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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

World GDP is about $83 trillion dollars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

It's probably just a matter of figuring out how to funnel enough money and people on the problem. Smartphone advances, for example, will be incredible over the next decade. Much better graphics, CPU, batteries, etc. That's because there's a huge market for them. Another example is 4k TV's, which are out of reach. Within 5 years, they'll be cheap, and a lot better.

Figure out a way to have consumers directly spend more money on medical research/technology and great things will happen.

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There is already a lot of money being spent on medical research. Cancer is a prime example. Cancer Research UK estimates that about 1/3 of us will have cancer during our lifetime, So there's a very large 'market' or political willingness to fund research. There are some dramatic changes at the scientific level (gene sequencing is getting much faster and cheaper), but progress at the treatment level isn't so quick.

The dramatic advances in consumer electronics aren't just about spending. We spend a similar amount on cars, but a new car today isn't much different from a new car ten years ago. Forty years after we landed on the moon, we don't have day trips there. Consumer electronics change fast largely we've been able to make increasingly tiny patterns in silicon, but most of our other technology develops much slower.

The problem is that insurance companies and governments stand between health care and consumers. So the incentives aren't as strong as other markets. Purely market-based health care, like eye lasic or breast implants, have seen remarkable improvements in safety and lower costs.

Insurance companies and governments still have an interest in getting effective healthcare at a low price. There's plenty of incentive there.

LASIK is younger than I am, and new technologies tend to develop faster. Looking at the Wikipedia article on breast implants, the pace of development there doesn't seem remarkable: it says the latest generation date from the mid 1990s, and that seems to be mostly an incremental safety improvement. There have been more significant advances in non-consumer healthcare in that time, e.g. Radioimmunotherapy.

And again, cars: widespread consumer technology, lots of money in the industry, but mostly incremental improvements. Though Google's self-driving cars are interesting.

I give up. What's a lot of money? We spend $45 billion on pet food (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food). NASA's budget is $20 billion? The NIH budget is $30 billion?

Do you think medical devices are closer to cars or computers? We spent $100 billion dollars forty years ago to go to the moon and stopped. Nothing really changed until SpaceX (i.e. private enterprise) got involved to drive down the cost.

We need to fix the root of the problem - evolution-derived protein bodies.

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