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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

While I think it's laudable that Larry Page would donate what I presume is a non-trivial amount of money to fund research and treatment into a condition he himself has, i.e. a voice disorder, at the same time I wonder whether he could get a bigger bang for his buck by funding the low hanging fruit. Maximum impact per dollar. Bill Gates foundation has taken this route and I think it's the right thing to do. There's a part of Larry's story that feels slightly egotistical.

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Your comment is shortsighted. This is not at all egotistical.

Rare diseases are generally not huge money makers for big pharma. That is why there isn't as much money being devoted to them to find a cure. The fact that Larry Page is donating is a great reason to capture some of that long tail for whatever reason.

I don't care about the egotistical part, but the point about rare diseases is dead wrong - those are exactly the diseases, if suffered by the right (read: wealthy, Western part of the world) that are enormously lucrative to pharma. The diseases that are not lucrative to pharma are things like malaria.

The things most lucrative to pharma are problems whose number of affected patients (x axis) and price to treat (y axis) create a box with the highest volume on a graph. That is, things which are expensive to treat, yet treatable, which many people have (common, not rare). Things like diabetes, cancer, etc. I don't think Hashimoto's thyroiditis would fall into that category.

But, both of your driving factors, affected patients, and price to treat, are in turn driven by other factors such as competition, targeting symptoms, and the cost of research.

While perhaps not blockbuster, orphan drugs for rare diseases can turn quite a profit for pharmaceuticals.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2012/05/02/how-com...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732392610457827...

Of course, that's certainly not Larry Page's fault...

Actually, Congress is thinking of modifying the Orphan Drug Act because pharma has been raking in cash by the ton.

Genzyme was built on rare disease drugs.

If you really want to get worked up, he "invests" in Tylenol when he gets a headache, too.

Why is his financial allocation a problem? Nobody was complaining when he wasn't donating to VHI at all. I'm sure it pales in comparison to what the public donates to sports teams and the movie industry.

How is funding research that will benefit people, including yourself, egotistical? It seems like a perfectly logical thing to do. You have a rare illness, you have the money to research treatment, you do the research, that way everyone with the illness benefits. This isn't his philanthropy plan. I'm sure he does plenty of other philanthropic projects. He only mentioned one as it was related to the story he was writing about.

This. When a problem affects you in some way, you become best positioned to address it.

I don't think I'd go so far as egotistical, but I do think putting a "significant" amount of money towards an issue that, as stated, just doesn't affect the patient's life that much is hard to fathom when there are so many fatal or crippling diseases and issues that such an amount of money could likely help as much.

Of course it's his money and his choice, and there's nothing bad or wrong about funding something that's important to him, but it does seem a little... shallow, I suppose.

Ultimately, folks with money can use that money how they want. You can dock credits because he didn't donate it to providing clean water or some other cause that you deem more worthy, but ultimately it's his money and it seems like a reasonably charitable thing to donate it to trying to find cures that will be available to everyone. There's supposed to be room for folks to make personal decisions about charity; otherwise we should just do it via taxation.

Yeah, not sure why people are being negative. I would understand that it would be selfish to direct Google funds to this research. Don't we all direct a large amount of our personal funds though to things that benefit us?

This is one of the rare moments when I wish someone has a more serious condition, like blindness or deafness, so he can invest to cure those instead.

I can be selfish too.

exactly. Imagine how many more lives Larry could improve if he happened to have had diabetes?

I think it's selfish/egotistical for someone who wants to donate a TON of money to medical research to choose a disease that he/she happens to have instead of sitting back, doing some research, and supporting research that will help the most people. That's just my opinion. I can see the other side of the coin too. Hell, maybe the amount of money we're talking about here is peanuts compared to the amount of money Larry already donates to other more widespread medical causes, maybe Larry just failed to mention that in his writeup. I suppose one shouldn't jump to conclusions.

It may be selfish, but it's completely understandable. I don't know if Larry is facing the prospect of losing his voice entirely, but even if he isn't having a disease like this is quite upsetting and frightening. I think anyone in his position would use their resources to try and find a cure or at least a way of halting the progress of the disease.

I suppose it's his money and he can damn well spend it on whatever he wants. Earn a few billion dollars then spend it however you please. But for goodness sakes, please stop complaining that other people aren't spending their money in the most effective way.

Bottom line is that it's none of your business.

Medical research has a tendency to break out of the pen you do it in. How many stories start "so I was researching this rare condition X when I noticed that the mice in test group A started to..."?

Just getting a rich guys attention and having him throw some money research's way is a crap-ton better than another jet-helicopter or mega-yacht.

There's no reason to assume that this is the only charitable cause to which Larry is contributing. This is just the one he's talking about.

It's not egotistical, but you could call it selfish. He wants to cure himself. Steve Jobs was on a similar quest to cure cancer - because he didn't want to die. Larry wants to speak normally again.

Behind many non-profits and causes there was a similar personal catalyst. People trying to get rid of the three strikes law or drunk driving were many times similarly motivated into action by a personal tragedy.

You don't know what he wants or doesn't want. It _could_ be selfish, but it could very well not be.

Maybe he just had the chance to learn a lot more about this particular disease and so it's more natural for him to invest there. It sure would feel more natural to me to contribute to research on a disease that I have experienced first-hand than to some other random one, even if the random one is more "important." No selfishness there. I would just identify better with the victims and have a more real urge to help them.

I see it more as people trying to solve problems they come across. If you contribute to the ones you are close to, and others do the same, things improve.

Scratching your own itch is the classic motivation for free software - it works for medicine too !

Most philanthropy is selfish in nature. Who cares what his motivations are? Why would anyone want to criticize philanthropy? It's not like the founders of Google have a poor stance on charity or anything: http://www.google.org/

Give the man a break. It's good that it's not life threatening at this point as there are certainly much worse CEOs in the world.

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