So that gift may amount to 2-3 days worth of what is already being wasted each year. Yes, that study may be way off. The scientific way to go about this is to actually see what is reproducible or not, rather than assume most research must be reproducible.
Larry is 71. He should be investing way more than this on life sciences research if he wants to move the needle on his own life span. Given his net worth, spending at least a billion a year is a no-brainer. The answer to spending that money effectively is really simple. Invest it in PhD scholarships. There is no better value for fundamental science ROI on the planet. $6 billion could buy him 100,000 new PhDs. Every single one could be working on figuring out how to extend his quantity/quality of life. That's ~10% of his net worth. It's irrational for him to not do it.
It's an interesting idea in theory but how do you ensure that money is well spent? It reminds me of the Australian government's "free insulation" scheme where a lot of money was poured into an industry very quickly. Result: wasted money, fraud, deaths from undertrained contractors, and the devastation of the existing stable industry.
Your PhD scholarship idea would see similar issues, including unforeseen bottlenecks which would starve out existing worthy research -- not just in this field but others too.
I think Ellison is right to be very particular about where he spends his money.
There are over 20,000 Universities in the world, with lots of potentially amazing dark horse PhD hopefuls that are passed over every year due to lack of funding. I think a decent argument can be made that the black swan that could give Larry an extra 15 years of sailboat time is more likely to be in that group than in a single institution endowed with $200M.
You could also say the next big tech startup will come from a random town around the world instead of Silicon Valley. But somehow the concentration of capital, expertise and opportunity in one place has a multiplier effect that makes Silicon Valley unreasonably effective at generating startups.
Similarly, you are more likely to "hit the high notes" in research by concentrating effort in a few places. The alternative is lots of duplicated efforts that each don't quite achieve anything.
This applies especially to medical research where the barriers to getting meaningful clinical results are sky high.
Scientific progress is a worldwide phenomenon, and there are great scientific contributions made by brilliant people all over the world on a regular basis.
If you are advocating that the best Universities deserve a higher share of funding I don't disagree but there are plenty of great scientists that started at what you might judge as lesser Universities. To give them nothing would be an error.
My numbers are just fine. $20K a year is a typical PhD scholarship amount. In most western countries scholarships are tax free, and PhD students that need more usually do some teaching or RA work. Facilities: The University that received the money. Materials: A computer.
Every single one could be working on figuring out how to extend his quantity/quality of life
This made it sound like he would be hiring PhDs. If he gave a scholarship to 100,000 PhDs, very few of them would end up working on anything related to extending Larry Ellison's life.
I would have said postdocs if that's what I meant. I see very focused industry sponsored PhD scholarships all the time. I don't see why this would be any different.
You seem confused about the terminology. I think you meant "PhD candidates". If you're talking about "hiring a PhD", this is a person who has earned his/her PhD and is in the field. A postdoc is specifically a person still pursuing additional research at an educational institution, still working with a faculty mentor, and usually alongside PhD candidates and other postdocs.
I usually try to let these little nerd arguments go, but I'm going to make an exception. Your insulting response defending such a tenuous position deserves a swift rejoinder.
You don't give a scholarship to someone with a PhD. You give them a salary or a grant and occasionally an award or a bursary or a fellowship. You are arguing for the <1% case when someone has chosen a poor, confusing sounding moniker for what is essentially one of these other things.
On the one hand 100,000 new PhDs all working on how to extend Larry's quantity/quality of life seems wrong. On the other hand what you say makes sense and would actually be a net win for humanity.
That is the heart and soul of capitalism. What is good for me, is good for the common man. I don't think this will give any extra points in the afterlife but at the very least, someone or everyone will benefit in at least some small way.
That is the heart and soul of capitalism. What is good for me, is good for the common man.
This doesn't seem like a property of capitalism at all. In fact, doing this research through university seems to run against capitalist principles. If it was done privately there would be no obligation to share any of the outcomes.
Larry is not a fool, it's not about him; I think he's reached an age where you start thinking seriously about leaving the world, and things like hubris and greed (which drove him before, one could argue) don't make as much sense as before. His children are what they are and he won't be buying boats once he dies, so why not help people you like who can make a difference for people coming after you?
I think people like Larry are greedier than you give them credit for. I can't help but notice this story that casts Larry in a very benevolent light was made public on the exact day that litigation started in a massive $9 Billion dollar trial, Oracle v. Google. Very fresh, I won't forget it. A nice way to kill two birds with one stone.
I don't think he is a fool but I do think it's about him; he wants a longer life and his prior investments throughout his life pointed to that. He survived the heartattack age and no dementia so far, so chances are cancer will get him are high (you have to die of something). Indirectly he already invested in cancer prevention by investing in research to aging etc. Those weren't spectacular amounts either so either it's just something he feels he owes himself or maybe he has managers that go about it smarter (like the PhD example). I don't know the guy personally and it's great he is putting money in this but he is doing it for him i'm sure.
