Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In Research

An anonymous reader writes "There have been complaints within the World Health Organization of some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes by the Gates Foundation. Scientists who were once open with their research are now 'locked up in a cartel' and are financially motivated to support other scientists backed by the Foundation. Diversity of views is 'stifled,' dominance is bought, and Foundation views are pushed with 'intense and aggressive opposition.'" The article tries hard for balance. It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm on the Gates Foundation's unintended consequences on world health research is "an openly undiplomatic official who won admiration for reorganizing the world fight against tuberculosis but was ousted from that job partly because he offended donors like the Rockefeller Foundation."

Surprised?

[jaxtherat (1165473)]

Why is anyone surprised. These foundations are nothing but cash cows, money sinks and tax write-offs.

Very, very few rich people are genuine philanthropists.

Re:Surprised?

[ejdmoo (193585)]

Please read TFA people...
Some quotes:

In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."

Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."

They are pointing out a general fact about research funding, and then saying that there's a lack of diversity in Malaria research/funding, because most of it is coming from the Gates Foundation. Maybe if Sergei and Larry would stop buying 767s (and NASA airfield landing rights) they could fund competing research.

(just flamebait fun on the goog guys...could have easily used Michael Dell)

Re:RTFA further:

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

Rule one is don't bite the hand that feeds you. This guy's rabid.

This is fundamentally wrong.

Dr. Kochi has been far more successful and saved more lives than any other malaria fighter. He is succeeding becuase he is replacing the stagnant, broken sytem of consultants and drug companies with pragmatic effective solutions. Because he is challenging orthodoxy, including those the Gates Foundation supports, he is meeting resistance, such as the usual FUD disseminated by large companies.

This article [nytimes.com] is much more informative about Kochi's activities and reasons.

Re:

[CSMatt (1175471)]

True, but try telling that to Joe Average.

Me: Bill Gates is a convicted monopolist who practices unethical business behavior.
Some person: OMG NOES HE ISNT HE STRTD A FUNDATON TO HLP TEH P00R!!!11!

False dichotomy.

[TapeCutter (624760)]

This 'Joe Average' says he can be both.

Re:

[Maxo-Texas (864189)]

So what would be the average of both noble philanthropist and devious scammer?

well, um..

[adam (1231)]

So what would be the average of both noble philanthropist and devious scammer?

I'd say: Human Being.

There is a great book by a primatologist named Franz De Waal ("Our Inner Ape" [amazon.com]), and the book largely deals with this subject, by speaking at lengths to the behaviors of various primates. The conclusion is, of course, that humans are not innately good or evil-- we have the capacity for both compassion and uncaring selfishness.

Random ass-headed cruelty.

[TapeCutter (624760)]

I think De Waal would agree that 'You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go inside the monkeyshpere'. part1 [pointlesswasteoftime.com], part2 [pointlesswasteoftime.com]

Re:Surprised?

[palegray.net (1195047)]

How many rich people do you count as close personal associates? Blanket statements like yours are irritating at best, and idiotic at worst. Let's talk about how much money you donate to charities. No? Fine... then consider this: whether it's a tax write-off or not, charitable foundations depend on the generosity of wealthy patrons to continue their work. That's just how the system is structured. Don't like it? Okay, work to get the tax benefits of charitable contributions eliminated. While you're at it, please explain to those who benefit from the monies donated to medical research, food programs, etc why they don't deserve the help.

I'm no Bill Gates fanboy (kinda hard to be when I refuse to use Microsoft products at home), but your position is ridiculous.

Re:

[Planesdragon (210349)]

then consider this: whether it's a tax write-off or not, charitable foundations depend on the generosity of wealthy patrons to continue their work. That's just how the system is structured. Don't like it? Okay, work to get the tax benefits of charitable contributions eliminated. While you're at it, please explain to those who benefit from the monies donated to medical research, food programs, etc why they don't deserve the help.

I worked in "charity" for five years. In all that time, I cannot name one thing other than "not having to fire anyone" that we accomplished.

