Regardless of motivation, I'm happy to see investment in this domain.
Steve Jobs, for example, had billions of dollars, had his genome sequenced, and probably tried very hard not to die so young. I bet if he had known 10 years earlier that he was going to die from pancreatic cancer, some of that money would have gone into searching for a cure.
Larry Page might live a perfectly healthy life, die in his sleep at 101, out living most of us. However, if you've got that kind of money and influence, why not buy some real insurance.
Steve Jobs is actually a terrible example. To quote wikipedia, "Despite his diagnosis, Jobs resisted his doctors' recommendations for medical intervention for nine months,[170] instead consuming a psuedo-medicine diet in an attempt to thwart the disease." Pseudo is Greek for "false." And if you want cancer solved by the time you get it, you probably have to pony up the money before your diagnosis.
I'm not disagreeing that medical advances are relatively slow, but on the scale of human life, Page has probably at least another 40 years of advances left to see. And that's a lot.
9 months is not much time. If Steve were just an average person, his condition probably wouldn't have been discovered as early as it was. He simply squandered the little extra time that he had. There's no guarantee that he it wouldn't have killed him in the long run even if he had gone under the knife earlier. Pancreatic cancer, in general, is pretty deadly: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreaticcancer/detailedguide/...
Randy Pausch had pancreatic cancer and died at 47: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch
Sure, it's great that we can predict with a higher accuracy what diseases we might get. Now it would probably be helpful if we could cure most of them.
It would be really interesting if we began noticing a medical analogue to Moore's Law in the next few decades (though I don't know how you'd measure it). Supposing conservatively that medicine is 100x better in 2013 than in 1900, one might expect medical knowledge to double between now and 2030. The size of the advances in computing from 1900-40 and 1940-80 differ by several orders of magnitude.
Of course I don't think we have the data to assign a model right now so this might be BS.
The capital us youngins have is time and ability if not money. This is a great example of moguls and companies willing to put that resource in given an availability of the talent and ability.