Why isn't there a Kickstarter for curing cancer?
Ten years ago, you would have to mail dvds because internet speeds weren't fast enough to live-stream the office surveilance camera. Twenty years ago you would have had to snail mail a bulletin every month about status updates.
Today you make a wordpress site with a $3 a year .com address and $50 a month hosting (or host it on the various media sites interlinked like a Tumblr), post live updates, and stream / upload video and audio about progress at a whim.
The middle men of a lot of things (movie production, r&d) did not exist because people wouldn't fund those on their own. They existed because it was infeasible to organize millions of funders and to properly broadcast progress to millions the way such organizations could to a boardroom. That has since changed.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1551949/
> It often takes more than 10 years to deliver a final, licensed vaccine,5 and requires not only excellence during research and product development but also managerial and funding commitment throughout the endeavor. The cost of developing a vaccine—from research and discovery to product registration—is estimated to be between US $200 million and US $500 million per vaccine.6 This figure includes vaccines that are abandoned during the development process. In short, vaccine research and product development is lengthy, complex, and loaded with binary outcome risks.
just because the complexity of a process is abstracted away doesn't mean it's ceased to exist.
Of course they can. Where do companies get their money from? Thin air?
I find it hard to imagine that you could keep asking for more and more funding on a promise for a cure for something in 5-10 years down the road, and continue to have the same private individuals with very little personal wealth continue to throw their earnings at it.
I imagine that individual smaller projects may well benefit from it, but crowd-sourcing cancer or something equally grand, people would lose interest in it. Not because they don't care, but because human beings have human timescales attached to expectations. Something that has a hard to quantify immediate success or reward attached to it is less likely to attract attention and investment.
That said, it might work on a limited basis if you applied an X-Prize to certain forms of cancer. It could mobilize people to really focus on certain types of cancer and specific goals.
For example, we might find a way to cure a lot of cancers by simply detecting them when they are days old when they are easier to treat, so a better, and inexpensive, way to detect cancers would be valuable.