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【medical-news】推荐翻译：比尔盖茨基金会资助科
Five Years In, Gauging Impact of Gates Grants
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SEATTLE — Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.
No idea was too radical, he said, and what he called the Grand Challenges in Global Health would pursue paths that the National Institutes of Health and other grant makers could not.
About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.
Now the five years are up, and the foundation recently brought all the scientists to Seattle to assess the results and decide who will get further funding.
In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were na?ve when we began.”
全文,请访问
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/health/21gates.html?_r=1&ref=health
最近清华大学教授获得盖茨基金会的资助,请见
http://news.dxy.cn/bbs/topic/19043401?tpg=1&age=0
Somalis waiting for mosquito nets. The Gates Foundation gave a grant to hunt for molecules that could block mosquitoes’ ability to detect people.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: December 20, 2010
SEATTLE — Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.
No idea was too radical, he said, and what he called the Grand Challenges in Global Health would pursue paths that the National Institutes of Health and other grant makers could not.
About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.
Now the five years are up, and the foundation recently brought all the scientists to Seattle to assess the results and decide who will get further funding.
In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were na?ve when we began.”
As an example, he cited the pursuit of vaccines that do not need refrigeration. “Back then, I thought: ‘Wow — we’ll have a bunch of thermostable vaccines by 2010.’ But we’re not even close to that. I’d be surprised if we have even one by 2015.”
He underestimated, he said, how long it takes to get a new product from the lab to clinical trials to low-cost manufacturing to acceptance in third-world countries.
In 2007, instead of making more multimillion-dollar grants, he started making hundreds of $100,000 ones.
“Now,” he said, only half-kidding, “you get a hundred grand if you even pretend you can cure AIDS.”
That little won’t buy a breakthrough, but it lets scientists “moonlight” by adding new goals to their existing grants, which saves the foundation a lot of winnowing. “And,” he added, “a scientist in a developing country can do a lot with $100,000.”
Over all, he said: “On drawing attention to ways that lives might be saved through scientific advances, I’d give us an A.
“But I thought some would be saving lives by now, and it’ll be more like in 10 years from now.”
Several scientists at the conference noted that Mr. Gates comes from the software industry, where computing power constantly doubles. Biology, by comparison, moves glacially — and microbes are less cooperative than electrons.
Biology also has a greater tendency to create progress-hindering controversy. For example, doing clinical trials on illiterate subjects in poor countries, which was once cheap and fast but ethically dubious, has become time-consuming and expensive as ethical standards have improved.
Also, poor countries lacking regulatory authorities and highly educated political and scientific elites may be nervous about being misused by Western scientists and careful about accepting new technologies.
Despite discoveries on many fronts, up to two-thirds of the grants either did not get renewed or may not in the near future, Mr. Gates estimated. In some cases, it was because they were not succeeding, either scientifically or because of political obstacles, or someone else had found a better path. In others, the foundation changed the goal.
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2010-12-25 07:23
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