I dare you to find me an example of someone so shamelessly, transparently looking to profit off of the hypothetical suffering of others.
EDIT: OK, I guess it wasn't clear why I find this hysterical. I'll explain how I see it. (As background, my job previous to starting Dawdle was as the junior member of the investment team at Ascension Health Ventures, a health care VC fund. I know a little something about how this all works in this space. Also, it's Saturday night and I'm sick at home but nonetheless tipsy.)
To me, a fund dedicated to pandemics is an example of thematic investing gone to its extremes. Pandemics are a such a minor subset of the incredibly large and complex health care system that it strikes me as implausible that there are $200 million worth of worthy VC investments. I could be wrong, but that's my gut.
But what really strikes me as hysterical is that pandemics are hypothetical situations. Medical devices and new pharmaceuticals are generally about finding solutions to known - and existing - problems. The economic returns from investments in those things are well known and replicable.
Pandemics are totally different - the next pandemic could be any from a range of diseases with any sort of transmission protocol with who-knows-what root cause. To me, trying to find infrastructure investments for something that doesn't exist (cause Lord help you decide what the next pandemic is going to be) that takes rapid adoption by the moribund and dysfunctional health care industry is crazy.
KPCB strikes me as being perhaps the world's only venture firm that could get $200 million in commitments from LPs for such a crazy-ass thesis. To me, it's just a crazy-ass boondoggle to think this could possibly work. But, hey, I could be wrong.
Thanks for the downvotes, though. Those who did showed a total lack of appreciation for the English language. Y'all saw "hysterical" and read "terrible". Perhaps you'll do better next time.
[EDIT 2: If I were to invest in "pandemics", I'd try to take advantage of the certain hysteria among the public that would result. That, at least, is predictable. EDIT 3: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2009/04/26/a-few-comments-on-... is worth the read.]
What the flying feeple is your problem? Should we all just roll over and die because no one invested in advanced medical tech that could save us?
Let me put this very clearly: Money is the basic unit which measures how much society cares about something. Money implements the power of professional specialization. Money is how real grownups get things done. http://lesswrong.com/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/.
If no one is allowed to make money, that means society is not allowed to care. If scientists are not allowed to make money off suffering, it means that you are not allowed to hire scientists and pay them to work on the problem.
Agreed. I take ibuprofen when I've got a head ache or a pulled muscle, but Wyeth makes a major profit off of me when I buy advil. However I'd much rather pay my money, like anyone else on the planet, to not feel like crap.
I worked construction, I know how painful a ripped muscle is. With ibuprofen I can continue working, because it prevents the inflammation from being more painful than my actual injury. What would anyone rather pay, 3-4 days wages while your muscle gets back to strength naturally or 3-4 hours of wages while your muscle gets back to strength with an anti-inflammatory.
I believe it's my right to pay as little as possible for the same quality of medicines and such, however if I want to pay $100 (or whatever) for a vaccination for the H1N1 virus, which has a very low death rate, then that's my prerogative. I'd be buying a service, which is called 'Peace of Mind', and the person selling it expects payments.
People have recovered from cancers without the necessary medical treatments. However, everyone here would pay every penny they have to be cured of a cancer, why? Because rational humans don't count on miracles happening, we count on disasters happening.
They would be profiting by curing the suffering of others.
The only way they make money is if they make people better. And if they make people better, they deserve money. In fact, money is a damn good incentive to make sure we have anti-virals like this ready.
The cynic in me wants to agree with you, but the pollyanna optimist in me wants to think that such thematic investing isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I say this because I worked in academic bioinformatics research in 2002-2004. After the anthrax scares in 2001 a bunch of grant money was available under the auspices of "bioterrorism research." My PIs simply redid their grant proposals to change their general science research to bioterrorism research. Some interesting tech that is generally applicable came out of said research: biosensor chips, mapping, basic statistical clustering research, anonymization and medical record database research, etc.
Thus in theory the $200M could be used to fund important projects under the guise of "pandemic prevention" that could be generally useful. A few things that come to mind are gene sequencing speedups and advancements in molecular engineering (of vaccines).
I'm not saying this is really how things would pan out but it's perhaps the optimistic scenario. After all, the funding for the internet came around because the USA was panicked about the Soviets becoming technologically superior - ARPA arose because the Russians launched Sputnik.
EDIT: OK, I guess it wasn't clear why I find this hysterical. I'll explain how I see it. (As background, my job previous to starting Dawdle was as the junior member of the investment team at Ascension Health Ventures, a health care VC fund. I know a little something about how this all works in this space. Also, it's Saturday night and I'm sick at home but nonetheless tipsy.)
To me, a fund dedicated to pandemics is an example of thematic investing gone to its extremes. Pandemics are a such a minor subset of the incredibly large and complex health care system that it strikes me as implausible that there are $200 million worth of worthy VC investments. I could be wrong, but that's my gut.
But what really strikes me as hysterical is that pandemics are hypothetical situations. Medical devices and new pharmaceuticals are generally about finding solutions to known - and existing - problems. The economic returns from investments in those things are well known and replicable.
Pandemics are totally different - the next pandemic could be any from a range of diseases with any sort of transmission protocol with who-knows-what root cause. To me, trying to find infrastructure investments for something that doesn't exist (cause Lord help you decide what the next pandemic is going to be) that takes rapid adoption by the moribund and dysfunctional health care industry is crazy.
KPCB strikes me as being perhaps the world's only venture firm that could get $200 million in commitments from LPs for such a crazy-ass thesis. To me, it's just a crazy-ass boondoggle to think this could possibly work. But, hey, I could be wrong.
Thanks for the downvotes, though. Those who did showed a total lack of appreciation for the English language. Y'all saw "hysterical" and read "terrible". Perhaps you'll do better next time.
[EDIT 2: If I were to invest in "pandemics", I'd try to take advantage of the certain hysteria among the public that would result. That, at least, is predictable. EDIT 3: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2009/04/26/a-few-comments-on-... is worth the read.]