Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth.
Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.
The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative would fund them for 5 days.
> Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.
That's not how it works. Whatsapp was an investment, Chan Zuckerberg Science is not an investment. If he had announced a new for-profit drug company with $20bn of Facebook's money you would have a point. It still doesn't work out as a personal commitment though, Mark's shares of FB weren't suddenly worth $5.6b less (in fact shares have surged since!).
100% agreed. Investment vs consumption. Though maybe, just maybe, this thing has an "investment in reputation" angle to it too? More generally I wanted to contextualize the amounts.
It still does not work out. I am working at a major cancer center with 2.*00 employees incl. 1200 scientists. We have a budget of ~250 million. So you could pay for this centre for 15 years with Zucks money. Hardly enough time to treat all diseases or even "just" cancer, and I can assure you, we are not slacking off.
"The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone."
Pharmacy companies are are not aiming to cure diseases, they aim to invent drugs that make good money. Eradicating diseases is harmful to their business.
>The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone
But how much of that spend was actually targeted at curing diseases, versus things like hair loss treatments, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, or other first world problems? It's well known that big pharma corps generally ignore the low hanging fruit of curable third world diseases because there is no monetary incentive for it. See why there was no viable Ebola vaccine until the latest outbreak, even though we've been dealing with it for decades.
If you look at pharma company R&D, they know where their bread is buttered: people who are at risk of death are much bigger spenders than brunettes wanting to be blondes. 70%+ of pharma R&D goes towards life-prolonging research.
While we've been dealing with Ebola for decades, it was characterized as both a highly sporadic and largely self-limiting disease, and not particularly endemic.
Horrible as it is, that's not a great target for a vaccine. Especially not an expensive, hard to administer one. So it remained largely of academic and specialized interest.
The recent Ebola outbreak was a recontextualization of Ebola, from a sometimes scary disease where it would be handy to have an infrequently used vaccine for special circumstances to "This might be an endemic disease in West Africa".
Yes, throwing money at it helped, but it's hardly the only reason priorities shifted.
I'll also note that there's promising work on Dengue Fever vaccines, which are third world diseases, and most of the diseases that are near-term eradication targets are third world diseases. Often these challenges aren't "Pharma hasn't developed a drug yet" but "How do we get this drug to everyone?"
I think that means they were working on it weren't they? I doubt the Ebola outbreak timeline was enough to warrant the research to figure it out. They probably already had projects going but suddenly they got a lot more attention through regulations to get it to market faster.
Mark Zuckerberg is worth 55 billion dollars. This is 5% of his net worth.
Mark Zuckerberg spent 20bn on Whatsapp. At his 28% shareholding in facebook that's a 5.6bn USD personal commitment.
The top 5 global pharma companies spent 42 billion USD on R&D in 2015 alone. Total pharma sector R&D is circa 200 yards. Every singe year. They aren't anywhere near "curing all diseases". This intiative would fund them for 5 days.
Very generous, but let's keep some perspective.