Edit: like the other comment 'Larry Ellison has cancer'; that's exactly the reason he would do this...
Is $200m really one of the largest gifts ever to a university? I thought multiple colleges are funded by huge endowments and this, while incredibly generous, doesn't seem like it would have rated so highly. As a single data point, the Broad Institute in Boston by itself was founded mostly by a single $400m endowment.
What’s the difference between a gift and an endowment?
>Gifts are donations of money, tangible items, volunteer time or other valuable resources that can be used immediately to support the mission of University of Missouri Extension in the short run (one or two years).
>Endowments are a long-term funding strategy whose proceeds are designated to be used for a specific purpose. The money put into this fund — the corpus — will be part of the fund forever in order to earn interest and grow. An MU Extension endowment account is a pending endowment until the fund balance reaches $2,500. At that time, paperwork is done to make the endowment permanent and distributions to county spendable funds begin. Distributions are generally made monthly once an endowment becomes permanent. The larger the corpus, the larger the distributions it can generate — distributions that will continue forever.
Larry isn't giving them a fund to work with and grow, he's literally throwing $200 million at them.
Can someone with visibility into cancer research please explain if the results being obtained are proportionate to the massive funding the field has received for decades?
Sometimes I wonder if the bulk of the capital is being wasted. I could be wrong.
That just sounds like a copout. No disease manifests exactly the same way in every person, and there are plenty enough commonalities amongst cancers to justify calling it a single disease.
Money spent on cancer research tends to have wide-ranging implications outside of cancer. It produces a ton of understanding about gene regulation, cellular integrity, etc. Personally I would prefer the money not be earmarked for cancer research, but for understanding evolution, growth, and development of organisms composed of cells, in a way that those discoveries led to treatments. But the way it works right now has also had a huge benefit across many non-cancer research areas.
I suspect that the amount spent is still far too large for the direct results.
awesome. always shocked that election candidates don't go here. 'Let's have a manhattan project to cure the most common 3 cancers' moves the needle on everything -- scientific competitiveness, long-term health spending, plus anyone who knows anyone who had cancer will instantly sympathize.
Spending a ton of money more productively than academia and private industry is hard. The Manhattan Project was largely an engineering exercise: If curing a common cancer were as simple as spending an absurd amount of money on centrifuges, somebody would have put together a company to do it already.
From time to time, politicians declare war on cancer, as for example President Nixon did in 1971 with his National Cancer Act and $100 million program that grew into the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center and a couple of other initiatives. At the time, some researchers complained that the attention on cancer took resources away from basic research which was (and still is) considered equally important.
Ironically, it was HIV that led to better cancer treatments. The crash research to understand the AIDS virus gave scientists better understanding of cellular surface structures, immunity, and retrovirus mechanisms, among many other things, much of which tied into battling cancers.
Getting back to Ellison's generous gift, it's inspiring and heartwarming to see this great entrepreneur making such a difference. The philanthropy of Gates, Ellison, and many other American billionaires flies in the face of the hostility and classism of the "one percenter" slur that has become so in vogue these past few years.
If Ellison's cancer research institute pushes knowledge forward even just incrementally, it will have been worth every penny. Every new data point helps push the field forward. In addition, a salaried job for a scientist is a great thing in this era of cutbacks and anti-science attitudes. We need brilliant young minds to see science as a viable career path.
"Cancer researchers are welcoming but eagerly awaiting more details on Vice President Joe Biden’s newly announced plan to lead “a moonshot” to cure cancer."
China did a huge study on cancer. T. Colin Campbell wrote about this in his book The China Study. It looks like the more animal protein you eat, the more likely you are to get cancer.
Taking a cursory glance at the cancer rates in different countries, it does seem to correlate with the amount of animal protein eaten:
One of the things you find out pretty quickly if you ever do any patient advocacy is that most people don't care about medical research. They don't think about it, don't really understand it, or the bounds of the possible or how the system of technological development works in medicine, or put any thought into how it might affect them until it is too late.
Something I just wrote for a different audience on this subject:
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There are a lot of people who have both a medical condition and a lot of wealth - tens of millions of dollars or more. In this day and age, a fraction of that wealth is enough to produce a prototype treatment from scratch for many classes of condition, if you are willing to wait the decade or two that low-cost basic science takes to run its course. Alternatively, for a faster result in the five year range, that much money is enough to take a couple of promising potential therapies with initial animal studies and move them to prototype status. Not all conditions are amenable to this sort of approach, but many are. When you have a prototype, you license it freely to maximize the odds that it will be picked up and improved upon, and meanwhile pay a reputable clinic in one of the less regulated portions of the world to set it up for your own use. This is all very possible for a wide range of medical conditions. Why is it that so few wealthy, sick people take this path?