Cash-based Charities as a whole are one step above outright scams. This is underscored for anything called a "foundation." Yes, they spend money on good things. But i'm not convinced that the donor and the donnee wouldn't be better served by simply handing over money -- or buying goods and selling them at a loss as a better form of charity.

Re:Surprised?

[palegray.net (1195047)]

Of course the donor and recipient would be better served in a direct exchange of currency. Now how do you get them in touch with each other to facilitate the transfer? How do you know they actually need the money, compared to someone else? That's where charitable fund raising foundations come into play, which cannot be effectively run on any large scale at zero cost. Like any other class of organization, there are good ones, bad ones, and some in between. In any event, the primary focus of the Gates Foundation is dispersing funds that are directly earned and controlled by, well, the Gates. Different animal entirely.

If you don't believe you accomplished anything in five years of working for a charity, why in God's name did you do it for that long? Surely you could have better spent your efforts elsewhere.

Re:Surprised?

[Dekortage (697532)]

I worked in "charity" for five years. In all that time, I cannot name one thing other than "not having to fire anyone" that we accomplished.

If that's true, then you need to report it to the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance [give.org], as well as to Charity Navigator [charitynavigator.org] -- groups which track the return-on-investment aspects of charitable organizations.

If you truly and literally spent five years not helping anyone, your charity is a scam. This hardly means that all charities are scams; most are not.

As for connecting donors to recipients: sure, that's a nice idea, except for:

• Economies of scale. You get ten thousand donors together to buy food, supplies, etc., then you can get a lot more solution for your money.
• Addressing root problems. Sure, a thirsty family in Africa might be able to buy safe drinking water for a month on the $20 you send them. But it would be better if a bunch of people could collectively send over $2500 and build a new, clean-water well. Or if somebody organized the money together and built dozens of clean wells all over the region. There are tons of problems like this.
• The problem isn't always money. Sometimes the problem is education. Or identifying problems in service delivery. Or advocating for change in government policies. How would you solve these problems by sending your money to the needy people?

Sometimes direct support works well. Kiva [kiva.org] has a really interesting approach that seems to be successful, for example. But it's hardly the answer to every problem that nonprofits try to solve.

Re:

[canterbury rod (1229414)]

-----------"Very, very few rich people are genuine philanthropists."

Why so cynical? There are many genuine philanthropists in this world and they certainly don't set up their foundations solely for the purpose of tax write-offs and providing as you say "cash cows." As Zig Ziglar put it, "I've been rich, and I've been poor. And frankly, it's better to be rich." Why, because you can help folks when you're rich. Me thinks, you think the rich are not genuine in their philanthropic endeavors. I beg to differ

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid that you and many others have a complete misunderstanding of "tax write-offs." You don't magically make money by donating to charity. The money that you donate to charity is simply not taxable. All of the money that you keep is still taxable. By donating to charity, you will lose money no matter how much you save in tax writeoffs (and you will lose quite a bit more).

Very, very few rich people are genuine philanthropists.

I agree with you here, but Gates is indeed one of the few.

Re:Surprised?

[Bert64 (520050)]

By donating to charity you will buy good PR, which is otherwise quite expensive.
You can also donate goods to charity, and claim a tax break relative to what they would have been sold at... This is designed for goods where there is a tangible cost to produce them and a small margin, and the tax break means that the company can afford to donate more goods for the same cost. But when it comes to software, which is virtually 100% profit, such a company actually directly profits from "giving" it to charity.

Also, for all the money the gates foundation (and other similar organizations) spends on medical research, how much of this research goes into the public domain, and how much goes to pharmaceutical companies owned by the very same people who own the foundations?
Similarly, how many of their donations come with strings attached, like "heres $1 million for drugs, but you have to buy all you're drugs from a specific company"... So the entire $1mil goes back to said drugs company, as does other money that came from other sources - a net win for the owners of the foundations. Similarly gates has been known to make "donations" on condition that various schools etc use microsoft software exclusively.

