15 ms·

Please Fund More Science

380 points by davnicwil 7y ago

williesleg 7y ago
Please find more humanity.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bertil 7y ago
Some would see a contradiction between that impulse and how companies from Y-Combinator might use a tax-reduction scheme. Some could even see a connection between tax lawyers introduced by Y-Combinator to founders and that practice. I’m not saying that _has_ to be the case but "tax-avoidance / tax-optimisation / complex international structure / negotiation with government keen to offer low tax deal" is a common point made against large tech companies. I’m surprised why Sam doesn’t connect that point to his point, or confront that issue directly.
- philwelch 7y ago
  The connection is extremely indirect. If companies voluntarily pay more tax than they are legally required to, the vast majority of that money will go to Medicare, Social Security, defense, and interest on the national debt, with only a tiny amount going to scientific research. Conversely, if companies use these "loopholes" to reduce their tax liability by $X, they can directly donate all of that money for scientific research. Going beyond that for a moment, some corporations voluntarily foregoing these loopholes will not even be enough for the US federal government to be able to afford their existing obligations, let alone increase spending on research or anything else. Furthermore, in a competitive environment, any company that does forego these loopholes is likely to find itself losing out to a competitor that uses these loopholes to undercut their prices. That leaves closing the loopholes altogether, which is something the government would have to do. But that's not even enough to address the deficit--the government would have to either cut spending or raise taxes elsewhere. And it's entirely possible that closing corporate tax loopholes isn't even a good idea regardless. Corporations are legal straw men that, in most cases, ultimately pass on their earnings to their shareholders. A corporate tax effectively taxes all shareholders the same--in other words, the retired grandmother pays the same amount as the billionaire investor. In other words, corporate taxes can actually be far less progressive than individual taxes.
  - bertil 7y ago
    I would have loved Sam to make that argument explicitly: it’s not his style to talk about government money as if it grows on trees. I suspect he wouldn’t have looked at the overall distribution but where to assign marginal tax revenues.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      Corporate taxes are only 4.4% of US tax revenue[1], there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference. Especially compared to what most successful startups end up doing, which is to employ people and pay them salaries that are within the upper tax brackets. Respectfully, you seem to be trying to draw a strong connection here where it's not obvious that one exists. [1] https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2020/ https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2020/
      - bertil 7y ago
        > there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference Citation needed.
        philwelch 7y ago
        I already provided one, what are you talking about?
        bertil 7y ago
        You are saying that what’s left after tax optimisation is small. Not that the potential revenue if corporate benefits were taxed effectively is small. Do you have an estimate of the revenue that is declared in low-tax jurisdiction?
nickff 7y ago
Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other government-funded researchers are simply responding to their incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case. The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted to gaming a government-funded and bureaucratically-run grant system. Major government funded research projects (especially international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive structure. Pouring more money in will not help us. A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.
- djaque 7y ago
  I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators. Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results. On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.
  - 7y ago
jankotek 7y ago
Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...
- umvi 7y ago
  > but is it not efficiently used This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors. When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite. It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I agree that a lot of money is being wasted but your estimate of 4 people is very naive.
    - umvi 7y ago
      What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it? Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.
      - Ididntdothis 7y ago
        There are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It’s hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.
teen 7y ago
Wouldn't these investors want a return on their investment? Is it possible to invest without profiting off of the pandemic?
- m0zg 7y ago
  I don't think anyone would mind some company "profiting from the pandemic" if it actually had something that works. Heck, the US government would probably sign you a hundred billion dollar check in 15 minutes at this point if you had a cure or a working therapeutic which can be deployed immediately.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhb 7y ago
    They should offer that as a prize.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      That's one way to do it. That's what it is, essentially.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 7y ago
>Scientists can get us out of this. What they need are money and connections. No. It's too late to get us out of this. We can prevent the next case. But no, it's too late now. What was needed with coronavirus was prevention. That's a matter of politics and economics. No science.
- ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
  Hence why the title has "funding" in it.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    By "economics", I don't think LatteLazy is referring to the need of funding of anything in particular.
- zippoxer 7y ago
  On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would have a mass-producible vaccine ready, then you could say science has saved us from a second pandemic.
  - LatteLazy 7y ago
    I'd love that, and it's possible. But given how hard other coronavirus vaccines have proven to be and quickly these viruses mutate...
- dangom 7y ago
  Indeed. Scientists and policy makers know that decisions are taken by policy makers.
tomaszs 7y ago
Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years. Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus. We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place. Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.
- gen3 7y ago
  Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research already. Smartphones have given millions of people access to information they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then 80% of there population online [1] The issues you listed would take significantly more time then “five years” to cure. I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed and used. [0] First link when searching for DARPA inventions: https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-inventions https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in... [1] https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/smartphone-adoption-puts-kenya-at-top-of-internet-penetration-in-africa https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/...
  - tomaszs 7y ago
    Yes - Army had impact on development. War - didnt. Even if we discuss research caused by wars i am 100% sure these would be made a lots faster without an actual war. And also - its natural army attracts some bright minds because sometimes only army has resources and money to fund research. So as long as it is used for good cause it makes sense as a symbiosis
  - bluGill 7y ago
    That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we don't know. If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have fire breathing dragons!
fyp 7y ago
Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be failing us in the US. Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.
- samstave 7y ago
  Un-popular opinion incoming: FUCK YOUR SURVEILLANCE STATE apologist propaganda. I don't WANT Predator following me about and retinal scanning me into the Starbucks.
  - creddit 7y ago
    I think it will only be unpopular because of your inability to say it in a stable, civil way.
    - samstave 7y ago
