Bill Gates: Male baldness research gets more funding than cures for disease

Capitalism has led to skewed research priorities, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has said, arguing that more money is pumped into research for male baldness than into curing diseases.

Speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Summit yesterday, Mr Gates – who has pledged to give away half of his billion-dollar fortune to charity – said initiatives for poor people are being abandoned in order to prioritise more marketable ventures.

"Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives," he said.

"The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding.

"But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria."

Governments and philanthropy have to step in to offset this "flaw in the pure capitalistic approach," he added.

"Why is it so much harder to get medicine used in the developing world versus the rich world?," he said.

Before explaining the need to develop the distribution of drugs that deliver treatment over a long time period, rather than quick release drugs that require the poor to constantly need top ups.

Despite admitting that the challenges of overcoming a poverty burdened world are "daunting", Mr Gates argued that tools of the "genetic revolution" could soon tackle issues such as low crops and the development of more food.

Through his own philanthropic ventures with The Gates Foundation, Mr Gates is tackling disease on a global scale.

Earlier this year, he vowed to win the battle against childhood polio and announced his resolve to eradicate it within six years.

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