Curing the Corruption of the Pink Ribbon
The world turns pink every October and major corporations turn their attention towards breast cancer awareness. Pink ribbons adorn almost every item in almost every shop. Athletes take the field in pink cleats and pink uniforms. Pink tinged commercials fill our television screens and cover our magazines. The pink ribbon has permeated throughout our society as a symbol of our collective fight against breast cancer. We assume that a percentage of the money we spend on an item with the pink ribbon is going towards finding a cure. Many companies attach them to their products, making it easier for people to justify purchasing items they would otherwise pass over. During October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we are helping to fund a cure for breast cancer simply by spending money, right? Wrong.
There is no law that requires companies to donate the money made on pink ribbon adorned items.
The adoption of the pink ribbon for commercial use and the almost innate opaqueness of charitable donations have created an inefficient, non-transparent path for philanthropic funding of breast cancer research.
The current system sees a lot of the public’s funds get lost in the time it takes for it to travel from a personal bank account to a research institution. Sometimes, it doesn’t ever make it anywhere close to a research team, while large portions of charitable donations often get lost in “administrative” costs. Corporations and charities have effectively bottlenecked public funds in order to increase their own revenue streams.
Removing these “middlemen problems” from the system could clear the pipes and generate a smoother, increased flow of public funds for breast cancer research.
A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously-growing list of records called blocks secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and link to a previous block. It is this transparency that makes blockchains a useful tool for the funding of breast cancer research (and all kinds of research in general). There is a precedent for using blockchain technology to help fund healthcare/scientific research. HEAL Alliance has created a the HEAL Bond on Blockchain (a social impact bond) which utilizes blockchain, social media, cloud, and mobile technologies to help fund HIV research. A similar public project could be applied for breast cancer research.
Crowdfunding campaigns (aka Kickstarter) tend to resonate with the general public. By using blockchain based dApps like WeiFund and Benefactory, research could effectively & truthfully be crowdsourced. The transparency of blockchain transactions means that all of the data regarding the acquisition and distribution of funds is open to the public. This in turn ensures that any money donated to the project ends up where it belongs, with the research teams and not in the pockets of corporate or charity employees. As an added benefit the transparency of these public donations could put pressure on corporations to utilize blockchain technology and publicly donate some of the money they bring in during Breast Cancer Awareness month.
Finding a cure for breast cancer is a goal that serves all of humanity. Unfortunately, current funding techniques are inefficient and problematic, slowing the progress of research. Blockchain technology, paired with proven crowdsourcing techniques or social impact bonds, present humanity with a new opportunity to create an efficient, transparent, and fair system that will hopefully allow us to rapidly speed up the search for a cure.
If you want to talk more about this (and other soccer/politics/foreign affairs related stuff), let me know your thoughts below or email me at ben.siegel@consensys.net
