I realize this question is in jest, but it may not be a bad idea. I could envision a Kickstarter fund for individuals to fund research projects to help scientists who can use the help. Granted that may not lead to a cure, but it might help. In fact I'd rather do that than the usual marketing driven thing of wearing a ribbon. I also think this would make funding research a bit less abstract.
the amount of money and lack of tangible immediate results would make this untenable. This is way outside the scope of normal crowd funding. This is why large companies with deep pockets and wealthy philanthropic concerns exist.
Large companies with deep pockets existed because there was no way to internationally organize around a monetary research fund cause and get live information about the progress in both a transparent and not prohitively expensive way for the organization to operate.
Ten years ago, you would have to mail dvds because internet speeds weren't fast enough to live-stream the office surveilance camera. Twenty years ago you would have had to snail mail a bulletin every month about status updates.
Today you make a wordpress site with a $3 a year .com address and $50 a month hosting (or host it on the various media sites interlinked like a Tumblr), post live updates, and stream / upload video and audio about progress at a whim.
The middle men of a lot of things (movie production, r&d) did not exist because people wouldn't fund those on their own. They existed because it was infeasible to organize millions of funders and to properly broadcast progress to millions the way such organizations could to a boardroom. That has since changed.
> It often takes more than 10 years to deliver a final, licensed vaccine,5 and requires not only excellence during research and product development but also managerial and funding commitment throughout the endeavor. The cost of developing a vaccine—from research and discovery to product registration—is estimated to be between US $200 million and US $500 million per vaccine.6 This figure includes vaccines that are abandoned during the development process. In short, vaccine research and product development is lengthy, complex, and loaded with binary outcome risks.
just because the complexity of a process is abstracted away doesn't mean it's ceased to exist.
from the sale of products they've invested years of research in. From angel funding and capital from the market, wealthy backers and philanthropists.
I find it hard to imagine that you could keep asking for more and more funding on a promise for a cure for something in 5-10 years down the road, and continue to have the same private individuals with very little personal wealth continue to throw their earnings at it.
I imagine that individual smaller projects may well benefit from it, but crowd-sourcing cancer or something equally grand, people would lose interest in it. Not because they don't care, but because human beings have human timescales attached to expectations. Something that has a hard to quantify immediate success or reward attached to it is less likely to attract attention and investment.
Maybe the "reward" isn't that you get immediate results, but you get the satisfaction of laying down a brick in a larger building? Maybe if we could put a face on research it would be less abstract to every day people who aren't in science?
There's something to be said for that, which is why charities and philanthropic organisations exist. the question is whether money is being funnelled efficiently in the right direction and used efficiently. Who's to say that laymen with no grounding in a subject make a good judge of that.
I don't think curing cancer makes much sense in the Kickstarter sense:
1. It is enormously expensive - curing a form of cancer costs well into the millions. So it wouldn't get funded.
2. There are loads of funding sources out there already.
3. "Curing" is actually very difficult to define. Most cancer treatments reduce and you'd need a bunch of expensive studies just to determine if the metric was met if it was anything short of "cured."
That said, it might work on a limited basis if you applied an X-Prize to certain forms of cancer. It could mobilize people to really focus on certain types of cancer and specific goals.
Well, the model would be a little different. It wouldn't be just about money. You would want to crowd-source work, ancillary projects, etc. Also, I wouldn't crowd-source a cure for cancer, but research in general.
For example, we might find a way to cure a lot of cancers by simply detecting them when they are days old when they are easier to treat, so a better, and inexpensive, way to detect cancers would be valuable.