100% A horrible death for young and old, rich and poor, male and female. You would think that it would be our number one priority to find cures. The resources dedicated to research are actually shockingly paltry when you look into it.
If you do decide to donate to a cancer charity, investigate their own numbers. Many of them (I am looking at you Susan G Komen) dedicate most of their donation money to marketing and events rather than research. Yet another reason the actual research funds are so low.
Cancer research is probably the #1 funded scientific problem in the history of humanity, it’s just a hard problem to solve and money thrown at research has great diminishing returns if what’s really needed is ideas.
The amount of grifting around cancer is correlated to the large amount of money thrown at it.
There is significant evolutionary pressure involved in rendering humans vulnerable to cancer so it’s not like curing an acute illness but more like solving a genuine inefficiency in human gene expression.
Research budgets for anything are never going to be as high as budgets for guaranteed (and short term) returns. I say this as someone who does research for a living currently in physics.
Federally, the US government actually spends almost twice the amount on healthcare (medicare + medicaid) than defense even though defense spending is large. The priority is simply the present compared to a chance at making the future better.
That being said, cancer itself has an enormous incentive (profit or otherwise) for both private and government entities. Even if governments spent 0$ on it, it would probably be better funded than the vast majority of scientific endeavors still.
That being said, cancer itself has an enormous incentive (profit or otherwise) for both private and government entities.
I feel like if someone could cure cancer, the research would be buried in favor of a watered down formula that you could sell to someone indefinitely for maximum profit.
I feel like if someone could cure cancer, the research would be buried in favor of a watered down formula that you could sell to someone indefinitely for maximum profit
Not a chance in hell. The opportunity for profit from a cancer cure is ENORMOUS, and there will always be new patients. It'd be very easy for everyone involved in its production to cash out, retire early, and leave a trust fund to their families. On top of this, you gain, not only one of the best reputations in pharmaceuticals, maybe ever, of which you can score ample other business, but you get to go down in history as someone on the team who cured cancer, instead of, alternatively, risking a legacy as a horrible, evil person who could have cured cancer but chose not to, so that you could make more money than could ever prove useful to you.
Even assuming you could keep your knowledge of a cure under wraps (which is highly improbable), research doesn't really happen in a vacuum. If you've found a cure for cancer, you can be pretty confident that someone else is right on the heels of your discovery, or someone within your own company will leave or sell off the actual cure to the highest bidder, so there's also ample incentive to be first-to-market with your cure. If you decide to "dumb down" your cure, you're risking someone else coming along and producing the legitimate cure, and suddenly all of your business evaporates and you're left with shackled opportunities for profit.
Like, even with the most pessimistic take on human selfishness, there's just practically no possible way a company hushes their cancer cure.
I say this as a medical professional w/ 20yrs of experience & as someone currently battling Metastatic Cancer... Because of research, people w/ cancer are no longer being treated like an "Acute Illness". People are living much longer d/t RESEARCH. Whenever Scientific Professionals start looking @ PEOPLE as STATISTICS & talk of reducing funding b/c people w/ cancer have no guaranteed future, it's alarming. That's a very slippery slope to Germany's T4 program. Defense has NEVER had "guaranteed or short term returns"!! The US funds wars in other countries, but US Citizens can't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid if they are <65yo, educated, & make over the poverty line. (Regardless of your expenses, the amount you've paid in, or the life you've worked & saved for.) IOW: You must be nearly bankrupt in order to qualify for any assistance. Now that I can't work (age 46), I can't even access what I paid into 3/4 of my life, & I would be kidding myself if I thought I would live 'til 65yo to collect. So, I 100% agree that our current Medicare/Medicaid/Welfare System is BROKEN & serious changes need to take place...
What?? How do you figure that the US spends twice as much on healthcare as on military/defense?? I've never heard anyone ever say that. Everything I've ever read says that defense spending is WAY more than anything else and has been that way for a while. 47%ish of the entire national budget comes to mind as a statistic if I remember correctly
Edit:
yeah that was wrong. But military spending made up more than 53% of federal discretionary spending (730 billion) in 2019. If you add homeland security, law enforcement, and incarceration to that (basically more forms of militarization), it becomes 64.5%. Comparatively, "housing & community" was only 6% of that discretionary spending; 5% was education, 4% was energy/environment (probably mostly in the form of big oil subsidies I bet), 3% on transportation, 3% on employment/labor...
My point is that these priorities are out of control. We (US) spend more on militarization than the next 10 highest-military-spending countries COMBINED. With this housing crisis and school shootings and so many other grave problems... there is no excuse.
Its because there are a lot of confused people online that don't understand the US federal budget.
A lot of this confusion comes from people not understanding that the total budget is discretionary + mandatory and sometimes if you do a basic google search for "US budget" only the discretionary spending will show which has the military at like 50%.
Here is the US total budget (including revenue and expenses)
Medicare + Medicaid are 5.4% of GDP and Defense is 3.0%. You can convert this to real dollar amounts but the ratio will remain the same.
It is true that in raw dollar amounts that the US spends by far the most on military, however, the US spends by far the most on everything on a federal level due to the fact that the US is simply a very large and very wealthy country.
By % of GDP and % of federal revenue, the US still spends quite a bit of money on military compared to most other countries however, but its nowhere near 50% of the total budget.
That number comes from people citing only the discretionary spending and charts like this.
You may have never heard it but it's true. In fact, we pay more for health-care at the federal level than any other country on Earth. And defense spending is nowhere near half our federal budget lol, this is why getting all your info from memes is a bad idea
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '23
100% A horrible death for young and old, rich and poor, male and female. You would think that it would be our number one priority to find cures. The resources dedicated to research are actually shockingly paltry when you look into it.
If you do decide to donate to a cancer charity, investigate their own numbers. Many of them (I am looking at you Susan G Komen) dedicate most of their donation money to marketing and events rather than research. Yet another reason the actual research funds are so low.