Monday, February 07, 2005

The Cure For AIDS

There are two reasons why we will not be finding a cure for AIDS anytime in the near future. And one of them is not the fact that we have never developed a cure for any virus before. We have vaccinated against viruses before (polio and smallpox being the most famously wiped out by vaccination – but why has it been so long since we had at minimum a vaccination cure?), but we have never developed a cure for one. Yet this is not the reason I am pessimistic.
I am fully confident that we will have the technological ability to wipe out AIDS. HIV has some features that make it one of the best candidates for being the first virus to be cured – even if it has other features that make a vaccine of it impossible. But technology is not the problem here. The problem is inherent in the social-political system. Nobody who could cure AIDS wants to.
This is not as insidious as it sounds. We are merely talking about incentives here. As comedian Chris Rock once said, they will never cure AIDS – the money’s not in the cure, it’s in the treatment. The money’s in the comeback. And he’s right. If a pharmaceutical company can keep you alive with AIDS for 50 years, they will. That’s 50 years of profits from treating you. This is in their best interests as a company. If they came up with a cure, there would be a short-term profit from selling it to everyone (assuming the government did not figure out a way to nationalize the cure, in the "best interest" of mankind), and then that would be the end of it. Once everyone was cured of AIDS, there would be no more HIV infections, and the cure would be useless. No company CEO in his right mind would want a product that eliminated its own need to be used.
The second reason why we will not be finding a cure for AIDS anytime in the near future is because of the way we fund AIDS research. There are university labs out there who are actively looking for a cure for AIDS – they are not tied into the company profit motive, so one could argue that they are more likely to find a cure. However, we have a similar problem here was we have with the companies. These labs get grants to look for a cure for AIDS. Please note my wording here: they get money to LOOK for a cure, not to FIND one. IF you know that so long as you are looking for something, you will continue to get millions of dollars, wouldn’t you continue to look, without bothering to find what you are looking for? Again, I don’t think this is a conscious choice. But the fact of the matter is that there are labs across the U.S. that would cease to get money year after year if a cure for AIDS were found. Thus, it is not in these labs’ best interest to find a cure – only to continue looking for one.
I’m sure there are a few people out there who sincerely want to find a cure for AIDS. Unfortunately, they are not numerous enough to increase the odds of actually finding a cure. We need to change the incentive structure. We need to stop paying people to look for a cure for AIDS, and instead pay them to find one. What this means is that we should at the very least create an award – perhaps a combination of government and private funding – for the person who finds a cure for AIDS. Various governments from around the world could contribute to it, as well as private individuals. And people could continue contributing to it over time. I would think that the award should be at least in the billions of dollars. It should be such a big award that any incentive not to find a cure is wiped out. And this award should be in addition to the money made from the cure itself being used.
We need to stop being romantic about somebody coming up with a cure out of the goodness of their hearts. A cure will only come about when a sufficiently large carrot is dangled in front of those who have the ability to develop a cure. None of this nonsense about what people "should" be doing, that they "should" find a cure because it’s the "right thing to do." If we want actual results (and the people who speak such nonsense do not want actual results, only to feel good about themselves having judged others for doing things for the "wrong" reasons), we have to change the structure of our incentives. This is the only way we will actually ever find a cure for AIDS. And once this works, we can move on to cancer and any of a number of other diseases. Cures will come only when we reward the finding of cures rather than the looking for them.

7 comments:

V said...

As usual, the embodiment of salient points.

Anonymous said...

is there anyone or any institution
currently putting together the
'big' reward for finding the cure?

Troy Camplin said...

Not to the best of my knowledge. If I had a few billion dollars lying around, I'd do it myself.

Anonymous said...

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Troy Camplin said...

I would love it if people would always do the right thing just because it's right. But the fact is, you can get more people doing the right thing with the right incentives. If you show people how they can personally benefit from something, they are more likely to do it. Wishing things were any other way just won't make it so, I'm afraid. That's why I'm trying to come up with a way to solve these kinds of problems as they pertain to the way people actually act in the world. Now, I don't doubt that there are people out there who are trying to find a cure for the reasons you give that they should -- however, I would like it if more talented people who don't necessarily share those values would join in so we could get this problem solved. I don't care if the person who solves the problem is selfish or altruistic -- I just care that the problem is solved.

Anonymous said...

To some extent you may be right. However, people should still try.

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=lawrence.IN.&s2=glaser.IN.&OS=IN/lawrence+AND+IN/glaser&RS=IN/lawrence+AND+IN/glaser

Anonymous said...

Troy Camplin, aids cure Feb 05. 1000% correct- except for the motive of designing a cure for aids. D Foundations motive was curiosity and developing a new type of medicine. Our countervirus medicine would work by splicing HIV provirus out of DNA in infected tissue. It is known that a retrovirus unable to incorporate a provirus will have it's infectivity reduced to 1/10,000 of normal. It is expected that a virus with integrated provirus would have it's infectivity reduced even more. Reduction to 1/10,000 would be a cure. Unfortunatly when the system was described to venture capatilists in 1987 we were laughed out of the room. Just like Salk someone said.
If anyone comes up with the $3 million, samples of medicine would be available in about 18 months.
Robert Bryson, President, D Foundation Ltd,San Diego, Calif