Genuine philanthropists would hand over money without any strings attached, and often do so anonymously, some big charities like oxfam receive large anonymous donations at times.

Coming soon...

[calebt3 (1098475)]

Microsoft Medicine
For the low price of $500 dollars per copy.
You may not disassemble or reverse engineer this vaccine.
If you install this vaccine in a second body, you must delete it from the first.
You may keep a copy of this vaccine for backup purposes only. You may not install this vaccine in a body containing more than two souls. (Siamese triples, anyone?)

Well how about

[markov_chain (202465)]

If you inject this vaccine into a siamese multiplet, you must purchase one license per individual.

Re:

[LiENUS (207736)]

Licenses are per seat, Siamese multiplets clearly need just one seat. As such they are multiple cores and require a single license.

Re:

[flyingsquid (813711)]

This medication has experienced a fatal error. Please restart the patient's heart.

Re:Coming soon...

[r55man (615542)]

You jest, but I don't think you're really all that far off. From the article:

Experts said IPTi involved giving babies doses of an older anti-malaria drug, Fansidar ... In early studies, it was shown to decrease malaria cases about 25 percent. But each dose provided protection for only a month.

Since it is not safe or practical to give Fansidar constantly to babies ... World Health Organization scientists had doubts about it.

The health agency's objections were met with "intense and aggressive opposition" from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation

What do you want to bet this is exactly the kind of "cure" that the Gates Foundation is looking for: The kind that you need to keep buying every month for the rest of your life.

Re:

[TeraCo (410407)]

When I have to purchase weekly vaccine updates from Micropharm, I'll be worried. BillG isn't actually part of Big Pharm yet.

Re:Coming soon...

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

BillG isn't actually part of Big Pharm yet.

He is, and has been for years.

In 2005, the foundation held nearly $1.5 billion worth of stock in drug companies whose practices have been widely criticized as restricting the flow of key medicines to poor people in developing nations.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines [latimes.com]

embrace and extend

[LingNoi (1066278)]

ah shit, not this again..

gives an new meaning

[WillRobinson (159226)]

to Embrace and Extinguish

I called this.

[ruinevil (852677)]

When I bash Gates, people always tell me that Bill Gates has donated more money to medical research than anyone else in history. Which is true. But I always say that he donates heavily to organizations he controls. And finally he has shown his true colors.

The idea behind Gates Foundation

[jbrax (315669)]

The main business of Gates Foundation is making money and avoiding taxes by giving away at least 5% of its worth every year. The Foundation is a major shareholder in many of the companies listed as "highest-polluting" in the United States and Canada.

What about the 5%? Gates Foundation awards grants mainly in support of global health initiatives, for efforts to improve public education in the United States (Live@edu for lock-in, anyone?), and for social welfare programs in the Pacific Northwest.

LA Times investigation of Gates Foundation, January 2007: Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation [latimes.com]

Re:The idea behind Gates Foundation

[TheSeer2 (949925)]

Your first paragraph appears to attack the foundation and second appears to support it. What is your point exactly? Avoiding taxes? They're a freakin' charity. THEY ARE TAX EXEMPT. This is the worst attempt at a troll I've ever... ever seen. The reason they have to donate 5% a year is because that is a requirement of Warren Buffet's donation and if they don't donate that amount, Warren Buffet's contributions will cease.

private or public science?