      Don't spy on me. Period. --- Actually let me expand upon that. First with an annecdote.... I Was at RSA conf in SF a few years ago - ran into an old friend who was contracting to the NSA - and then met the head of cybercrimes for the state dept (I cant recall his title sadly - I kept a pic of his business card for years, but have since lost it) They invite me to dinner that night. There is about ~12 of us - and they are trading war stories of shit they have done in cybercrime blah blah (I was working at Lockheed at the time) There was this super you, SUPER brilliant eng that was with them and he was talking about hacking this, that and the other - being on redteam and they had to physically infiltrate, pick locks and steal this and that from blueteam... but there was a subtext which was fucking disturbing. They were all bragging about these OPs... And while I understand the national necessity of having such skills in your bet - the problem was that I realized I was sitting at a table with 100% psychopaths that didnt have a single moral fiber in their soul.... and it was about the thrill and ego of being "look at how fucking smart and technical and cool I am" I literally excused myself from the table and acted as though I was going to use the restroom. I simply walked out of the restaurant. The point is, that these orgs use very young smart people and enable and empower them with autonomy, authority, and praise and you wind up with digital psychos. I am looking at you [lots of surveillance companies all over HN] So, FUCK authoritarian supporting, bullshit businesses.
carapace 7y ago
While you're at it, fix everything else too. I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot). He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. ) Or see his Old Man River's City project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ ) A city in a single building with ten million square feet of enclosed open space. Add some applied ecology ("Permaculture") and you've got an arcology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ). We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our power with our values.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  >He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics. The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often lacked basic public amenities, at least initially. In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by modern ones & isolating the sides). >hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. ) Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered extraodrinary around here.
earthtourist 7y ago
Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk. Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected. I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly. The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.
- koeng 7y ago
  I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea. The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests), which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for. Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show results if your body is already producing antibodies. The really good test is an RT-PCR or RT-LAMP test, which uses a pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant. Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't approved by the FDA AFAIK.
- lr 7y ago
  You would have to do this every day, too. Getting tested doesn't mean you are not exposed on the way home that day, or the way back to work. Also, what if you wanted to go to multiple places in the same day? You would have to be tested n-times, as you could have been infected going from one business to the other. What I do not hear people talking about is this: Getting tested once is not enough. If you do not have COVID-19 today, it doesn't mean you are not going to have it tomorrow. The only test that can tell you that is an antibody test. Also, we don't even know yet (for sure, anyway) if people can be re-infected.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
AxiomaticSpace 7y ago
Pedantic correction: R0 actually refers to the contagiousness of a virus before any public health measures are taken (including vaccines). R is the contagiousness of a virus in the world as it currently is. So if an effective vaccine is produced, R will go below one, but R0 will be unaffected.
- raizinho 7y ago
  Is there a similar bit of terminology for the case fatality rate?
koeng 7y ago
In the future, I'm hoping some of the dreams of synthetic biology come true (basically, decentralization of biotech). I work on that problem in close collaboration with a lot of community lab spaces, and it is surprising how many have the capacity and knowledge to implement rapid testing in their local communities and the inability to do so because of regulation. Biotech, if you run proper controls, isn't actually that hard. A lot of those spaces are now seriously struggling because of the shut down. The main thing that is stupid about how the FDA is approving tests is that they approve protocols, even though they have lots of controls for input->output. Coming from a computer science side, I'd imagine they'd so something along the lines of unit tests, but they aren't - they're still regulating how the protocol is done itself.
- cma 7y ago
  By injecting the coronavirus rna strand into a cell in culture, anyone could make it in their garage if synth bio dreams come true. You’d have to hope countermeasures advance faster but that’s hard to prove.
  - koeng 7y ago
    Sure, or you could just go swab sick people and keep it in storage for a while. More people want to build than destroy IMO. If we tested in the synbio dream, this outbreak would have never happened in the first place.
- Reelin 7y ago
  This is amazing! I used to do academic research, and I had _no idea_ that community biotech labs existed! https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab-puts-diy-spin-biotech https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab-put... That article mentions the cost of equipment. In academia, we used to semi-seriously discuss building our own stuff. We generally didn't because even basic engineering, fabrication, and firmware require a lot of time and effort. (We were occasionally forced to when we needed something extremely specialized that simply wasn't available off the shelf.) It seems like open source equipment designs don't exist largely because they don't usually make sense for academia or industry to fund. I wonder if that approach might be viable for this type of endeavor, since it would allow designs to be shared between groups and would lower the cash barrier to that of the raw materials? I'm not sure how you'd navigate the patent minefield, but if successful I think it would benefit society at large.
anthony_r 7y ago
Not sure if necessary. You can get so much funding for anything covid related, it's almost like ".com" in 90s or adding blockchain to your name more recently. But this time it's so much more urgent, so I think people will forgive easily the incredible amount of misses in the area that we'll probably have. I'd much rather see the governments fund coronavirus-related research after this is over. The primary reason why SARS (v1) still doesn't have a vaccine and research was abandoned was due to the incentive structure (SARS is gone, and so is funding). I wish we knew more about coronaviruses now, it's been over 10 years since SARS ...
reasonattlm 7y ago
My company, Repair Biotechnologies, is working on regrowth of the atrophied thymus via FOXN1 upregulation. We're at the preclinical stage of getting the vector and formulation into shape, and the start of tests in influenza exposure models in mice. The atrophy of the thymus is a major reason why the adaptive immune system declines. The evidence from sex steroid ablation in prostate cancer patients strongly suggests it is possible to provoke the naive T cell component of the adaptive immune system into regenerating itself in a matter of months, provided that the thymus is restored to more youthful activity. Also evidence from the Intervene Immune trial with growth hormone (not advisable as a strategy, but congratulations to that team on getting interesting data) for the same proposition. To be clear this is a years long process for Repair Biotechnologies that would see us into trials around 2022, but at some point fixing the aged immune system will and must become a practical concern. At that point, we'll all be a lot less concerned about pandemics of this nature, as the mortality and hospitalization rates will be much reduced. There are other things that need to handled to restore all of the aged immune system: getting hematopoietic stem cells back into line and functioning properly, regenerative medicine for lymph nodes, some form of targeted destruction for malfunctioning immune cells. But each of these items will give incremental benefits on its own.
saintx 7y ago
According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient. To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health." > He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant. What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable. 1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized. 2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions. 3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward. Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-nih-failed-test-coronavirus-drugs-it-studied-drunk-monkeys-soap https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...
