Cancer Research

NASA is going to offer prize money for innovations. Now if we could get the National Institutes of Health to use some of their 27 billion dollar annual budget as a prize for a cure for cancer instead of spending it on research we might be better off. How about a cure for diabetes?

The war on cancer was declared by President Nixon. Still no cure after billions of confiscated tax dollars spent on research for the past 30 years. Add billions more in private charitable contributions for cancer "research" and still no cure. Instead of spending money on research, which simply leads to more research, offer a prize of a billion dollars for a cancer cure. You would see a stampede of nerds and geeks setting up laboratories throughout the world. Investment bankers would be backing the geeks and nerds. Major companies would invest millions looking for a cure to claim the prize. Instead, we spend billions on research and development in health care which has only bought more and more research, but no cures. Prize money would be capital that would incentivize creativity.

The research industry would be against a prize for a cure. Politicians and good Samaritans would be afraid people in foreign countries would be doing risky experiments on live humans, much like Edward Jenner's experiment with a farmer's son to find a cure for smallpox in 1796. Thank goodness Jenner did not need to get the approval of the United States Food and Drug Administration before conducting his experiment. Millions would have suffered waiting for the FDA approval.

People who love big government as the great problem solver would be aghast that private enterprise could find a cure for cancer, when billions of government grants could not.

Maybe a non aggression prize should be made available to a country that goes ten years without aggression toward another state. I would contribute to such a prize.

Bilbo Baggins