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's happening everywhere, a gradual chilling debasement of science and open collaboration. On one hand the internet has brought great
opportunity, and some great things like Gutenberg, the Internet archive, Hyperphysics, and of course Wikis that are gaining credibility more and more, but these are not real scientific repositories, real science is being buried. Some online journals have their archives open to download free pdfs, but they are the exception, in general things are getting much worse than better. 15 years ago I had to go to a library to get papers, but at least they were there and I could photocopy for free. Now all the records have gone electronic its a nightmare. Do a Google search on any serious topic and the first two pages will be istore, free patents online, and all those for-pay peddlers of knowledge. These guardians of information charge $30 or more for an electronic reprint, on 80 year old papers, IP that doesn't even belong to them! I expect many great scientists are spinning in their graves. I sometimes laugh when I hear the phrase scientific community. There isn't one anymore! Everyone is out to obscure and bury. How can peer review be conducted anymore? Everyone is too afraid to publish in case patent trolls sieze their work, and only the few in large institutions can afford to. I have to share papers on the sly with other researchers and certain old textbooks are becoming treasured items. This knowledge belongs to us all. The vast majority from the last few hundred years is public domain, payed for by your tax dollars to fund research on national levels.

I certainly don't expect Microsoft to help in any way, their track record is to squeeze money out of every chance they get. What have they ever contributed to real science? We must reverse this slide into private and secret science or eventually university students will be signing NDA agreements before being allowed to study and progress will only be the preserve of the wealthy.

Google scholar is a step forward, but if you use it a lot you will see more than half of what it links to isn't actually available, it just leads to pay-for sites. They should block those so that only info that is actually available to read is presented.

Re:

[johnlcallaway (165670)]

I've got news for everyone ... scientific research is not the unbiased bastion that everyone thinks it is. There are many books that document the sagas (and if I could get into the room where my step-son is sleeping I'd get you a couple of titles) of how scientists and politics go hand-in-hand. Backstabbing, lying, and downright blackmail have been going on for hundreds of years. It's popular to blame the current administration, but they weren't the first and won't be the last to try and craft scientific th

Re: It's affecting AIDS research too

[QuincyFree (147705)]

I work in AIDS research. The conflicts that are emerging in the field of malaria research are very similar to what we are experiencing in our field, which in both cases is a consequence of the severe funding bottleneck for biological sciences. The Gates Foundation has been an extremely important source of funding for basic science as well as providing resources for prevention and outreach in areas of the world suffering from the heaviest burden of these diseases. Unfortunately, the current funding philosophy seems to be to reward a massive sum of cash to a very select subset of scientists in the field. This has created some unfortunate divisions in our field. If you can access the article, see: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n5/abs/nm0507-515.html [nature.com] (I've also been able to Google for excerpts from the article.) Basically, both the Gates Foundation and the NIH have pumped massive funding into a single research consortium, leaving many other labs scavenging for funding to sustain their clinical research. Throw in some questionable data-sharing practices and lack of scientific collaboration by the consortium, and you'll obviously create a lot of resentment.

Re:

[15Bit (940730)]

I work in what is now called the "alternative energy" sector - fuel cells etc, and we have similar problems. The lot of money to a small number of groups is evident here too, though to be fair to the funding bodies these are people who have a track record of providing a "return" on the investment. There is a sort of critical size effect though, and once a research group gets beyond a certain size it seems to lose focus and the output per person drops.

The bigger problem seems to be continuity of funding. Yo

Business as usual

[dedazo (737510)]

Ah, another Bashdot hack job. Just bringing home the bacon.

But let's quote from TFA, since no one really reads it - it's enough that Slashdot publishes something to add it to the repertoire of the FOSS advocate army on the internets:

The Gates Foundation has poured about $1.2 billion into malaria research since 2000. In the late 1990s, as little as $84 million a year was spent - largely by the U.S. military and health institutes, along with European governments and foundations. Drug makers had largely abandoned the field. (China was developing a drug, artemisinin, that is now the cornerstone of treatment.)

The World Health Organization is a United Nations agency with a $4 billion budget. It gives advice on policies, evaluates treatments - especially for poor countries - maintains a network of laboratories and sends teams to fight outbreaks of diseases, like avian flu or Ebola. It finances little research; for diseases of the poor, the Gates Foundation is the biggest donor in the world.

$4 billion dollars. Since the WHO is a UN body, I'm sure we can imagine where most of that money goes to. But that's really irrelevant.