- ink_13 7y ago
  Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem, and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way". Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.
  - dajohnson89 7y ago
    If the attempt is novel, wouldn't it be worthwhile to share your failed results to help prevent others going down the same dead-end path you just did?
gdubs 7y ago
This might be an unpopular opinion around here, but this is an obvious area for bold public investment. Countless startups sprung out of public investment into basic research during the 20th century. And places like Bell Labs spent more on R&D due to the tax situation of the time. Beginning in the 70s and 80s, investors began to push for lower and lower capital gains taxes. So, I guess I'm saying that if you're an investor and you want more research into basic science, we could release the vice grip on capital gains rates and let the public pour a ton of money into it. I'm hoping for this to provoke a rational conversation and not a political flame-war – so, please respond fair-mindedly.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
Please pay more tax. Then we can fund the science with it. Honestly, I heard a comment on Slate Money to the effect of "Why aren't the billionaire class doing more to fund COVID research" All the epidemiology, all the WHO plans for last decade, all the incredible co-ordinated response globally (#) has been publicly funded. Give over on the idea private companies are good for anything but taking existing research in the hands of hundreds and putting it into hands of millions and billions. Pay tax. Vote for competence. (#) yes I happen to think that shutting down most of the planet, in an attempt to save millions of lives, in a matter of weeks, is an amazing feat of global co-ordination. Yes there are lots of local differences and many many ways things could be better but humanity could have done so much worse.
- refurb 7y ago
  Around 20% of all biotech revenue gets put back into R&D. So the next time your insurance pays $1000 for a drug, know that $200 of that goes back to R&D.
  - cma 7y ago
    The rest largely funds more fireworks at the Super Bowl through consumer targeted drug ads, and lunches to manipulate doctors into prescribing based on soft bribery.
    - sudosysgen 7y ago
      And a significant part of R&D is in practice patent-engineering and slightly better solution to trivially solved issues.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Tax is independent of spending, thanks to fiat currency.
- closeparen 7y ago
  It would make sense to pay tax, instead of contribute directly to research, if you only wanted 3% of the money to go to research. What you’re really saying here is it’s wrong that some entities choose to direct more money to research than society does collectively, and they should defer to society’s decision to spend on other things instead.
marcell 7y ago
In terms of COVID-19, I'm skeptical there's any real need for VC style funding: 1. Existing biotech companies are probably perfectly capable of addressing this with usual means. Vaccines are a known quantity, not novel disruption. 2. By the time any startup gets off the ground (6 months at least), the crisis will likely have passed
- comicjk 7y ago
  Existing vaccine efforts will probably succeed, but the possibility that they fail is real and quite scary (to me, anyway). So I'm glad we have a bunch of longer-term speculative projects as backup.
barkingcat 7y ago
The US has been politically antiscience for this entire administration. It's not a matter of funding more science. It's about voting out politicians that seek to benefit themselves instead of thinking about what science can do, and what science has already done for humanity. I also would like to counter - science doesn't need any more money. Money distorts the progress of science (for example, look at the grants system - what a dumpster fire). What science needs is proper primary and secondary education and a healthy population. Start with fixing schools and healthcare, and you'll have so much science you wouldn't be able to stop it.
aazaa 7y ago
> Investors and donors—this is where we can help. Please consider shifting some of your focus and capital to scientific efforts addressing the pandemic. (And future pandemics too—I think this will be a before-and-after moment in the world, and until we can defend against new viruses quickly, things are going to be different.) Although the sentiment resonates, the business logic does not. Consider antibiotic drugs. Big Pharma and biotechs alike have been jettisoning programs. Why? It has nothing to do with science. These drugs simply aren't as profitable as others: > Several major pharmaceutical companies recently shut down their antibiotic and antiviral research projects, backing away from the growing threat of superbugs, which may kill more than 10 million people a year by 2050. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-backs-off-superbug-why-5-drugmakers-bailed-on-antibiotic-research.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-ba... How much do you think a cure for COVID-19 will make its creator? Be careful when you answer, because you'll need to include all of the R&D effort in the calculation, and also consider the opportunity cost of not pursuing something more profitable. The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded.
- twomoretime 7y ago
  I think R&D is going to be a lot cheaper when you have the FDA authorizing emergency compassionate use for promising drugs. >The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots Why not? We are basically in wartime conditions. Even if the government doesn't relax it's rules, there's a high likelihood that enough hospitals/doctors will to conduct high risk trials on critically ill patients. Now is the best time for moon shots.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  >The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded. Ok, so let's just socialize the pharma industry and treat it as a matter of national defense rather than consumer luxury. With respect to infectious and transmissible disease, the paradigm of treating health as a matter of personal comfort and subjective preference has very plainly failed.
julesqs 7y ago
it's really rich to read a blog post from someone at YC wishing "the federal government was doing much more". YC and the extended universe of VCs have spent years providing an intellectual facade to undermine confidence in a centralized government, public funding of critical services, and promoting the profit motive in places like healthcare. The past decade in America has seen the dominance of the capitalist tech utopians like Paul Graham, and we are seeing the results. For god's sake Peter Thiel was working with YC barely two years ago and now Sam wants to complain that the federal government isn't prepared to respond to crises?? what a joke.
- fanatic2pope 7y ago
  You are being silenced, but you are 100% correct. Free market absolutism is religion dressed up as reason.
dekhn 7y ago
During the clinton administration, NIH funding doubled over ~5 years. This led to a glut of PhDs (far, far more than there are faculty slots or biotech jobs) who had limited job options and it didn't really translate to higher scientific productivity (in some sense, it just ended up selecting for professors who were more cutthroat and willing to publish lower quality stuff in higher h-index journals). I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity. The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.
- pen2l 7y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average institution or entity that Bill Gates chooses to fund is much more productive than the average NIH funded lab. I think the answer lies in taking a good look at where the money is going. Particularly, I think I think we need to give more to the very productive people and institutions. I know it's the million dollar question, by what is Salk doing that others are not? Or CSHL which has something like 8 nobel laureates there. One last observation is that a career in science just doesn't make sense anymore. Why slave away making $40 or $50k as a postdoc or an instructor after years of studious study when you can pull 6 figures in tech right out of school? This right here is one of the things that tells the bright ones to stay away from academia.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    Ex-Scientist here: While I agree the gates foundation is likely doing a better job than the nih... The danger is this, how do you decide upon a metric for productivity? How do you then prevent 1) corruption, absent that, 2) inadvertent corruption via biases (I'm going to judge proposals in my field more favorably because they are less confusing or more comfortable, or the inverse, more harshly since I want to keep competition out or know the pitfalls better), and absent that, 3) goodhart's law?
curo 7y ago
