This is horrible news. We are all poorer today, all of us. Banks is an inspiration to all who read him - of what could be, what can be, what is to be.
Cancer has claimed a terrible toll in my life. Three in my immediate family and counting, the countdown very fast for one of them. And now it seems to have turned its unwelcome gaze to my intellectual treasures. I hate this disease, I despise it so much it's hard to express.
I'd say it's my hatred of cancer that drives me to want to achieve riches, via a startup, so I can pour money into its vanquishing. It was hatred that made me agree to be a member of "the 300", as useless as that has turned out to be. And it's the knowledge and memory of those lifeless bodies on hospital sheets, cold before their time, that forces me onwards, reminds me that that capricious finger of death could swivel my way at any time.
Banks, you are a titan. You inspired me, you inspired others. You'll never be forgotten, and god willing maybe you'll inspire a few to take revenge on your blind, callous killer.
More money is not what is needed here--we already pour tons of money into cancer research. What's needed are new ideas. If you really want to fight cancer, skip the startup and go to graduate school. Computational and mathematical approaches to understanding and fighting cancer are still in their infancy. There is a lot of scope for smart, motivated people to do good.
Lack of money is precisely why you should not go to graduate school, because graduate students (and post-docs, and adjunct faculty) in these areas already massively outstrip available funding. The claim that more people should go into the field would be more credible if there were good jobs available for those who already did.
Part of the reason for the lack of good jobs is that there is actually not much money put into cancer research, relative to Valley-type companies. Google's declared 2012 R&D budget was $6.7 billion. The National Cancer Institute's entire budget in 2012, which is parceled out among all eligible institutions in the country, was $5.1 billion. It's no surprise that, as a direct result, it's easier to find good jobs in the Valley than in cancer research: Google alone can offer more funding to aspiring researchers than the entire national cancer strategy can.
No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on.
But I wholeheartedly agree that rather than trying to be a billg and earn money to fund philanthropy, the world needs more researchers.
"In 2010, 65% of all deaths worldwide were due to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) like heart disease, lung disease, diabetes and cancer. 15% of all deaths worldwide, nearly 8 million people, were due to cancer alone. The number of deaths worldwide from cancer dwarfs the number of global deaths from malaria and HIV/AIDS, as is projected to exceed 13 million by 2030."
> No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on.
The first sentence and the next two aren't at all related. It's possible that the amount of money we're collectively spending right now is all that can be used effectively, and more money will yield at best highly diminishing returns.
There's really no way around the need for written grant proposals, so the solution seems like "research teams should allocate a decent wage for a good grantwriter". Surely there are talented technical writers out there who would happily join with these noble causes, if only the jobs were there (and financially viable for the writer).
I'm not convinced that what this world needs is research into keeping sick people alive longer. We have lots of people as it is.
When I was a kid childhood leukemia was a death sentence. These days survival rates are in the 80% and up range.
The goal isn't non-dead sick people. It's well people.
Attacking that problem doesn't mean that you can't attack the problem of too many people too. Hopefully in a more productive way than having a horrible, lingering, painful disease solve it for us.
Yup -- the first thing public health students learn is the WHO definition of health: "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." In my clinical trials course, equal emphasis was put on extending life and increasing quality of life (e.g., as measured by quality adjusted life-years (QALYs)).
"I'm not convinced that what this world needs is research into keeping sick people alive longer."
Given that the average costs of bringing up any single individual are nowadays probably at an all-time high, it makes sense to invest something into keeping those people from dying prematurely.
Also, this is less about keeping sick people alive longer, but about making them unsick, or even prevent them from becoming sick in the first place (prevention, timely diagnosis, study of the immune system behavior and reactions related to the cancer onset).
Would you stand by that statement if you were diagnosed with terminal cancer tomorrow? Your spouse? Child? The point isn't to keep sick people alive longer, it's to make them not sick.
I know in this kind of nerdy community of which I am a part, this might be considered to be a hip statement or "logical" or some such nonsense. But I am going to just be honest and say if that is your view, you're a horrible person. That's just such garbage.
EDIT - I had a little time to think about your statement a little. Your statements are basically just ridiculous venom. In any other venue, it would be met with the vitriol it really deserves but I just find this to be essentially inhuman.
More money is not what is needed here--we already pour tons of money into cancer research. What's needed are new ideas. If you really want to fight cancer, skip the startup and go to graduate school. Computational and mathematical approaches to understanding and fighting cancer are still in their infancy. There is a lot of scope for smart, motivated people to do good.
