Why does research cost so much money?
it only takes time and effort
I think the answer to the question is already there. It takes time and effort. So it means it takes at least the money to pay the people for a long time. And effort means you need a lot of people.
More precisely, for medical research, reagents, animal model, clinical test are really expensive. Many different drugs need to be developed to have only one working in the end. Finally when a drug seems promising, you have to do year-long clinical tests, just to ensure patients safety.
So time and effort == lot of money
People's salaries cost money. Given the overheads of running a business or university, plus the cost of fringe benefits like retirement and health insurance, you can basically double someone's salary to get the full cost of employing them (whether the number is directly charged or comes in through a national healthcare/retirement scheme). If their talent's are in demand, then companies may bid up salaries in order to attract them away from universities in order to try to make a profit on their labors.
STEM talents are in demand.
Therfore, each PhDed person who works on a project costs somewhere between $150,000 and $400,000 (salary is half that, recall) in a broad range of fields relevant to solving problems like ALS or cancer or other diseases.
Research is hard. Most drugs don't pan out, so you need lots of people trying lots of different ones in order to develop some that do work.
Mathematics is cheaper to pursue. That can literally be one person reading and scribbling and talking to colleagues until she has a breakthrough. These folks often get paid primarily to teach, but if they're willing to work on algorithms for companies or the government, then they are worth a lot, so salaries also get bid up.
I'm an experimenter, so in addition to the cost of some highly trained people's salaries and benefits and the cost of keeping the lights on and the white boards cleaned there is equipment and consumables.
Some of the equipment is precision kit. Lots of it are produced in small runs because only a few hundred sites in the whole world need that kind of stuff, so there is no economies of scale. Some of the consumables are pretty exotic and cost a whole heck of a lot.
All of this applies perfectly well to the kind of research mentioned in the question, plus they have to deal with human subjects concerns and that doesn't come cheap either.
And just because I like to talk about my work...
Because I'm in big science, when it come time to stop tinkering around with prototypes and testbeds and get really serious we usually build a one-of-a-kind multi-ton detector with thousands or tens of thousands of instrumented channels. Giga-bytes per day data streams, massive computing infrastructure, hundreds of salaries and travel money.
The question isn't "Why does it cost so much?" but "How do you expect us to get it done with so little?". Then we go ahead and try because we're happy to have the chance to do it, even on a "shoestring".