Why would it have to be a percentage of his net worth? He's contributed $50MM which he feels is enough to "move the needle". Medical research moves slowly and simply throwing money at it may not offer any incremental benefit.
Edit: I thought I'd add an example, since my father has Parkinson's so I know a little bit about it. One promising area of research is stem cell therapy. However, one known side effect of stem cell injection is cancer. (It takes years to develop but there have been enough studies already to show a strong correlation). Now, Parkinson's doesn't kill per se - it makes life miserable towards the end, but as a rule, people with Parkinson's live just as long as people without. So let's say you had really high net worth and wanted to spend it all to cure Parkinson's. Would you be able to "buy" people to trade a low chance of improvement in their lifestyle for a very real chance of cancer? I don't think so. Of course, this is just one example, however, it shows that things are not that simple.
I'm just saying what I would do if I was worth 15 billion and knew that I had a high chance of having a serious disease like that.
Throwing money blindly at a problem doesn't always help, that's very true. But I'm sure there are many intelligent ways to use more than 50m effectively.
You mention stem cell therapies; helping get them to the point where they don't cause cancer anymore might be an area of research worth pushing, especially if some of it is under-funded. Giving out scholarships to people studying in areas related to the disease might be a way to help improve the supply of researchers. And when you can't hire more people, you can usually upgrade the equipment with faster/better stuff (shortening the upgrade cycle might help accelerate progress). You could help pay for conferences where the leading minds working on the problem can meet and exchange information (and if there's already enough of those, you can help make them better). You can probably find high-risk/high-reward research projects that aren't getting funded through the regular channels because those usually favor low-risk/low-reward projects. Etc.
But I repeat: What Brin did is awesome. Kudos to him. All I'm saying is maybe I'd do it differently if I was in his shoes.
Thank you so much for posting the video! (For those who might want to watch it also, the interesting stuff starts at the 5 and a half-minute mark). The re-framing of cancer as a desirable injury response is truly eye-opening.
Comments
Why would it have to be a percentage of his net worth? He's contributed $50MM which he feels is enough to "move the needle". Medical research moves slowly and simply throwing money at it may not offer any incremental benefit.
Edit: I thought I'd add an example, since my father has Parkinson's so I know a little bit about it. One promising area of research is stem cell therapy. However, one known side effect of stem cell injection is cancer. (It takes years to develop but there have been enough studies already to show a strong correlation). Now, Parkinson's doesn't kill per se - it makes life miserable towards the end, but as a rule, people with Parkinson's live just as long as people without. So let's say you had really high net worth and wanted to spend it all to cure Parkinson's. Would you be able to "buy" people to trade a low chance of improvement in their lifestyle for a very real chance of cancer? I don't think so. Of course, this is just one example, however, it shows that things are not that simple.
I'm just saying what I would do if I was worth 15 billion and knew that I had a high chance of having a serious disease like that.
Throwing money blindly at a problem doesn't always help, that's very true. But I'm sure there are many intelligent ways to use more than 50m effectively.
You mention stem cell therapies; helping get them to the point where they don't cause cancer anymore might be an area of research worth pushing, especially if some of it is under-funded. Giving out scholarships to people studying in areas related to the disease might be a way to help improve the supply of researchers. And when you can't hire more people, you can usually upgrade the equipment with faster/better stuff (shortening the upgrade cycle might help accelerate progress). You could help pay for conferences where the leading minds working on the problem can meet and exchange information (and if there's already enough of those, you can help make them better). You can probably find high-risk/high-reward research projects that aren't getting funded through the regular channels because those usually favor low-risk/low-reward projects. Etc.
But I repeat: What Brin did is awesome. Kudos to him. All I'm saying is maybe I'd do it differently if I was in his shoes.
Surely the most logical thing to is invest the $50M now to get things started and wait to see what needed funding next..
This almost certainly will not represent the sum total of his donations.
Good point. We'll have to wait and see.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eva_vertes_looks_to_the_future_of_m...
Thank you so much for posting the video! (For those who might want to watch it also, the interesting stuff starts at the 5 and a half-minute mark). The re-framing of cancer as a desirable injury response is truly eye-opening.