Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.
The takeaway here is getting money into the hands of smarter and more motivated people.
The entire yearly budget for the National Cancer Institute is $7 billion dollars. To put this in perspective, that's 3 days of funding the DoD. For cancer. That kills well over half a million Americans per year.
The takeaway is that we should invest in research rather than letting people die.
Governments have a limited (although large) budget, and no incentive to spend it well[1]. You don't get promoted as a government administrator if you approve a Nobel-prize-winning grannt.
If you don't get rewarded for good work but may get punished for taking risks, you optimize for risk minimization, even if this means a lot of potentially-good work not getting done.
Nobody blames the FDA when millions of people die from the-medicine-hasn't-been-invented-yet-itis, everybody blames the FDA when ten or so people die from a side effect nobody saw. This impacts FDA policy.
This person has the best incentive there is in the world, the incentive to live. He didn't care whether the people getting his money correctly filled form 437-F, or whether they have the relevant paperwork that verifies their legitimacy in a way which can be described by legal rules.
[1] Incidentally, finance has (had?) the opposite problem. If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage * profit_generated), you will maximize risk, optimizing for bets that give you great returns most of the time, but wipe you out completely some of the time, as your losses are clamped to 0.
I assume you meant `max(...)`? Otherwise you will at best get zero dollars in bonus, and at worst owe your employer money. ;)
(I get min/max backward all the time too.)
Would it be a big deal to double that?
Alzheimer's is a warning tale. Lots of money flowed into research of this condition, and was mostly wasted on a flawed hypothesis supported by scientific VIPs who had a face to lose in case it proved incorrect.
We don't necessarily need more money in research, but smarter ways of spending it. The current grant system rewards established players and reliable production of mediocre (or even fraudulent) papers over honest failure and actual innovation too much.
The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.