Comment below. Regards,
jrs On Aug 26, 2014, at 11:25 PM, Dibyo wrote: > I found this - > http://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/6040435/als-ice-bucket-challenge-and-why-we-give-to-charity-donate > - which looks at some stats on deaths vs. money raised. > > It's interesting that Diabetes and Chronic Pulmonary Obstructions (is this > related to Asthma?) > feel underfunded if one goes only by this chart. But another thing the > article mentions is that simple fixes in developing countries (as opposed > to the US) will have a far bigger impact than anything done in the US. This > seems very intuitively true to me. > > Dibyo > > This is an interesting article that makes some good points but glosses over others. I lost a brother to ALS; he was only 45 when he died (after 5 years of illness), so naturally I'm sympathetic to giving money to ALS causes. But there are other considerations that affect my charitable impulse beyond a sentimental desire to "get" the disease that got my brother. For one thing, researchers have been making really exciting discoveries about the causes and mechanisms of ALS. A breakthrough feels tantalizingly close. I don't know if this is the case with other diseases -- like the brain cancer that took my sister at a young age or the breast cancer that took my sister-in-law at a young age -- but to my naive understanding, ALS seems closer to a breakthrough than those cancers. I want to help make that breakthrough. For another thing, many of the most promising lines of ALS research use embryonic stem cells. However in the USA, by law federal money cannot be used for projects that use embryonic stem cells.[1] The U.S. government (through the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation) is the largest source of research money. That implies that some of the most promising lines of research are not eligible for financial support from the largest financial supporter. Project ALS, on the other hand, is entirely privately funded, and is thus not subject to restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. I support Project ALS because the government (and my tax dollars) don't. [2] For a third thing, we already know how to reduce the impact of killers like cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Obesity, sedentary lifestyles, tobacco and environmental pollution are all implicated. I support projects designed to get people to change unhealthy behaviors, and I understand that research may be needed to figure out the best way to do that. But social science research is a lot, lot cheaper than fundamental laboratory science of the kind Project ALS is doing. We already know how to prevent many, many cases of heart disease, cancer, diabetes. Why we're not preventing them is a separate problem. But we don't know how to prevent ALS. Similarly, I support projects to improve the health of extremely poor people around the world by things like improving local water supplies and providing mosquito nets. But successful, non-governmental projects in areas like this are often done by small charities or NGOs which are not set up to reliably handle an influx of tens of millions of dollars such as created by the Ice Bucket Challenge. NOTES: 1. The situation on funding & state and federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research is actually considerably more complicated, as explained by wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell_laws_and_policy_in_the_United_States However, by not relying on Federal $$, Project ALS avoids many actual and potential roadblocks, leaving its scientists free to focus on science. 2. Project ALS: http://www.projectals.org
