Gates Foundation Vs. Openness In Research 150
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."
The idea behind Gates Foundation (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Oh, shit... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: It's affecting AIDS research too (Score:5, Interesting)
Business as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
$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:
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:
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:
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:Surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some quotes:
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:private or public science? (Score:3, Interesting)
Everyone does it
Recognize the conflicts exist, do your own sanity check, then move on. It's never going to change until our unemotional robot overlords take control. As long as people do the research, there will always be biased contamination in the reporting of the results.
Re:Surprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Gates Foundation and SCO (Score:3, Interesting)
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. .
-FL
Should be noted that (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Random ass-headed cruelty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Should be noted that (Score:3, Interesting)
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]
Re: It's affecting AIDS research too (Score:3, Interesting)
The bigger problem seems to be continuity of funding. You can get a grant for 1-3 year project, during which time you may or may not achieve something positive. But after the time is up, you are subject to the whims of the funding system again, and your chance of getting money to continue the project (even if it was wildly successful) is slim. You keep applying, and perhaps 3 years down the line you'll actually get the cash, but by then all the researchers on the project (and hence all the knowledge and experience) have gone and you're starting again from scratch. It also tends to lead to research group leaders having lots of money for specific windows of time, meaning that for 5 years they may need lots of lab space and stuff, and then within 6 months go to needing absolutely nothing cos they have no funding at all. The labs and equipment are then "lost" before the next set of funding ensues.
If the Gates foundation did something toward fixing this they'd get my vote.
Re:Coming soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
He is, and has been for years.