Ice bucket bonanza

I'VE seldom seen an issue tackled with such passion by the critics as the ice bucket challenge to benefit amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). My favourite critique was that it’s a bad example in a world where we should be saving water and not wasting it.

Second-best came from the person who dredged up an annual report from one of the ALS NGOs, showing that a relatively small proportion of donations in the last year of reporting had gone to research.

Third was the Facebook comment: “Well done! You’ve all just contributed to funding cruelty to animals in laboratories!”

And fourth was: “Oh, like, hooray! The ice bucket challenge means that all the money people had for charity will go to ALS. Do you know how many worthy causes will suffer?”

And fifth was this, from the BBC’s website: “Bloomberg writer Leonid Bershidsky called it a ‘narcissist's bonanza’.” So, a round of polite applause to all of you, great that you got that off your collective chest.

Some things to consider

First off, do any of the critics do things like take their cars to the car wash? Do you backwash your swimming pool at all? Use the hose to clean down the driveway? If so, you’re wasting – on a regular basis – far more water than any conceivable ice bucket challenge. I do care about water wastage, but really, this isn’t going to become a permanent feature of the social media landscape, is it?

Secondly, from what I’ve seen of the funds the NGOs were raising before, there wasn’t that much available to do research (which is very, very expensive); having a nice big once-off injection like this might be great for funding a research push.

And by the way, do you know that very little of your charity spend on many professional campaigns may reach the cause in question? (Unlike this one, where at least we can be sure those donations profited no one else.)

In the USA, around $6bn is raised every year for breast cancer; one major campaign is by the National Football League, the NFL: “In the end, after everybody has taken their cut, only 8.01% of money spent on pink NFL merchandise is actually going towards cancer research.”

The animal testing thing worries me, because so much research does involve animal testing at some stage, and it just gets to me, you know? I know at least one would-be scientist who found all the dead mice in his lab life too much, and switched careers.

But it’s not like ALS is a particularly bad disease in these terms – many of the things you use every day, like antibiotics or insulin, and the treatment you turn to in a crisis, like chemotherapy, have been subject to animal testing at some stage.

So instead of criticising the tide of ice, why not start a campaign to mandate alternative means of testing  – with stem cell techniques, for instance – wherever conceivable. I’ll be right behind you: I’m rather fond of mice, rats, rabbits and rhesus monkeys.

Perhaps some of the people who donated will limit their charity spend elsewhere. But I’m also sure that many donors sloshing ice around would not otherwise have sent ANY money to a charity or NGO this year. Many people have indeed got a thrill out of being seen to caper around under ice water – all with the very not-silly goal of Doing Good. Good. Well done.

And maybe the experience will convince a few people to become long-term donors, to this or any other cause, having discovered that it lifts your spirits.

And so what if a whole lot of wannabes tried for fame through their bucket challenge? Yep, they jumped on a bandwagon. If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. But in so doing, they created the kind of awareness an orphan disease like ALS could not have dreamed of in a million years.

And just as a reminder: no ALS organisation started this thing. Like so much that goes viral online, it was spontaneous, generated by a friend’s concern (as I understand it).

And that’s something I get, completely. I lost a friend to a similar motor-neuron type of condition, also an orphan disease which no major pharmaceutical company is going to put on its priority research list. How could you make money out of it, if only two in a thousand people is going to get it?

No, better stick to statins and antacids and blood pressure meds, that’s where the big bucks are. (A top statin, for example, sold $9bn a year before it went out of patent.)

That’s one powerful reason I believe we citizens should insist on devoting some of our tax money to research – because there are things really worth researching which are never going to gain traction with a big corporate.

Any number of major inventions seemed to have no commercial application when a scientist working at a state institution or university was researching and testing them.

Think of Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, discovering a ray that would pass through skin and muscle, but not bone – a scientific curiosity that became the X-ray. There’s good reason to free science from the profit motive.
 
 - Fin24

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.