Having worked with privately funded research NGOs in the past, I'm pretty sure that the turf wars and petty rivalries are as common at that level as they are everywhere else. Let's quote again:

But Attaran said he believed that scientists were not afraid of the foundation, but of its chief for malaria, Regina Rabinovich, whom he described as "autocratic."

So, twenty bucks this is some sort of institutional or personal rivalry of some sort. I don't buy the "openly undiplomatic official" bit at all, not from someone who works for the United Nations.

It is of course quite possible that the person responsible for malaria efforts at the Gates foundation is a certified bitch - that alone does not justify the retarded "some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes" bullshit in the submission. From an anonymous reader, no less. Nowhere in the article is it claimed that the malaria campaign by the foundation is wrong or not working. No, it's just that it's not proceeding the way the UN bureaucrats want it to:

His own experience with Gates-financed policy groups, he said, was that they are cowed into "stomach-churning group think."

That's institutionalese for "they're not doing things the way we do them around here".

The gist of the article involves Kochi's dislike of how the Gates foundation goes about using it's $1.2 billion dollar malaria program:

called the Gates Foundation's decision making "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself."

Perhaps the people who run the Gates Foundation have read about how inefficient and ineffective the WHO has been in the past twenty years, and they prefer not to be accountable to a group of people who are supposed to be helping humanity but instead spend their time trying to hold on to research grants for dear life, witholding information about radiation poisoning from the public at the bequest of the IAEA, and fighting turf wars over juicy postings in well-to do countries.

Re:

[MrCopilot (871878)]

I don't buy the "openly undiplomatic official" bit at all, not from someone who works for the United Nations.

Two Words John Bolton [wikipedia.org]

Re:Business as usual

[Daniel Phillips (238627)]

It is of course quite possible that the person responsible for malaria efforts at the Gates foundation is a certified bitch - that alone does not justify the retarded "some oddly familiar-sounding tactics and attitudes" bullshit in the submission.

That alone? From the article:
Since it is not safe or practical to give Fansidar constantly to babies because it is a sulfa drug that can cause rare but deadly reactions and because Fansidar-resistant malaria is growing, World Health Organization scientists had doubts about it. Nonetheless, Kochi wrote, although it was "less and less straightforward" that the health agency should recommend it, the agency's objections were met with "intense and aggressive opposition" from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation.

So this is either truth or lies. If truth, it is alarming.

Re:

[dbIII (701233)]

on the internets

Since your feild is not computers I should say that using this word is the equivalent of telling a medical expert that your foot bone is connected to your head bone :)

Misguided Gates references

[dreemernj (859414)]

The Gates foundation provides funding so long as there is adequate proof of where the funding is going and so long as it aligns with the broad vision the Gates foundation has. It sounds like this guy has problems with some of the scientists receiving Gates funding and he has problems with the fact that the Gates foundation has its own internal, closed decision making process that is only accountable to itself. But, that's to be expected. The Gates foundation introduced a level of accountability not seen before on a large scale. They did for international philanthropy what organizations like Pew did for philanthropy within the US.

The Gates foundation had to fight to bring any real accountability into these fields. If the WHO feels threatened its probably because they were pushing funds into opportunistic pockets up until the Gates foundation forced real accountability to happen.

Given the state of affairs up until now, if the Gates foundation did just create their own WHO-like organization, there's a good chance more people would be helped per dollar invested than are being helped by the WHO now.

The gates foundation is far from perfect. But they are inevitably going to take heat from threatening the lifeblood of the people at all levels of international philanthropy that have been skimming off the top of a very broken system.

Monopoly Philanthropy

[sakusha (441986)]

Yep, I've been saying this for ages, and nobody believes me. It's like the old joke by Craig Kilborn:

"Bill Gates announced his initiative to eradicate the AIDS virus. He plans to buy all competing viruses and use his power of monopoly to drive the AIDS virus to extinction."