Does anyone have a list of all the COVID-19 research and response orgs that would be funded? I've worked in international dev where normally government grants go to a handful of familiars who subcontract out. It's often a question of visibility for everyone else (smaller groups either win subcontracts or have a shot at getting their work accelerated directly). I know science funding is different, but I wanted to map all the orgs & relationships for visibility. The best list I can find are previous grantees of https://wellcome.ac.uk/ https://wellcome.ac.uk/
upofadown 7y ago
It seems to me that it is way easier to get funding for medical research vs straight up biology. That might be wrong. Biology is what all of medical research eventually hinges on and any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money. It is super easy to contribute to the search for treatments for particular diseases but how do you contribute to the fundamental research that ultimately fixes problems?
- dnautics 7y ago
  It might be wrong, but it also might be right. >any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money But most research in pure biology is irrelevant. So you're effectively mistaking a type II error for a type I error in your argument.
mathfailure 7y ago
No >:[
fataliss 7y ago
Like it's often the case this is not just a problem of money. You can research virtually anything and not everything will yield anything of value to the human race. We need to have some direction. Epidemiology for example, sounds like a good high level scope that is definitely more directed towards human gains. Biology is a huge field. Also private funding and humanity's benefit are often at odds. Private funding tends to aim at making investors a return. What we really need (and Sam alludes to it) is a government/public fund for research so that labs have the ressources to research things that may never yield commercial profitability. If you leave it to big pharma and other private biotech companies to advance humanity, it's like leaving the food industry in charge of making humans healthier.... not happening :(
jashephe 7y ago
This calls to mind the ever-relevant “Science: The Endless Frontier” [1] by Vannevar Bush, who more or less oversaw the entire American federal research enterprise during and post-WWII. He famously said that the best thing you can do for scientific progress is give scientists money and then get out of the way (i.e. not even putting out requests for grant submissions in specific domains, like the NIH often does now). [1] https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm
m0zg 7y ago
It's not just funding. It's also focus. In recent years the CDC was tasked with fighting obesity and "gun violence" "epidemics" as well. Neither of those things is an epidemic. They are not contagious even. Why the fuck does the CDC waste their resources on this, instead of the real, actual epidemiological problems the eventual emergence of which is not only entirely plausible, but which have happened in practice several times already over the past couple of decades. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/... https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html
scroot 7y ago
Does HARC count?
kayhi 7y ago
I'm a fan of increased federal funding, but there's also a massive problem with the pricing of scientific supplies and chemicals. We commonly see 2-3x and sometimes 10x differences in prices for the exact same item from the same manufacuturer. We're (https://labspend.com https://labspend.com) tackling this problem but it's massive and not often mentioned or known by people outside of the lab. We've consulted with companies and help them identify millions in savings. A couple of issues contribute which are the pricing isn't transparent like hospitals in the USA. Also there are only 2-3 major suppliers and for certain items it's essentially a monopoly.
sytelus 7y ago
US should create 100 more universities. Each university campus lights up the economy of otherwise sleepy written off towns. The state operated universities can help lower the tuition and in turn reduce the student debt burden - one of the biggest issue. It creates more faculty positions for PhDs coming out. It attracts more international students bringing in money and talent. It lowers stress on outrageously competitive higher education space. It creates more research departments and opportunities. A creation of typical university campus is merely $1B. For $100B total, this generates so many benefits that it shouldn’t be even question. A lot of progress in US happened because of establishment of new universities. At some point we didn’t kept pace with growing demands and now education as well as research has become scars, expensive things available Only to elite.
- sykick 7y ago
  Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn’t have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can’t get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.
    - sykick 7y ago
ajudson 7y ago
I encourage everyone here to read the book Science-mart by Mirowski. It reveals a lot of limitations of adding markets and the search for "efficiency" in science.
StandardFuture 7y ago
Is Sam putting his money where his mouth is on this? Is he putting his time and effort there as well? Genuine questions. Even just putting together an obvious and simple historical timeline correlating increased scientific funding with improved standards of living would help. How come something as simple as that is not being brought forward instead? Is it possible that putting effort into proving this assertion might end up disproving it instead? We cannot know until better and more legitimate proof is attempted to be found. Proof > Opinion
deleted 7y ago
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campercoder 7y ago
Thank you Sam Altman for pointing this desperate need out. Man do we ever need more scientifically minded & trained politicians. I am hopeful that by the time we are on the other side of this, our knowledge of antiviral medicines is greatly expanded. We are now learning that many latent viral infections cause significant disease later in life. Multiple sclerosis & Epstein Barr Virus Alzheimers and Herpes virus Epstein Barr virus and several types of cancer. HPV and cancer aging and several types of latent viruses
piokoch 7y ago
I think that people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. can truly contribute to funding more science. For starters they can ask companies they fund to start paying taxes in some other place than Jersey, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg or any other tax heaven. Even more, they can start paying taxes themselves without passing their income through bogus "foundations", "funds", etc. One off donation that many companies are doing now "for the sake of the virus" is a nice PR stunt but does not change anything in the long run.
- fortydegrees 7y ago
  What makes you think the government is more efficient at distributing money than Sam, Bill and Mark?
  - tucosan 7y ago
    Funding of early fundamental and clinical research rarely comes from VC capital, since the probability for a positive ROI is quite low. This is why early research is mostly funded by governments. Sadly, a lot of conditions are not properly researched due to lack of funding. Some governments are better at distributing funds than others. The current US administration isn’t.
superpermutat0r 7y ago
Currently, scientific research is not efficient enough to deserve more funding. The pyramidal scheme, currently collapsing, is just extracting as much money as possible with as little innovation as possible. If there were thousands of small research labs taking tiny amounts of money, it would be worth it purely for the massive amount of trial and error, but currently, the system is just collapsing.
waveyshinobi 7y ago
Is anybody thinking deeply about what it means to fight against natural selection as a modern species? I know nobody wants to hear this nihilistic take but humans are the most destructive invasive species in existence. I wish biomedical and health science research instead focused more on how we can lead rich lives with the little time we do have, knowing nature might take us back to dust for any reason, and leave the world a better place with more knowledge for the next generation. Instead we have old wealthy (mostly white) men driving the interests of science research for them to live longer and have more time to spend their money destroying the earth. It is an ethical mess to know how to cure a disease or give one better health outcomes and intentionally not apply it but there has to be a balance. I worked in a hospice for a few years and I saw elderly folk often abandoned by their (alive and well) families and dieing alone. It sounds crazy to think but I feel like too much of anything, even longevity, is not good.
magwa101 7y ago
Please vote for logical not ideological candidates.
bshanks 7y ago
We do need to fund more science, but we also need to fund more PPE, more testing and contact tracing, more medical equipment and more nurses. Please support the Coronavirus Action Plan: https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan

