The Boston Globe today has a great article that, to me anyway, really illustrates the amazing resiliency and imagination of the human spirit when faced with the unthinkable. It describes Avi Kremer’s story, a man diagnosed with ALS who decided to fight back, literally, for his life with something different — money. Prize money, that is, for helping along the cure to ALS. His project, called Prize4Life, turns the tables on the traditional funding method for researchers:

Usually, researchers get grants as seed money on the front end of their scientific pursuits. Prize4Life takes that dogma and turns it inside out. Scientists get the prize money only after solving crucial questions about ALS — solutions that could hasten discovery of drugs to slow the disease.

Avi’s story is something that, although possible a decade ago, would’ve been so much harder to publicize and organize without the Internet. It is stories like this that, to me, suggest possibilities for the future (and capture the real spirit of “Health 2.0” or e-patients).