Kickstarting Cancer's Ass

Jay Lake (author of clock-punk classic and the recently released Kalimpura) has a particularly rare form of cancer and as one of the options to fight it, he needs to sequence the DNA of the cancer against his own DNA.  It's been done before.  By isolating specific genes, doctors have successfully shut down cancer in the past, and both Jay Lake and his friends are hoping they can do the same with his.  Genomic sequencing, however, is expensive, and not covered by Jay's insurance so a couple of his friends started a fund-raiser to get him the money he needs.

I met Jay once at a book signing at the Cedar Hills Powell's here in Portland and was surprised by his humor and friendliness.  Authors at book signings can run the gamut from awkwardly shy to down-right hostile (though, fortunately, the latter is very rare), and I remember thinking how much I'd enjoyed the reading of Green, by Jay Lake.  I was more familiar with his novels set in the Mainspring universe, a kind of clockwork steampunk that defied what I thought punk and science-fiction were.  But at that time he was reading from Green, the first novel in his Green series.  I was intrigued (and it didn't hurt that the cover was one of Dan Dos Santos's).

But I lost track of the author until I heard about the fundraiser for his benefit.  I want to read his work, and I'd like to see him survive his cancer, and I wholeheartedly endorse the fundraiser.  It has succeeded financially, at least, surpassing its goal by nearly 200%; in doing so, however, it caused a minor kerfuffle that brought PayPal's policies and lapses once more to the internet's attention.  Basically, PayPal locked Jay's account due to what it suspected was fraudulent activity.  He invoked Twitter and the blogosphere, and leveraged the influence of his friends and their readership, to motivate PayPal to fix the problem in a timely manner.  John Scalzi has a pretty nice account of what happened, but in reading the comments to his story, I noticed something interesting.

Scalzi has an international audience.  He's popular the world over, and it's no surprise that people from other forms of health care would use this opportunity to lambast American health care (or even for Americans to criticize our healthcare system.  The tenor of the criticism seems to revolve around the recent use of the internet to fund-raise for healthcare.  We're probably all familiar with the concept of micro-loans to start small business in developing countries; we're well aware that Kickstarter has revolutionized creative start-ups.  What's less well understood is the way in which the internet allows people with needs to actively engage humanitarian impulses throughout the world.

The humanitarian loop used to go something like this: A need is identified (either through journalism, word-of-mouth, or more or less official channels including diplomatic); once that need is identified, people with resources have to be able to extend their largesse to those with the need.  Somewhere between those two, however, an organization or individual had to handle the money and see that it was delivered.  The internet takes out the first step, greatly simplifies the final step and most importantly allows everyone with any excess to contribute.  Philanthropy was once the purview of the rich; it now exists for everyone with a couple bucks and an internet connection.