But this is no joke. Gates has established a monopoly on philanthropy and the addition of money from Warren Buffet has given even more power to the Gates Foundation. They don't fund charities, they assimilate them. It is impossible to fund any alternative charities when the overwhelming majority of monies are going to the Officially Approved Gates Foundation Charities. Those charities have become a monoculture, as this document asserts. And those charities are designed to get third-world companies hooked on first-world Big Pharmaceuticals. Guess what? Bill Gates is a major shareholder in Big Pharma, from Merck to Schering-Plough to a dozen others. Gates can't help but apply his business mindset to everything he does, he seeks to rebuild the world in his own image, even if this means working his will through phony philanthropy.
But what galls me the most is that the billions of dollars he's "donating" came out of the pockets of Microsoft customers: governments, corporations, and individuals. What diverse charities might WE have funded, if Bill Gates hadn't stolen those dollars from OUR wallets?

the WHO?

[rasputin465 (1032646)]

It notes that the WHO official who raised the alarm...

Uh... you mean Pete Townshend?

Bill's new business card

[martin-boundary (547041)]

--------------------
William H Gates, III
--------------------
CATHERDER
[e-mail]
--------------------

Familar naming convention

[edwardpickman (965122)]

So that's why booster shots are now called Service Packs in Africa.

Well, start your own foundation, then!

[I'm Don Giovanni (598558)]

The Gates Foundation can operate however it pleases. If you don't like it, then let the heads of SourceForge Inc (owners of slashdot), Google, Apple, Red Hat, Ubuntu, or some other slashdot-approved entity start their own foundation and they can operate it more in keeping with slashdot's principles.

(Of course the only slashdot "principle" here is "Gates = evil"; a foundation run by ESR or Steve Jobs (yeah, that'll be the day) that operated in the exact same manner as the Gates Foundation wouldn't be ripped

Gates Foundation and SCO

[Fantastic Lad (198284)]

Argh!

I ran across a rumor about the Gates Foundation using its muscle to persuade a private investor to make that $100 million dollar bailout to SCO, and that it was linked to some Saudi Prince.

But I can't find a single reference to it anywhere. Was I just dreaming? Does anybody have anything on this?

Although I did run across this item [theregister.co.uk] while searching. . .

Everyone and his dog knows that corporate philanthropy is PR, but what is not understood very well in the US is that there should be a certain decency about how it is done. Not so with the Gates Foundation. It uses plenty of professional PR to milk the donations, and the timing certainly correlates with Microsoft's desire to influence public opinion. Microsoft is after all only partly playing to Judge Jackson, where what is in effect special pleading ("we've been naughty, but we've given wagon loads of money to charity by way of a penance" ) is unlikely to prove helpful. Much more important to Microsoft at the moment is a hearts-and-minds campaign and to use the charity card to lull a gullible public into thinking that at heart Microsoft is OK. Former Novell boss Ray Noorda scotched that one when he observed (paraphrasing) that to have a heart-to-heart, you had to have two hearts. Looking at the Foundation's actions over the last six months, and analysing press releases announcing donations, we see that when nothing was happening publicly in April, there were three releases. In May, as things were warming up for the June rebuttal hearings, there were 12 releases. In June, the number shot up to 20, but immediately dropped down to just four in July, when the trial was quiet again. August saw 12 and there were 13 in September, in honour of the findings of fact and the oral hearing. A recent move is an invitation by Craig McCaw of Teledesic (in which Gates and Microsoft have invested significantly) for Nelson Mandela and his new wife to visit Seattle from 7-9 December "to raise awareness of issues in Africa". The press release was jointly issued by Teledesic and the Gates Foundation. You can bet that Mandela will be given a large cheque. This looks like a PR blocking move in case Judge Jackson's Opinion is handed down around that time. As has been said before, charity begins in the home PC. Several hundred million PC users around the world have been a victim of Microsoft's monopoly exploitation, pricing policies and software quality. This charity money comes from these users - us - yet we have no say in what happens to it. Microsoft is indeed a world leader -- in exploiting philanthropy.