380 points by davnicwil 7y ago

williesleg 7y ago

Please find more humanity.

deleted 7y ago

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bertil 7y ago

Some would see a contradiction between that impulse and how companies from Y-Combinator might use a tax-reduction scheme. Some could even see a connection between tax lawyers introduced by Y-Combinator to founders and that practice. I’m not saying that _has_ to be the case but "tax-avoidance / tax-optimisation / complex international structure / negotiation with government keen to offer low tax deal" is a common point made against large tech companies. I’m surprised why Sam doesn’t connect that point to his point, or confront that issue directly.

philwelch 7y ago
The connection is extremely indirect. If companies voluntarily pay more tax than they are legally required to, the vast majority of that money will go to Medicare, Social Security, defense, and interest on the national debt, with only a tiny amount going to scientific research. Conversely, if companies use these "loopholes" to reduce their tax liability by $X, they can directly donate all of that money for scientific research. Going beyond that for a moment, some corporations voluntarily foregoing these loopholes will not even be enough for the US federal government to be able to afford their existing obligations, let alone increase spending on research or anything else. Furthermore, in a competitive environment, any company that does forego these loopholes is likely to find itself losing out to a competitor that uses these loopholes to undercut their prices. That leaves closing the loopholes altogether, which is something the government would have to do. But that's not even enough to address the deficit--the government would have to either cut spending or raise taxes elsewhere. And it's entirely possible that closing corporate tax loopholes isn't even a good idea regardless. Corporations are legal straw men that, in most cases, ultimately pass on their earnings to their shareholders. A corporate tax effectively taxes all shareholders the same--in other words, the retired grandmother pays the same amount as the billionaire investor. In other words, corporate taxes can actually be far less progressive than individual taxes.
- bertil 7y ago
  I would have loved Sam to make that argument explicitly: it’s not his style to talk about government money as if it grows on trees. I suspect he wouldn’t have looked at the overall distribution but where to assign marginal tax revenues.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Corporate taxes are only 4.4% of US tax revenue[1], there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference. Especially compared to what most successful startups end up doing, which is to employ people and pay them salaries that are within the upper tax brackets. Respectfully, you seem to be trying to draw a strong connection here where it's not obvious that one exists. [1] https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2020/ https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2020/
    - bertil 7y ago
      > there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference Citation needed.
      - philwelch 7y ago
        I already provided one, what are you talking about?
        bertil 7y ago
        You are saying that what’s left after tax optimisation is small. Not that the potential revenue if corporate benefits were taxed effectively is small. Do you have an estimate of the revenue that is declared in low-tax jurisdiction?

nickff 7y ago

Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other government-funded researchers are simply responding to their incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case. The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted to gaming a government-funded and bureaucratically-run grant system. Major government funded research projects (especially international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive structure. Pouring more money in will not help us. A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.

djaque 7y ago
I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators. Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results. On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.
- 7y ago

jankotek 7y ago

Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...

umvi 7y ago
> but is it not efficiently used This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors. When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite. It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I agree that a lot of money is being wasted but your estimate of 4 people is very naive.
  - umvi 7y ago
    What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it? Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      There are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It’s hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.

teen 7y ago

Wouldn't these investors want a return on their investment? Is it possible to invest without profiting off of the pandemic?

m0zg 7y ago
I don't think anyone would mind some company "profiting from the pandemic" if it actually had something that works. Heck, the US government would probably sign you a hundred billion dollar check in 15 minutes at this point if you had a cure or a working therapeutic which can be deployed immediately.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mhb 7y ago
  They should offer that as a prize.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    That's one way to do it. That's what it is, essentially.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 7y ago

>Scientists can get us out of this. What they need are money and connections. No. It's too late to get us out of this. We can prevent the next case. But no, it's too late now. What was needed with coronavirus was prevention. That's a matter of politics and economics. No science.

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
Hence why the title has "funding" in it.
- jolmg 7y ago
  By "economics", I don't think LatteLazy is referring to the need of funding of anything in particular.
zippoxer 7y ago
On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would have a mass-producible vaccine ready, then you could say science has saved us from a second pandemic.
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  I'd love that, and it's possible. But given how hard other coronavirus vaccines have proven to be and quickly these viruses mutate...
dangom 7y ago
Indeed. Scientists and policy makers know that decisions are taken by policy makers.

tomaszs 7y ago

Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years. Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus. We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place. Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.

gen3 7y ago
Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research already. Smartphones have given millions of people access to information they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then 80% of there population online [1] The issues you listed would take significantly more time then “five years” to cure. I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed and used. [0] First link when searching for DARPA inventions: https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-inventions https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-in... [1] https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/smartphone-adoption-puts-kenya-at-top-of-internet-penetration-in-africa https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/...
- tomaszs 7y ago
  Yes - Army had impact on development. War - didnt. Even if we discuss research caused by wars i am 100% sure these would be made a lots faster without an actual war. And also - its natural army attracts some bright minds because sometimes only army has resources and money to fund research. So as long as it is used for good cause it makes sense as a symbiosis
- bluGill 7y ago
  That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we don't know. If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have fire breathing dragons!

fyp 7y ago

Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be failing us in the US. Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.

samstave 7y ago
Un-popular opinion incoming: FUCK YOUR SURVEILLANCE STATE apologist propaganda. I don't WANT Predator following me about and retinal scanning me into the Starbucks.
- creddit 7y ago
  I think it will only be unpopular because of your inability to say it in a stable, civil way.
  - samstave 7y ago
    Don't spy on me. Period. --- Actually let me expand upon that. First with an annecdote.... I Was at RSA conf in SF a few years ago - ran into an old friend who was contracting to the NSA - and then met the head of cybercrimes for the state dept (I cant recall his title sadly - I kept a pic of his business card for years, but have since lost it) They invite me to dinner that night. There is about ~12 of us - and they are trading war stories of shit they have done in cybercrime blah blah (I was working at Lockheed at the time) There was this super you, SUPER brilliant eng that was with them and he was talking about hacking this, that and the other - being on redteam and they had to physically infiltrate, pick locks and steal this and that from blueteam... but there was a subtext which was fucking disturbing. They were all bragging about these OPs... And while I understand the national necessity of having such skills in your bet - the problem was that I realized I was sitting at a table with 100% psychopaths that didnt have a single moral fiber in their soul.... and it was about the thrill and ego of being "look at how fucking smart and technical and cool I am" I literally excused myself from the table and acted as though I was going to use the restroom. I simply walked out of the restaurant. The point is, that these orgs use very young smart people and enable and empower them with autonomy, authority, and praise and you wind up with digital psychos. I am looking at you [lots of surveillance companies all over HN] So, FUCK authoritarian supporting, bullshit businesses.

