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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It makes no sense that every billionaire on the planet doesn’t put 95% of their money into cancer, heart disease and neurological disease research.

They’re just waiting to die in their 60s ~ 80s from exactly the thing they could cure in their 50s.

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.

+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.

Economy doesn't like past retirement people obviously.

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.

Michael J. Fox.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/04/12/michael-j-fox-parkinsons...

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 ).

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.

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