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Comment by lappa | Hacker News Reader

How do you propose having all of humanity fund it? A country could pay for it with their tax dollars, but then it is only a subset of the world having their paycheck decreased in order to help the entirety of humanity.

You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.

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Ideally, it wouldn't be a case where one country shoulders the burden. If there are any justifications at all for multinational cooperation, this would probably be an easy sell.

We already devote a massive amount of funding to foreign aid -- about $48 billion in economic and military assistance in 2012 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid). We sent about $13 billion to Afghanistan and Pakistan alone in 2012, according to nationalpriorities.org. This is a pretty good match for private-sector pharmaceutical R&D expenditures, about $51 billion in 2013 according to one industry lobbyist (www.phrma.org).

I don't know if the 3+ billion in military aid to Israel sould really be in the same bucket as say fighting Ebola. Then again the pharmaceutical R&D numbers are also vastly inflated.

Yeah, I was just addressing the point about the American public being upset about so much money going to what could be construed as foreign aid. It already does, and nobody evidently cares.

$48million is a few cents per person.

The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.

That's 48 billion in US terms (1 x 10^9).

Thanks for the correction. Anyways, at least tripling foreign aid (maybe multiplying it by 10-100) is something that would be controversial.

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