4 ms·
Just imagine that €21B spent on biological/medical programs.
by jmount 6y ago
Just imagine that €21B spent on biological/medical programs.
- andrepd 6y agoYou should be more angry about 700B on defense spending in the US, or >2000B in bank/corporate bailouts. Rather than being upset that money is being spent on a good thing instead of an (in your eyes) better thing.
- epistasis 6y agoI'm biased, but that's exactly what I would like to see, and I think would have huge scientific returns. That's on the order of magnitude of the NIH budget in the US. But it's spread across a huge number of researchers rather than just a few huge projects. The Human Genome Project was only a $1B project which led to huge technology development in sequencers. Other efforts at developing large canonical datasets have been less effective at spinning out clear tech wins, but they have had huge science wins. I think biology has been really good at balancing having tons of churn from small independent labs pushing on new ideas, and coming together for big asks when it makes sense.
- ape4 6y agoThere are medical spinoffs. eg Positron emission tomography = PET scan.
- pfdietz 6y agoPET scans are a spinoff of accelerators -- accelerators of the kind built before WW2, with energies six or more orders of magnitude below that of the LHC. Cyclotrons are used to make 18F, a shortlived positron emitter that is incorporated into a fluorinated glucose derivative to act as a tracer detected by the scanner. You're not going to see medical spinoffs from massively larger machines.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThe NIH budget is currently around $40B a year.
- delfinom 6y agoIn the US, that would get you one new medicine, a few dozen yachts, and a few thousand citizens in debt :D
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoBiomed research is quite expensive, and $20b aint't that big.