The best way to cure cancer is to regularly buy newfangled gadgets for yourself. I'm serious.

I'd be rich.

I'd buy the elephant man's bones.

A million chicks at the same time.

You need to raise your standards. As indicated in the OP, a billion barely pays for two.

damn you Elliot, i opened this thread to post this.

Wasnt cancer cured recently by eating organic food?

A billion dollars might be enough to come up with a worldwide cancer awareness/donation campaign that provides enough resources to cure cancer.

But directly, nah your bill wont go far to solve real world problems.

"Studies published in 2003 report an average pre-tax cost of approximately $800 million to bring a new drug (i.e. a drug with a new chemical entity) to market"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_development

I'd buy a damn brewery and turn the whole planet into alcoholics.

The biggest obstacle to curing cancer is moral issues and not money. If you can pay a bunch of poor people money to give them cancer and whatever crazy drugs that will almost certainly kill them you would have a much better shot than just throwing 10^9 dollars att it.

Uhhhhh not sure if that's how it would work I think it's a bit more involved than that.

There are still academics working on cancer, who get more than a billion combined, and who have a huge vested interest in the fame and renown that would come with curing cancer.

"Cancer" isn't one kind of thing. Even "prostate cancer" isn't a single disease. Every cancer is different, and every cancer involves a perversion of just about every cellular process.

A billion in cash (Benjamins) would easily fit inside of your standard Little Debbie delivery truck.



You'd just need to double-stack the pallets.


I have to agree somewhat with the sentiments of the people in this thread that a billion doesn't buy what it used to. But these people also need to remember that government money is not handed out the same way that private funds would be.

It's not so much how good you are at curing cancer with a government grant, it's just who you knew to get the grant to begin with.

I think private dollars are more likely to fall into the hands of true experts and innovative geniuses, and not just politically connected individuals and groups.

So I firmly believe that $1B in private money would be more effective than $1B in public money.

Proof of my theory can be seen in just about any government contract issued in the past 50 years.

And before someone goes there; yes, I'm sure favoritism exists in the private sector. But to compare it to the corruption in government would be absurd.

If i had a billion, id probably be wealthy enough to be able to live in New York AND call myself rich. Probably.

No it's not. Do you know anything about how the NIH and NSF grant application process works?

^^Yeah, it is harder to think of a stricter meritocracy that NSF grants

I would set up an educational process that gave students set rewards for meeting certain well defined and limited goals. No rewards would not be given until several goals were met. A period of time would have to past between meeting the first goal and the associated reward. Of course age of student would be under 16. Records would be kept and result published.

I'm skeptical.

Are we confusing red tape or arbitrary constraints with actual quality screening here?

I won't accuse them of handing money out as easily as a public works department, but I'd be shocked if there weren't more examples like "Wolfquest" where the NSF handed out $600k for someone to develop a video game where you play as a wolf in the wild.



Edit: Link to wolfquest http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_videos....media_id=62790

Currently, only about the top 10% of grant applications get funded, as chosen by a committee of experts in the field who don't work for the government but in academia. People writing applications have no say in who is on the committee that reviews their grant.

Well if Wolfquest is in the top 10%, then we need to cut the NSF budget and give that money to Ineedaride to blow instead.

Assert something has no value, become science expert.

I guess you're with Sarah Palin that fruit fly research is completely worthless, too?

The NSF is also supposed to educate the general public about science. Wolfquest clearly looks like it could potentially do that.

Depends on the research, Wookie. I don't keep up with Sarah Palin's latest controversies, so I don't know what you're referring to.

I can't believe you guys are sitting here defending Wolfquest though.

It's the kind of thing that should be paid for with privately raised PETA funds or something. Not a taxpayer funded federal agency.

It looks really fun and has scientific content. I don't see why it is so bad

Oh, I'm sure it's the best wolf game ever made.

That doesn't mean we should be blowing tax dollars out the window to make it when our finances are in flames.

It also speaks to OP's point that if he was given a billion dollars, he could probably do better than Wolfquest. Which by your own admission is in the "top 10%" of government funded research.