3 ms·

The announcements of new treatments and new discoveries in various healthcare fields astronomically outstrips the real ones that you can actually make use of.

by crusso 10y ago

The announcements of new treatments and new discoveries in various healthcare fields astronomically outstrips the real ones that you can actually make use of. The easy money is in the hyping of potential cures, and it's easy to see why. Even in this HN thread where you'd expect the level of scientific understanding and healthy skepticism to be fairly high, you see a lot of "Wow, it's about time" type responses. Now imagine the response of the politician controlling grant money who has no background in science.

leephillips 10y ago
Generally speaking, politicians don't control grant money for research. They set the budgets for agencies who solicit proposals that are reviewed by domain experts. The exception is what is known as "pork", but that usually involves large projects.
- lvs 10y ago
  That's pretty much untrue. In the US at least, the federal budget allocation passed by Congress specifies how funding is distributed across programs and to fund the implementation of initiatives specified in other acts. They not only set the budgets for agencies, but also they set the funding for specific programs in those agencies. For science funding agencies, those programs are partially grant soliciting programs, as well as other things. It's not just a big slush fund. Politicians regularly try to mess with these allocations to, for example, attempt to reduce funding for science programs they don't believe in. A famous example is with regard to embryonic stem cell research, although this was done by executive action.
  - leephillips 10y ago
    All you say is true; I was trying to give a coarser-grained description. It applies to cases like this. Someone with a new idea for regrowing tooth enamel is going to apply to some program within NIH (I guess). He's not likely to get funded because a congressperson read a pop-sci article - his proposal will be reviewed by other researchers in dental health.
    - lvs 10y ago
      And that's true microscopically, but year-over-year the flow of money down the pipe is indeed controlled by political whims. In the Bush years, we had some grants granted by an agency that were ultimately only partially allocated by Congress for subsequent years, so that we ended up with only a fraction of what our overall budget was supposed to be by the end of a multiyear grant.

by crusso 10y ago

leephillips 10y ago

Generally speaking, politicians don't control grant money for research. They set the budgets for agencies who solicit proposals that are reviewed by domain experts. The exception is what is known as "pork", but that usually involves large projects.

lvs 10y ago
That's pretty much untrue. In the US at least, the federal budget allocation passed by Congress specifies how funding is distributed across programs and to fund the implementation of initiatives specified in other acts. They not only set the budgets for agencies, but also they set the funding for specific programs in those agencies. For science funding agencies, those programs are partially grant soliciting programs, as well as other things. It's not just a big slush fund. Politicians regularly try to mess with these allocations to, for example, attempt to reduce funding for science programs they don't believe in. A famous example is with regard to embryonic stem cell research, although this was done by executive action.
- leephillips 10y ago
  All you say is true; I was trying to give a coarser-grained description. It applies to cases like this. Someone with a new idea for regrowing tooth enamel is going to apply to some program within NIH (I guess). He's not likely to get funded because a congressperson read a pop-sci article - his proposal will be reviewed by other researchers in dental health.
  - lvs 10y ago
    And that's true microscopically, but year-over-year the flow of money down the pipe is indeed controlled by political whims. In the Bush years, we had some grants granted by an agency that were ultimately only partially allocated by Congress for subsequent years, so that we ended up with only a fraction of what our overall budget was supposed to be by the end of a multiyear grant.