In the longevity science community we tend to ponder a very narrow facet of this question, which is ask why, with very few exceptions, the wealthy of the world are not funding rejuvenation research. They are all aging to death, just like the rest of us. Why are they walking off the cliff when they have a good shot at preventing that outcome? Yet the broader question is also of interest: not just aging research, but all medical research. I was pondering this after donating to the present crowdfunding initiative for DRACO, a universal basis for cheaply creating effective treatments for any and all viral infections, such as those that are poorly controlled and afflicting large numbers of people today. How many individuals are there with both resistant viral hepatitis and enough money to take DRACO to what its inventor considers the finish line of readiness for human trials? The cost of that is a few million dollars at this point. I can think of a couple of individuals from the last celebrity generation alone who are in this demographic. But of course it isn't happening, these people are not jumping in to make waves and build out a prototype therapy that could cure or control their infections. So it seems to me that perhaps our first problem with regard to funding rejuvenation research isn't in fact a matter of convincing the world that treating aging is a viable goal in medicine. That is a challenge, and has to be accomplished, but it isn't the first issue in line. That first problem is that next to no-one with the wealth to have a fair shot at solving their own medical problems through funding research thinks that they can in fact achieve that goal.
We can debate as to just why this is the case. For example, firstly there is simple ignorance of the possibilities. Some people and their supporting networks don't have the framework of ideas that lights the way. I think it isn't unfair to say that most people don't have any great insight into medicine as a system that can be changed and improved. I certainly didn't for half of my life. Engaging with doctors and learning about a specific condition because you happen to have developed it may or may not provide that insight - it strongly depends on the individual. The state of medicine and even the state of waiting for better medicine can be taken as set in stone. You can be good enough at what you do to become very wealthy, and yet lack the ability or patience or drive - or that framework of ideas - to learn the science behind the medicine, see that this science can be influenced, and understand the economics and connections well enough to see how to influence it. That is a tall order for someone who has invested decades in the minutiae of their own business and profession, a hard right turn in life, and a significant investment in time and will.
Secondly, there is a poster child effect here. Consider Michael J. Fox as one example, someone who has given large sums to Parkinson's disease research over the past two decades. Unfortunately, this is a condition in which it will take a long time and enormous funding to establish effective treatments, as is the case for most neurodegenerative diseases at this time. Conditions for which this is true tend to get a lot of the press, since there is more work taking place, and also more philanthropy. Secondly, the span of Fox's philanthropy crosses from a time in which life science work was very expensive and time-consuming into the present in which it is much cheaper and faster. Medical research is very much easier today than it was at the turn of the century: all of the tools are greatly improved, as is knowledge of cellular biochemistry. But people think of this, and similar cases, and see decades of expense and no resulting cure. Subtleties such as the considerable progress achieved in both understanding the condition and building a foundation for treatments yet to come are somewhat lost on the world at large.
Thirdly, it is enormously expensive to move from prototype therapy to clinical availability through the regulatory gauntlet. That is well understood, and it is why most people think of medical research as fantastically expensive. But it is not. Building prototypes is cheap. Early stage research and investigation can be so cheap that it can be crowdfunded by ordinary people like you and I. It is the testing required to prove reasonable safety for clinical translation of a prototype therapy that is merely ordinarily expensive. Then it is the over the top regulatory compliance that is par for the course in the US and Europe that drives the cost through the roof, restricts all meaningful clinical development inside the system to the entrenched Big Pharma interests, and ensures that all too many lines of research are never developed, and never even fully researched, as they cannot be cost-effective.
This is why I point out the strategy of open licensing and medical tourism. Build the prototype, then give it away and undergo the treatment yourself. We live in a world in which the BioViva CEO can be (probably) the first human to undergo a particular gene therapy with good animal data, and get that done for a low six figure cost or less. Regulation and its tremendous costs are not needed to produce a treatment that can be judged safe enough to risk - and that choice of safety should be up to the individual in any case. Again, however, near all of the people with the money to do this sort of thing from scratch, and with a condition that might be treated, don't see things this way. Wealth doesn't magically grant knowledge or wisdom. They, like most people, view medicine as an enormously expensive undertaking, far beyond their ability to move the needle, where they think of it as something that can be influenced at all.
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Cancer research has a number of potential disruptive approaches that might transform the whole field if supported, turning from a case of trying to fix ten thousand very different situations into targeting just a handful of commonalities in all cancers. The best from my perspective is telomere extension interdiction - all cancers must lengthen telomeres. So if you can turn off telomerase and ALT in cancerous tissue in a targeted fashion, problem solved, and you only need to figure out the per-tissue deliver system. If you can just turn off telomere extension globally for a while that might also be enough to deal with most cancer, making it a truly universal therapy.
Some of the California labs are working on this sort of thing.
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jour...
So that gift may amount to 2-3 days worth of what is already being wasted each year. Yes, that study may be way off. The scientific way to go about this is to actually see what is reproducible or not, rather than assume most research must be reproducible.