carapace 7y ago

While you're at it, fix everything else too. I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot). He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. ) Or see his Old Man River's City project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ ) A city in a single building with ten million square feet of enclosed open space. Add some applied ecology ("Permaculture") and you've got an arcology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ). We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our power with our values.

m4rtink 7y ago
>He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics. The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often lacked basic public amenities, at least initially. In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by modern ones & isolating the sides). >hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. ) Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered extraodrinary around here.

earthtourist 7y ago

Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk. Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected. I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly. The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.

koeng 7y ago
I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea. The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests), which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for. Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show results if your body is already producing antibodies. The really good test is an RT-PCR or RT-LAMP test, which uses a pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant. Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't approved by the FDA AFAIK.
lr 7y ago
You would have to do this every day, too. Getting tested doesn't mean you are not exposed on the way home that day, or the way back to work. Also, what if you wanted to go to multiple places in the same day? You would have to be tested n-times, as you could have been infected going from one business to the other. What I do not hear people talking about is this: Getting tested once is not enough. If you do not have COVID-19 today, it doesn't mean you are not going to have it tomorrow. The only test that can tell you that is an antibody test. Also, we don't even know yet (for sure, anyway) if people can be re-infected.
deleted 7y ago
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AxiomaticSpace 7y ago

Pedantic correction: R0 actually refers to the contagiousness of a virus before any public health measures are taken (including vaccines). R is the contagiousness of a virus in the world as it currently is. So if an effective vaccine is produced, R will go below one, but R0 will be unaffected.

raizinho 7y ago
Is there a similar bit of terminology for the case fatality rate?

koeng 7y ago

In the future, I'm hoping some of the dreams of synthetic biology come true (basically, decentralization of biotech). I work on that problem in close collaboration with a lot of community lab spaces, and it is surprising how many have the capacity and knowledge to implement rapid testing in their local communities and the inability to do so because of regulation. Biotech, if you run proper controls, isn't actually that hard. A lot of those spaces are now seriously struggling because of the shut down. The main thing that is stupid about how the FDA is approving tests is that they approve protocols, even though they have lots of controls for input->output. Coming from a computer science side, I'd imagine they'd so something along the lines of unit tests, but they aren't - they're still regulating how the protocol is done itself.

cma 7y ago
By injecting the coronavirus rna strand into a cell in culture, anyone could make it in their garage if synth bio dreams come true. You’d have to hope countermeasures advance faster but that’s hard to prove.
- koeng 7y ago
  Sure, or you could just go swab sick people and keep it in storage for a while. More people want to build than destroy IMO. If we tested in the synbio dream, this outbreak would have never happened in the first place.
Reelin 7y ago
This is amazing! I used to do academic research, and I had _no idea_ that community biotech labs existed! https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab-puts-diy-spin-biotech https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab-put... That article mentions the cost of equipment. In academia, we used to semi-seriously discuss building our own stuff. We generally didn't because even basic engineering, fabrication, and firmware require a lot of time and effort. (We were occasionally forced to when we needed something extremely specialized that simply wasn't available off the shelf.) It seems like open source equipment designs don't exist largely because they don't usually make sense for academia or industry to fund. I wonder if that approach might be viable for this type of endeavor, since it would allow designs to be shared between groups and would lower the cash barrier to that of the raw materials? I'm not sure how you'd navigate the patent minefield, but if successful I think it would benefit society at large.

anthony_r 7y ago

Not sure if necessary. You can get so much funding for anything covid related, it's almost like ".com" in 90s or adding blockchain to your name more recently. But this time it's so much more urgent, so I think people will forgive easily the incredible amount of misses in the area that we'll probably have. I'd much rather see the governments fund coronavirus-related research after this is over. The primary reason why SARS (v1) still doesn't have a vaccine and research was abandoned was due to the incentive structure (SARS is gone, and so is funding). I wish we knew more about coronaviruses now, it's been over 10 years since SARS ...

reasonattlm 7y ago

My company, Repair Biotechnologies, is working on regrowth of the atrophied thymus via FOXN1 upregulation. We're at the preclinical stage of getting the vector and formulation into shape, and the start of tests in influenza exposure models in mice. The atrophy of the thymus is a major reason why the adaptive immune system declines. The evidence from sex steroid ablation in prostate cancer patients strongly suggests it is possible to provoke the naive T cell component of the adaptive immune system into regenerating itself in a matter of months, provided that the thymus is restored to more youthful activity. Also evidence from the Intervene Immune trial with growth hormone (not advisable as a strategy, but congratulations to that team on getting interesting data) for the same proposition. To be clear this is a years long process for Repair Biotechnologies that would see us into trials around 2022, but at some point fixing the aged immune system will and must become a practical concern. At that point, we'll all be a lot less concerned about pandemics of this nature, as the mortality and hospitalization rates will be much reduced. There are other things that need to handled to restore all of the aged immune system: getting hematopoietic stem cells back into line and functioning properly, regenerative medicine for lymph nodes, some form of targeted destruction for malfunctioning immune cells. But each of these items will give incremental benefits on its own.

saintx 7y ago

According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient. To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health." > He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant. What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable. 1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized. 2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions. 3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward. Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-nih-failed-test-coronavirus-drugs-it-studied-drunk-monkeys-soap https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...

ink_13 7y ago
Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem, and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way". Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.
- dajohnson89 7y ago
  If the attempt is novel, wouldn't it be worthwhile to share your failed results to help prevent others going down the same dead-end path you just did?

gdubs 7y ago

This might be an unpopular opinion around here, but this is an obvious area for bold public investment. Countless startups sprung out of public investment into basic research during the 20th century. And places like Bell Labs spent more on R&D due to the tax situation of the time. Beginning in the 70s and 80s, investors began to push for lower and lower capital gains taxes. So, I guess I'm saying that if you're an investor and you want more research into basic science, we could release the vice grip on capital gains rates and let the public pour a ton of money into it. I'm hoping for this to provoke a rational conversation and not a political flame-war – so, please respond fair-mindedly.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

