I don't think the problem is with society, or with the economy. The money was already available for this project, and funding was essentially assured. The prob

I don't think the problem is with society, or with the economy. The money was already available for this project, and funding was essentially assured. The problem is that, without putting too fine a point on it, the folks running the National Institute on Aging couldn't find their rear ends with both hands and a flashlight. There is a profound degree of stagnation in some of the National Institutes of Health, and the NIA is no exception, as exemplified by the fact that the current NIA director has been in that role for over 30 years. The leadership group puts out a list of goals for their "strategic directions" every 5 years or so, and to my knowledge, they've never actually achieved any of those goals. As outlined in the report mentioned in the article [1], the NIA's approach to spearheading this large (for them) initiative basically involved identifying job opportunities, putting out a call for grant applications...and that was it. They didn't bother to articulate any actual vision for the project, nor develop any way to account for how the money would be spent. So at the end of the six-year program, there would have been 100 different projects, storing data in 200 different silos, $300 million spent, and zero to show for it. In the end, NIA chose to can the initiative rather than open up scrutiny to how they spend the *rest* of their money (their yearly budget is over $4 billion [2]). 1: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106886.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106886.pdf 2: https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fiscal-year-2024-budget https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fiscal-year-2024-budget