Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2013. It is a news piece about Bill Gates’s comments on research funding, and the state of malaria vaccines and funding has changed since then.
Since leaving Microsoft, Bill Gates has devoted himself body and soul to the Gates Foundation, whose purpose is to solve the most serious problems afflicting the planet. Today it is the most important foundation of its kind, since it is set to receive the fortunes of some of the world’s richest people when they die.
Gates has sharply criticised capitalism for having completely flawed priorities. One of the biggest problems the Gates Foundation is tackling is infectious disease, which causes millions of deaths around the world, and malaria in particular. Bringing a malaria vaccine to developing countries has become the number one humanitarian priority, and yet there is no money to make it happen.
By contrast, as Gates pointed out, if you are a scientist working on products for male baldness, your research will not be short of funding at all.
As a famous doctor once put it, “one day we will see 92-year-old women with firm, perky breasts and 98-year-old men with fully working erections, but they will not remember what to do with them, because they will probably have Alzheimer’s, a disease that today gets less research funding than the cosmetic surgery and baldness industries.”
This is what Bill Gates calls “misdirected capitalism”: while malaria treatments depend on the generosity and donations of a few individuals and some foundations, investors’ money goes into other kinds of research. In reality, both could be profitable businesses for those investors if governments steered them properly and made them a priority.
The problem is that it does not pay for pharmaceutical companies to work on research aimed at poor people or people in developing countries, because they cannot pay for it. These companies receive no funding for research into priority diseases, and governments do not show much interest in wiping out diseases in those countries either. A product aimed at baldness, beauty or rejuvenation, on the other hand, has potential customers in the upper middle class, so pharmaceutical companies have no shortage of funding from the very start: investors know that by putting money into these products they will make big capital gains.
Unless something changes, it will be very hard to attract money to save millions of people from certain death.
To take just one example, for the cost of building a rocket and sending it to the moon, you could easily bring more than enough water to the developing world for people to grow their own crops and stop depending on food sent by charities.
Of course, that is where the ugliest side of yet another industry would show itself: the modern world has no interest in these countries having water and being able to grow crops, because they could end up with the largest farmland in the world and become the world’s top food exporters. And that makes a lot of people nervous.
Featured image: Jacklee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