Please pay more tax. Then we can fund the science with it. Honestly, I heard a comment on Slate Money to the effect of "Why aren't the billionaire class doing more to fund COVID research" All the epidemiology, all the WHO plans for last decade, all the incredible co-ordinated response globally (#) has been publicly funded. Give over on the idea private companies are good for anything but taking existing research in the hands of hundreds and putting it into hands of millions and billions. Pay tax. Vote for competence. (#) yes I happen to think that shutting down most of the planet, in an attempt to save millions of lives, in a matter of weeks, is an amazing feat of global co-ordination. Yes there are lots of local differences and many many ways things could be better but humanity could have done so much worse.

refurb 7y ago
Around 20% of all biotech revenue gets put back into R&D. So the next time your insurance pays $1000 for a drug, know that $200 of that goes back to R&D.
- cma 7y ago
  The rest largely funds more fireworks at the Super Bowl through consumer targeted drug ads, and lunches to manipulate doctors into prescribing based on soft bribery.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    And a significant part of R&D is in practice patent-engineering and slightly better solution to trivially solved issues.
lonelappde 7y ago
Tax is independent of spending, thanks to fiat currency.
closeparen 7y ago
It would make sense to pay tax, instead of contribute directly to research, if you only wanted 3% of the money to go to research. What you’re really saying here is it’s wrong that some entities choose to direct more money to research than society does collectively, and they should defer to society’s decision to spend on other things instead.

marcell 7y ago

In terms of COVID-19, I'm skeptical there's any real need for VC style funding: 1. Existing biotech companies are probably perfectly capable of addressing this with usual means. Vaccines are a known quantity, not novel disruption. 2. By the time any startup gets off the ground (6 months at least), the crisis will likely have passed

comicjk 7y ago
Existing vaccine efforts will probably succeed, but the possibility that they fail is real and quite scary (to me, anyway). So I'm glad we have a bunch of longer-term speculative projects as backup.

barkingcat 7y ago

The US has been politically antiscience for this entire administration. It's not a matter of funding more science. It's about voting out politicians that seek to benefit themselves instead of thinking about what science can do, and what science has already done for humanity. I also would like to counter - science doesn't need any more money. Money distorts the progress of science (for example, look at the grants system - what a dumpster fire). What science needs is proper primary and secondary education and a healthy population. Start with fixing schools and healthcare, and you'll have so much science you wouldn't be able to stop it.

aazaa 7y ago

> Investors and donors—this is where we can help. Please consider shifting some of your focus and capital to scientific efforts addressing the pandemic. (And future pandemics too—I think this will be a before-and-after moment in the world, and until we can defend against new viruses quickly, things are going to be different.) Although the sentiment resonates, the business logic does not. Consider antibiotic drugs. Big Pharma and biotechs alike have been jettisoning programs. Why? It has nothing to do with science. These drugs simply aren't as profitable as others: > Several major pharmaceutical companies recently shut down their antibiotic and antiviral research projects, backing away from the growing threat of superbugs, which may kill more than 10 million people a year by 2050. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-backs-off-superbug-why-5-drugmakers-bailed-on-antibiotic-research.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-ba... How much do you think a cure for COVID-19 will make its creator? Be careful when you answer, because you'll need to include all of the R&D effort in the calculation, and also consider the opportunity cost of not pursuing something more profitable. The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded.

twomoretime 7y ago
I think R&D is going to be a lot cheaper when you have the FDA authorizing emergency compassionate use for promising drugs. >The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots Why not? We are basically in wartime conditions. Even if the government doesn't relax it's rules, there's a high likelihood that enough hospitals/doctors will to conduct high risk trials on critically ill patients. Now is the best time for moon shots.
- deleted 7y ago
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eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded. Ok, so let's just socialize the pharma industry and treat it as a matter of national defense rather than consumer luxury. With respect to infectious and transmissible disease, the paradigm of treating health as a matter of personal comfort and subjective preference has very plainly failed.

julesqs 7y ago

it's really rich to read a blog post from someone at YC wishing "the federal government was doing much more". YC and the extended universe of VCs have spent years providing an intellectual facade to undermine confidence in a centralized government, public funding of critical services, and promoting the profit motive in places like healthcare. The past decade in America has seen the dominance of the capitalist tech utopians like Paul Graham, and we are seeing the results. For god's sake Peter Thiel was working with YC barely two years ago and now Sam wants to complain that the federal government isn't prepared to respond to crises?? what a joke.

fanatic2pope 7y ago
You are being silenced, but you are 100% correct. Free market absolutism is religion dressed up as reason.

dekhn 7y ago

During the clinton administration, NIH funding doubled over ~5 years. This led to a glut of PhDs (far, far more than there are faculty slots or biotech jobs) who had limited job options and it didn't really translate to higher scientific productivity (in some sense, it just ended up selecting for professors who were more cutthroat and willing to publish lower quality stuff in higher h-index journals). I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity. The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.

pen2l 7y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average institution or entity that Bill Gates chooses to fund is much more productive than the average NIH funded lab. I think the answer lies in taking a good look at where the money is going. Particularly, I think I think we need to give more to the very productive people and institutions. I know it's the million dollar question, by what is Salk doing that others are not? Or CSHL which has something like 8 nobel laureates there. One last observation is that a career in science just doesn't make sense anymore. Why slave away making $40 or $50k as a postdoc or an instructor after years of studious study when you can pull 6 figures in tech right out of school? This right here is one of the things that tells the bright ones to stay away from academia.
- dnautics 7y ago
  Ex-Scientist here: While I agree the gates foundation is likely doing a better job than the nih... The danger is this, how do you decide upon a metric for productivity? How do you then prevent 1) corruption, absent that, 2) inadvertent corruption via biases (I'm going to judge proposals in my field more favorably because they are less confusing or more comfortable, or the inverse, more harshly since I want to keep competition out or know the pitfalls better), and absent that, 3) goodhart's law?

curo 7y ago

Does anyone have a list of all the COVID-19 research and response orgs that would be funded? I've worked in international dev where normally government grants go to a handful of familiars who subcontract out. It's often a question of visibility for everyone else (smaller groups either win subcontracts or have a shot at getting their work accelerated directly). I know science funding is different, but I wanted to map all the orgs & relationships for visibility. The best list I can find are previous grantees of https://wellcome.ac.uk/ https://wellcome.ac.uk/

upofadown 7y ago

It seems to me that it is way easier to get funding for medical research vs straight up biology. That might be wrong. Biology is what all of medical research eventually hinges on and any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money. It is super easy to contribute to the search for treatments for particular diseases but how do you contribute to the fundamental research that ultimately fixes problems?

