Do not donate to the American Cancer Society, LLS, Johns Hopkins or Harvard.

Here is what you should donate to instead

Recently Johns Hopkins announced that because Michael Bloomberg donated a billion dollars, medical school will be free. Recently the American Cancer Society funded a study to provide CT chest screening scans to homeless people to look for lung cancer.

What do these donations have in common?

They are a poor use of money. Doctors already earn millions in lifetime earnings and even a physician in a lower paid specialty (pediatrics/ family practice) can pay off all their loans and still come out ahead— to the tune of millions. Homeless people need lots of things, the least of which is a CT scan to look for lung cancer. (see video)

Both Johns Hopkins and ACS are misusing their funds. I suspect in the case of Hopkins they got Bloomberg to agree to the idea (i.e they proposed it) and in the case of ACS they used donated funds to fund these projects.

As for the LLS society, here are the big donors.

The society does not fund research in patients best interest if that seriously threatens the earnings of these companies. Often they fund complementary research to companies, which expands the market share of the drugs. They also raise substantial funds from individual donors which ties these monies to the corporate interests. Of course, the organization will claim to be independent, but that misses the point. Of course, you would not want to jeopardize or anger a million dollar donor. As such, they will never fund the most impactful research that pushes back on pharma.

All this raises the question: How should people donate?

I would never donate to the ACS, LLS, or Johns Hopkins (broadly) because I have no confidence these institutions would use my money in a wise way. If you are a typical donor, I would read books by Peter Singer and donate to these charities, which address the worst off people in the world (which BTW isn’t donating money to US Pediatricians who will make 3 million in career lifetime earnings after loans).

If you are truly interested in donating to cancer or university research, then I would donate to individual researchers. I would not donate to anyone doing work with trendy modalities— aka genome sequencing or artificial intelligence— there is plenty of money for buzzword topics. I would donate to individuals who are doing research that pushes against corporate power, or otherwise would not have abundant funding. There are many thoughtful people working at universities on the verge of being pushed out. I would donate to these people.

Big universities and many charities are misspending money. I wouldn’t donate to them.