There are a zillion[0] talented young programmers who have figured out that the VC-istan game is rigged (I like to believe that I helped with that) and who would readily work on machine learning for cancer research at a market salary.
[0] Zillion probably means "tens of thousands", but that's a lot. A good programmer costs $125k to hire and is worth $1-2M to the economy. Thousands of programmers = major muscle. Tap that piece of A! (A meaning "awesomeness potential".)
$100-150k, machine learning, saving lives? Shit, you'll be turning people away.
If it's government-funded it doesn't have to be in a high-COL area where 100-150k, while respectable, isn't raise-a-family money. But you could do this out in a place like Minneapolis where people can raise a family on that and (bear with me, here) therefore actually find programmers with more than 10 years (!) of technical experience who want to stay on real work (!!) instead of becoming useless executives (like VC-istan's VeePees of BizDevolution) because they can actually raise kids on what they make (!!!).
It's about the people. But the nature of the real world is that it takes money to hire people. So, indirectly, it is about the money. We should spend less money on pointless, illegal wars and more on the disease that's actually (if we don't fucking do something) going to kill a large portion of the people reading this.
See, that's my exact point. I didn't say that they make $125k (that's about average for a half-decent VC-istan programmer) because I knew scientific salaries to be low (I'm surprised to hear that they're that low) and they shouldn't be. Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher.
You should make more working on scientific research that helps everyone than you'd make ($100-150k for typical programmers) writing yet another ad exchange.
It's not true that you "can't get good people" with low salaries. The sciences are full of great people making low salaries. You just can't get very many of them. We need good people in the sciences and a much larger number, which means that society needs to start paying scientists what they're actually worth.
Heh, I really wish salaries in science were at least 3 times higher. Most of my colleagues, including those with many years of experience, have salaries in the 30-40K range, so that average starting salary of 35K seems about right or even slightly high. By the way, this is in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is relatively high. Incidentally, the more highly trained postdocs might even have worse salaries and potentially the worst prospects because the number of available faculty positions have seemed to decrease over the years.
Programmer/analysts do make more, but not nearly as much as they would in VC-istan. The median starting salary for a programmer/analyst at my institution is 50K. Senior programmer/analysts can make as much as a median 116K, but I almost never see people employed at that level despite their capability. More importantly, at least in life science research at a public institution, there's really no guarantee that you'll be kept on past the duration of the grant you're funded from, unless your PI is famous and your lab's rich. Even so, the recent cascade of NIH and NSF cuts are putting pressure on all labs.
Along those lines -- the job insecurity's the worst for junior staff, so I don't really see any good reason for recent grads to continue in public research. Most of my former grad school classmates are now in private pharma or biotech. I'm personally looking to move from life science to the SF tech scene as soon as I graduate this year.
> Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher.
Why? What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?
If demand for these skills should be higher, but isn't, that is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Your or anyone else, if correct, could make a killing using these skills at low prices (salaries). The more people who do that, the more the prices of their skills rise.
Supply and demand do not determine value. Supply and demand do determine price. The equating of price and value is a lazy attempt to find an objective interpersonal measure of value by saying "what is" is equivalent to "what should be," since determining "what is" is typically easier than forming a consensus on "what should be."
Demand for a cure to hair loss is high, and billions more will be spent on it, than will be on a cure for malaria or other diseases where the sufferers can ill afford the cost.
Market forces are better than previous systems at allocating resources, but they aren't infallible.
As someone has pointed out, theres a difference between price and value.
What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?
Time-behavior + value-creation vs. value-capture.
Market demand for science R&D is pretty much nil. Basic research requires some kind of altruistic/passive funding (government, universities).
Market demand for the technologies that come out of basic research, decades later, is nearly infinite.
No one is going to pay, on the market, $150,000 per year for a biologist to analyze some weird protein. But when that work results in a cure for several common cancers, 20 years later, I'd say it's paid itself off by several orders of magnitude.
It depends heavily on the specific area of biology. I have friends making $35-40k in the LA area doing pharamaceutalogical research, and others making $250k+/year (also in the LA area) in some specialized areas of biochemical research that I don't understand enough to describe.
Also, if you get closer to product, you get paid a lot more. I know a lot of people who work in pharma and all of them make $80-150k (in the bay area); even admin/support people, and many levels of management, compliance, and other crap.
