one can (never) cure cancer?

[chris0033547]

What we need is to not rely so much on profit-seeking companies so that we can develop and produce medicines that aren't reliant on how profitable they will be.

Yes, these are my thoughts as well! I also read your article about seeking an alternative for capitalism, which you wrote in this thread:

http://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=1140

However even though I think that it would be too early to seek an alternative for capitalism, because humanity hasn't developed a post-scarcity global civilisation yet, there may be specific ways to give pharmaceutical companies more incentives to develop new treatments for diseases. I think that the only way to do it in our current society is crowdfunding. Unfortunately current crowdfunding methods don't work very well as can be seen here for example:

https://www.crowdrise.com/CUREEBOLA

The accumulation rate of money seems to be rather slow when it comes to crowdfunding and I think that it's impossible to collect large sums of money like this in order to finance new research directions in medicine. However if one could find ways to make crowdfunding much more effective it might be possible to circumvent the influence of big pharmaceutical companies on the medical market and do research directly sponsored by "people on the street".

When I watch TV for example sometimes advertisements for the state lottery pop up on the screen. One can participate in this state lottery and - if one is extremely lucky - win huge sums of money. The state lottery is an additional source of income for the state. So I wonder, why there are no state programs to organize a state lottery dedicated to the support of specific research fields like medicine? People would play in this lottery and the collected money would be used for projects like 'CUREEBOLA' above. I think that this approach would generate a "medical arms race" with the established pharmaceutical companies and give them an extra incentive to invest in new treatments for various diseases. (Otherwise those companies might go bankrupt if the crowdfunded research comes up with a better treatment for one disease or even several diseases.)

I mean states over the world already organize events like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_concert

The collected money usually goes to some charity organisations, which help some poor people somethere in the world for example. Sometimes catastrophes happen in the world and these kind of concerts are organized to accumulate gigantic sums of money:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitaria...earthquake

So I wonder, why the states around the world don't organize something similar like a "medical state lottery" or regular "benefit concerts" for the advancement of science and so on? This would surely put some pressure on the pharmaceutical companies around the world.

A question, which would've to be addressed is: Who decides, what to spend the collected money on? Somehow a public state-sponsored plattform (financed by the money, collected from the lottery) would've to be organized, where scientists could advertise their research fields for the general public (the participants of the lottery) and then people could make their votes. Well, something like this might work.