The professional science/medicine funding system (i.e. NIH money) can be characterized by "cabal" depending on how you look at at it. If by "cabal" they mean a

The professional science/medicine funding system (i.e. NIH money) can be characterized by "cabal" depending on how you look at at it. If by "cabal" they mean any organized profesional vetting system. I suppose there is a trade off between vetting good funding ideas from the bad, vs. the risk of "suppressing" original views aside from the "dogma". Did some alternative views get squashed by not receiving R or K grants? maybe. I would bet some of them might have been true original ideas that needed money to get good preliminary data. But many of them probably did not pan out. A lengthy way of saying I agree w/ the OP of the thread...