If you're on your first VC-funded startup, you'll probably get torn up by liquidation preferences and dilution for executive hires (that you had no say in; they were VC injections) and various other things, and not get very rich. You could end up worse off than an employee (because they get to take real salaries; you're hosed if your equity gets zeroed). You'll have to play a second time (capitalizing on your reputation, having joined Those Who Have Completed An Exit) to get what you came to the game for. It's like the record industry: you make money on your second album, because the record company has leverage to screw you on the first one.
If you're a manager or executive-level hire, you're probably never going to get the investor contact you were promised and, if you do, you probably won't be allowed to say much, so the networking you were promised won't happen.
If you're an engineer, you're probably not going to get the "leadership" (executive) position you were promised. It'll be given to some external asshat when the company goes in to "scaling"/social-climbing mode and starts hiring "real X's" (i.e. not the fools who worked for 90 hours per week and 50% of market salaries, judged not to be good enough for prime time).
Only a tiny percentage of VC-funded startups have a real engineering culture (pre-apocalyptic Google) where you can do well as an engineer without becoming a manager. If that's what you want, your odds are better (not great, but better) at a place like Google.
Most VC-funded startups grow too fast to keep a decent culture, and the executive positions often get handed out by VC to their underachieving friends who couldn't make it on their own.
I completely empathise. I have a personal hatred of cancer as well.
First Terry Pratchett and now Iain Banks. Satoshi Kon, taken by pancreatic cancer. Who's left? Why are all my favourite artists dying from this horrible family of diseases?
Fuck cancer, and damn our perverse incentives. All you hackers and entrepreneurs, please make all the money you can and do something to advance the combined well-being of the world and people like yourself. All that saved-up money can hardly do anything when a serious cancer strikes hard and we find out too late. Please do something to support the research that could save so many of your family and friends.
All the pleasures of the world cannot cancel out the loss and desolation of an early death. Our time is short; let's not let it be cut shorter.
I wish medical research were set up in a way to support hobbyists and part time involvement. There are lots of people in the high-profit, low-value-to-society parts of biotech and medicine (day jobs as pharma reps, sometimes MDs, people running clinical trials for yet another evergreening of an old drug, or a super-viagra, or whatever), who have skills, and have their personal financial situation set up, who could probably be effective part-time contributors to basic research. In software, that'd be a guy working in some enterprise somewhere developing a new programming language or library on the side. I don't think there really is anything like that for biotech, yet.
The 300 was far from useless - it was in fact the vehicle that enabled the Methuselah Foundation to do any of what it did: gain enough social proof and funding to invest in Organovo, boost SENS research far enough to gain funding from Peter Thiel and others, ultimately enabling it to spin off into the SENS Research Foundation, work behind the scenes to make the research community much more accepting of aging research, build a network of sympathetic researchers willing to speak out publicly about human longevity as a goal for science, help the Supercentenarian Research Foundation get started, and of late work on the New Organ initiative.
None of that would have been possible without the 300, and more importantly without people like you and I believing in the goal.
On cancer: there are new ideas and promising signs if you know where to look. I'm not a fan of WILT, but I haven't see anyone mount a good claim that it won't work as advertised, which is to say no cancer, ever:
An effective cancer treatment is all about finding a commonality to cut through the enormous variation in cancer biochemistry, so I watch for signs of that with some interest. The latest possible cancer commonality is CD47, for example:
There's also the suggestion that maybe we could extract the global cellular mechanism that makes naked mole rats cancer-free, or the different global cellular mechanism that makes blind mole rats cancer-free, and safely introduce one of them into human biology. That's much more speculative, not least for the concern that what works for 20-30 years in a mole rat might not be good for 100 in a human - there are plenty of examples of things working well in rodents but not being all that applicable to people.
But even without this, I think that targeted cell destruction therapies (via nanoparticles, or trained immune cells, or viruses, etc) will evolve into a robust cancer cure for near all cancers caught early enough within the next couple of decades:
Cancer has claimed a terrible toll in my life. Three in my immediate family and counting, the countdown very fast for one of them. And now it seems to have turned its unwelcome gaze to my intellectual treasures. I hate this disease, I despise it so much it's hard to express.
I'd say it's my hatred of cancer that drives me to want to achieve riches, via a startup, so I can pour money into its vanquishing. It was hatred that made me agree to be a member of "the 300", as useless as that has turned out to be. And it's the knowledge and memory of those lifeless bodies on hospital sheets, cold before their time, that forces me onwards, reminds me that that capricious finger of death could swivel my way at any time.
Banks, you are a titan. You inspired me, you inspired others. You'll never be forgotten, and god willing maybe you'll inspire a few to take revenge on your blind, callous killer.