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.
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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.