Sleep robs us of roughly 1/3 of our lives. With a global population of 7b, this equates to 2,300m Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) per year. Compare this to cancer which globally costs 169m DALYs/year, or cardiovascular disease which cost 63m DALY/year. Indeed the entire global cost of all diseases, 1,500m DALYs/year, is less than DALYs lost to sleep.

Funding by the NIH for sleep research in FY 2015 amounted to $233m out of a total of $30.3b for FY 2015 for all diseases, or less than 1%.

8 hours of sleep doesn't don't seem intrinsic to the human condition, rather it is an evolutionary adaption to the diurnal world (around which other evolutionary adaptions have doubtless formed). Drugs such as modafinil suggest that we can readily get by on 2.5 hours of sleep per night with few serious side effects.

What is called for is more research on why we sleep, the side effects of taking drugs such as modifinil for prolonged periods of time, and the development of other similar drugs. What is promised is not, reducing the time lost to sleep to zero, but to perhaps a less expensive 2.5 hours a day.