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Oh, I definitely agree. No private entity could truly compete with government funded research. That's the ideal scenario where all important medical breakthro
by datashovel 11y ago
Oh, I definitely agree. No private entity could truly compete with government funded research. That's the ideal scenario where all important medical breakthroughs are a result of government funded research.
- dnautics 11y agowhat? 1) A ton of contemporary research is funded through the American Cancer Society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Herceptin was essentially kicked off through the charitable contributions of the cosmetics company Revlon. 2) Polio was cured through the efforts of a nongovernmental research agency (March of Dimes) 3) For basic research: The Glyn Research Trust was an entity set up to discover the chemiosmotic effect. Few people believed Mitchell, and it is unlikely that the work would have gotten public funding. Not only is the chemiosmotic effect now uncontroversial, but Mitchell won a Nobel Prize for his work.
- datashovel 11y agoI'm certainly not implying that there aren't major non-government research efforts out there. Perhaps even more effective in some cases. But simply by sheer numbers, 2016 NIH proposed budget is $31.3 billion (http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/ http://officeofbudget.od.nih.gov/). That's a single year. The entire endowment of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (if the numbers are up-to-date on Wikipedia) is worth ~$19 billion. According to some basic info I've found online it appears March of Dimes averages approximately $200 million per year in donations. $30+ billion is already alot, but, given the right circumstances, at the drop of a hat a future president might be so bold to ask to redirect even more of the US Federal government's ~$4 trillion annual budget toward those efforts.