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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, AFAIK Becker's "The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life" is pretty much all there was until Michael Levin came along and picked up the torch.

IMO it's one of those weird "holes": why so little interest in human tissue regeneration?

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> why so little interest in human tissue regeneration?

There's this HN comment I've always found interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32744294

That is interesting, cheers!

Because there’s no immediate and clear plan for a return on the investment due to how speculative things are, private funding is scant. Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D.

Edit: grammar.

The US budget is 6.5T USD for 2022.

The US DOD budget was 753B USD for the same year.

The US Medicare program was 747B USD; with another 45B USD for NIH.

So the US actually spends about equal amounts on military and healthcare, at the federal level — about 11.5% on each.

A better question might be why the US gets so little ROI on its healthcare spending.

A much better comparison would be to look at the proportions dedicated to research.

E.g., DARPA vs NIH, not DoD vs Medicare or DoD vs NIH.

DARPA’s budget was slightly under $4B in 2022 — an order of magnitude smaller than the NIH.

My original comparison was because Medicare and the DOD have their own funding authorities and I didn’t want to sift through their budgets to find it all.

The number you’re using is deceptive. You’re citing the Dept. of Defense’s (mandatory) budget, as if that is all the funding that goes to the military. It is not. After mandatory spending (DoD mandatory funds that you cite, social security, medicare, Medicare, interest…) about 25% of the budget is left for discretionary spending… BUT, nearly half of discretionary spending is government wages that, surprise surprise, includes military salaries and benefits. Then, a huge portion of the remaining discretionary funds are again allotted to the various military branches and war spending. Discretionary spending more than doubles the actual amount we put towards the military.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-discretionary-spe...

The DOD’s comptroller says you’re wrong — that figure includes both mandatory and discretionary funding authority.

See page 9 and page 14.

https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...

>Because we (the USA) are spending most of our money on the insane military complex there is little extra public funding for actually beneficial R&D

This simply isn't true at all. The US doesn't spend that much money on the military compared to other countries. Go look at federal expenditures; most are for entitlements: social security, medicare, etc.

As a percentage of GDP, US expenditure on the military is nothing unusual, and even a little low compared to many countries like Israel, Russia, probably Saudi Arabia, etc. It only seems huge because the US is huge, and has an enormous GDP, so of course it can afford to spend a lot more than a country like Italy for instance.

As the sibling comment said, look at how much the US spends for healthcare (not just federal expenditures, but total spent in the economy), and then ask why the US gets so little for its money there.

The problem in the US isn't spending money, it's how the money is spent and where it goes. Most of it seems to go into a black hole. Just look at how expensive it is to build anything.

The military budget both in absolute and relative terms is ludicrous.

The nations with a more irresponsible budget than the US are mostly state-terror organisations. Which doesn’t mean that the US isn’t one

So you think countries like South Korea, Greece, Kuwait, Columbia, and Singapore are "state-terror organizations"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_highest...

Inconceivable!

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