-FL

Should be noted that

[djupedal (584558)]

...the B & G Foundation/MS statistically donates less money than most all other US corporate behemoths. It acts more like a giant investment fund rather than a savior.

Quote from the LA Times, Jan, 2007: "the Los Angeles Times looked into how the foundation invests some of the billions of dollars that are in the portfolio of the world's largest charity, and it found a number of instances -- perhaps 41 percent of that portfolio -- in which the foundation has invested in companies that have policies that actively undermine the social welfare goals of the foundation."

Re:

[Eukariote (881204)]

in which the foundation has invested in companies that have policies that actively undermine the social welfare goals of the foundation

And that is not coincidental. The publically stated goals of the foundation serve to hide its actual agenda. To learn more about the actual agenda of the Gates Foundatation, watch this shocking presentation: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6890106663412840646 [google.com]

Mod parent down -1, Quackery

[McDutchie (151611)]

The video linked to by parent is complete quackery. The autism-vaccine link has been thoroughly disproven [alertnet.org] many times now. In countries where vaccinations are not combined or where vaccines do not contain thimerosal (e.g. Denmark [nih.gov], Japan [findarticles.com]), autism rates rise as much as anywhere else; the obvious and correct explanation is better diagnosis and a significant loosening of diagnostic criteria. Contrary to what the "doctor" in the video claims, most autistics do not have anything like the gastroenteritis symptoms t

Re:Immortality

[eln (21727)]

Most mega-billionaires give away their money in hopes of achieving immortality. Why is this a bad thing? Many fine research and educational institutions would not exist without this desire to be remembered for something positive. I think if we look down on the idea of doing great things for society in order to achieve lasting immortality, we will lose all of the great things that can result from it.

The only "true" philanthropy is anonymous. That doesn't mean we should condemn the idea of "pseudo" philanthropy just because we find the idea of buying immortality distasteful. After all, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute would probably be just as good without Howard Hughes' name on it, but it certainly wouldn't be as good (or even exist) without his money in it.

Re:Immortality

[gosand (234100)]

Most mega-billionaires give away their money in hopes of achieving immortality.

Exactly. The argument of "But they're giving away millions upon millions of dollars! How much do you donate?" doesn't hold water. If you look at the percentages, I give away more to charities each year than Bill Gates. Giving away 10% of billions isn't putting him in the poor house. I once calculated it, and if I gave away $2 it was the equivalent percentage of Bill Gates giving away a million. Will his million do more good than my 2? Sure. But he could give away 90% of what he's worth and still be very very wealthy. If I gave away 10% of my net worth, I would be struggling.

You can't deny the good that the amounts of money he's donated will do. But the term "generous" is not correct. He's buying a positive legacy, hence the name of his foundation. How can giving away millions of dollars not generous? When you have thousands of times that amount and giving it away has zero impact on your ability to live. I am not knocking him for starting the foundation, because he certainly didn't have to do it... but let's look at what it is in a realistic light.

Re:

[TheVelvetFlamebait (986083)]

Ya, because he thinks about things (like consequences of his actions) he should be reviled by everyone. Perhaps you would rather someone without the basic intelligence to foresee that curing malaria would earn him brownie points in charge of finding a cure for malaria, or ~90% of the world's operating systems.

Me, I'm just happy that these things are getting done.

Re:Oh, shit...

[TheSeer2 (949925)]

Ummm. This has nothing to do with the Gates Foundation. This is just a general scientific community sentiment in not wanting to offend their backers (hence the mention of Rockefeller in the summary).

Re:

[Max Littlemore (1001285)]

If I gave $30 billion (I don't care how it was made, it was) of my money and decided I wanted the recipients to figure out how to make monkeys dance while playing cards and whistling Sheena is a Punk Rocker, than they better damn well figure out how to do it.

If you gave $30 billion of your money to a charity administered by me and insisted we figure out how to make monkeys dance while playing cards and whistling Sheena is a Punk Rocker, I'd cut off your penis in front of your bank manager, shove you dismem