help, it wouldn't be any sort of guarantee, let alone instant solution.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/budget

Interesting... So he owns 5% of Berkshire and 45% of Four Seasons. Nice

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