dnautics 7y ago
It might be wrong, but it also might be right. >any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money But most research in pure biology is irrelevant. So you're effectively mistaking a type II error for a type I error in your argument.

mathfailure 7y ago

No >:[

fataliss 7y ago

Like it's often the case this is not just a problem of money. You can research virtually anything and not everything will yield anything of value to the human race. We need to have some direction. Epidemiology for example, sounds like a good high level scope that is definitely more directed towards human gains. Biology is a huge field. Also private funding and humanity's benefit are often at odds. Private funding tends to aim at making investors a return. What we really need (and Sam alludes to it) is a government/public fund for research so that labs have the ressources to research things that may never yield commercial profitability. If you leave it to big pharma and other private biotech companies to advance humanity, it's like leaving the food industry in charge of making humans healthier.... not happening :(

jashephe 7y ago

This calls to mind the ever-relevant “Science: The Endless Frontier” [1] by Vannevar Bush, who more or less oversaw the entire American federal research enterprise during and post-WWII. He famously said that the best thing you can do for scientific progress is give scientists money and then get out of the way (i.e. not even putting out requests for grant submissions in specific domains, like the NIH often does now). [1] https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm

m0zg 7y ago

It's not just funding. It's also focus. In recent years the CDC was tasked with fighting obesity and "gun violence" "epidemics" as well. Neither of those things is an epidemic. They are not contagious even. Why the fuck does the CDC waste their resources on this, instead of the real, actual epidemiological problems the eventual emergence of which is not only entirely plausible, but which have happened in practice several times already over the past couple of decades. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/... https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html

scroot 7y ago

Does HARC count?

kayhi 7y ago

I'm a fan of increased federal funding, but there's also a massive problem with the pricing of scientific supplies and chemicals. We commonly see 2-3x and sometimes 10x differences in prices for the exact same item from the same manufacuturer. We're (https://labspend.com https://labspend.com) tackling this problem but it's massive and not often mentioned or known by people outside of the lab. We've consulted with companies and help them identify millions in savings. A couple of issues contribute which are the pricing isn't transparent like hospitals in the USA. Also there are only 2-3 major suppliers and for certain items it's essentially a monopoly.

sytelus 7y ago

US should create 100 more universities. Each university campus lights up the economy of otherwise sleepy written off towns. The state operated universities can help lower the tuition and in turn reduce the student debt burden - one of the biggest issue. It creates more faculty positions for PhDs coming out. It attracts more international students bringing in money and talent. It lowers stress on outrageously competitive higher education space. It creates more research departments and opportunities. A creation of typical university campus is merely $1B. For $100B total, this generates so many benefits that it shouldn’t be even question. A lot of progress in US happened because of establishment of new universities. At some point we didn’t kept pace with growing demands and now education as well as research has become scars, expensive things available Only to elite.

sykick 7y ago
Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn’t have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can’t get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.
  - sykick 7y ago

ajudson 7y ago

I encourage everyone here to read the book Science-mart by Mirowski. It reveals a lot of limitations of adding markets and the search for "efficiency" in science.

StandardFuture 7y ago

Is Sam putting his money where his mouth is on this? Is he putting his time and effort there as well? Genuine questions. Even just putting together an obvious and simple historical timeline correlating increased scientific funding with improved standards of living would help. How come something as simple as that is not being brought forward instead? Is it possible that putting effort into proving this assertion might end up disproving it instead? We cannot know until better and more legitimate proof is attempted to be found. Proof > Opinion

deleted 7y ago

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campercoder 7y ago

Thank you Sam Altman for pointing this desperate need out. Man do we ever need more scientifically minded & trained politicians. I am hopeful that by the time we are on the other side of this, our knowledge of antiviral medicines is greatly expanded. We are now learning that many latent viral infections cause significant disease later in life. Multiple sclerosis & Epstein Barr Virus Alzheimers and Herpes virus Epstein Barr virus and several types of cancer. HPV and cancer aging and several types of latent viruses

piokoch 7y ago

I think that people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. can truly contribute to funding more science. For starters they can ask companies they fund to start paying taxes in some other place than Jersey, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg or any other tax heaven. Even more, they can start paying taxes themselves without passing their income through bogus "foundations", "funds", etc. One off donation that many companies are doing now "for the sake of the virus" is a nice PR stunt but does not change anything in the long run.

fortydegrees 7y ago
What makes you think the government is more efficient at distributing money than Sam, Bill and Mark?
- tucosan 7y ago
  Funding of early fundamental and clinical research rarely comes from VC capital, since the probability for a positive ROI is quite low. This is why early research is mostly funded by governments. Sadly, a lot of conditions are not properly researched due to lack of funding. Some governments are better at distributing funds than others. The current US administration isn’t.

superpermutat0r 7y ago

Currently, scientific research is not efficient enough to deserve more funding. The pyramidal scheme, currently collapsing, is just extracting as much money as possible with as little innovation as possible. If there were thousands of small research labs taking tiny amounts of money, it would be worth it purely for the massive amount of trial and error, but currently, the system is just collapsing.

waveyshinobi 7y ago

Is anybody thinking deeply about what it means to fight against natural selection as a modern species? I know nobody wants to hear this nihilistic take but humans are the most destructive invasive species in existence. I wish biomedical and health science research instead focused more on how we can lead rich lives with the little time we do have, knowing nature might take us back to dust for any reason, and leave the world a better place with more knowledge for the next generation. Instead we have old wealthy (mostly white) men driving the interests of science research for them to live longer and have more time to spend their money destroying the earth. It is an ethical mess to know how to cure a disease or give one better health outcomes and intentionally not apply it but there has to be a balance. I worked in a hospice for a few years and I saw elderly folk often abandoned by their (alive and well) families and dieing alone. It sounds crazy to think but I feel like too much of anything, even longevity, is not good.

magwa101 7y ago

Please vote for logical not ideological candidates.

bshanks 7y ago

We do need to fund more science, but we also need to fund more PPE, more testing and contact tracing, more medical equipment and more nurses. Please support the Coronavirus Action Plan: https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan