The infection may not be obvious if it does not produce other visible results so it may have been considered benign by itself, the disease affects the brain but the infection is in the gut, the disease looks very much like others that are not caused by bacterial infections (instead: genetic disorders, poisoning or prions) ... so while it is indeed simple, it's rather tricky and misleading.
As a layman, I’ve always wondered why we don’t fund more medical research to cure , or treat, common diseases sooner. A lot of pain and suffering could have been avoided if we discovered a cure 20 years ago.
The investment probably doesn’t scale linearly but I imagine there’s a compounding effect.
Waiting for billionaires to solve our problems again?
The US economy is $23 trillion a year. It makes no sense that we don’t double medical research tomorrow. We’re either going to have a similar fate, or will personally know someone who will.
Anecdotally, Billionaires pushing money into science so they or a loved one can live longer has been some of the most misspent research money. There have been a good number of time I’ve read about a “genius financier” or “high tech magnate” that is going to shake up drug development, but I can’t think of a win.
Fair and thank you I was feeling cynical this afternoon. I’ll agree his Foundation is a win. I was thinking more of companies on the focus (eg. calico) and not of funding organizations like the CF foundation (huge success story) and HHMI (great driver of scientist led science ).
+1, but... 2X'ing the medical research budget tomorrow would, short-term, create zero more qualified researchers, zero more well-equipped research facilities, etc. Growing those things has a very long lead time.
But administrative bloat, salaries of upper-end administrators, etc. can be scaled up extremely fast.
The US economy doesn’t care if a billionaire suffers and dies from Alzheimer’s. But the billionaire cares. That’s why I’m surprised he spends his money on yachts and jets instead of spending 2 decades funding the world’s greatest skunkworks medical research labs.
