5 ms·

174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-laureates https://www

174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-laureates https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l... Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems". But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.

dekhn 2y ago
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
- chii 2y ago
  > funding much of the basic research it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research). I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).
  - kmos17 2y ago
    Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.
      - kmos17 2y ago
        In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        Undoing regulatory capture may well involve removing some regulations, though. That won't exacerbate regulatory capture.
- Jerrrry 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ChicagoDave 2y ago
    The amount of scrutiny on Wuhan has been astronomical and they actually proved last year it was one of a handful of wild animals as the source of Covid-19. The infections started and were initially concentrated in the market, not the lab. The Wuhan lab is a convenient conspiracy theory distraction. mRNA vaccines are miracle and I've been saying this from day one... If any virus were to start kill kids, you'd all be lined up in milliseconds for the vaccine. We got extremely lucky that Covid-19 left children out of its attack vector. The next pandemic may not be so gracious. The Spanish Flu in 1917-18 killed young and old in its first wave. Then the second wave it also took out 25-35yo adults. And if you got it, you were dead in 48 hours. You people don't actually read anything and know nothing about why the CDC and Fauci acted as they did. They were expecting another Spanish Flu, and they got something very different. Different incubation time. Different attack vector. But they adapted and saved lives. You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy. You know every single Republican was vaccinated as soon as they got the chance. They just forgot to tell you.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy. As a non-US person - I don't understand this. Didn't all the locking down happen state by state anyway? He didn't stop anyone locking down, from what I understood? And he allocated $18bn to finding and distributing a vaccine for Covid[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
      - 2y ago
grahamj 2y ago
Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?
- petesergeant 2y ago
  I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still
  - grahamj 2y ago
    amazing :D
notjoemama 2y ago
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) $47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not? > The hiring freeze is governmentwide > pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration? > NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said. I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off? I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".
- dekhn 2y ago
  NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job). As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.
serf 2y ago
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources? another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
b112 2y ago
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party. To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring. Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.

dekhn 2y ago

NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.

chii 2y ago
> funding much of the basic research it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research). I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
- dekhn 2y ago
  NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).
- kmos17 2y ago
  Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.
    - kmos17 2y ago
      In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        Undoing regulatory capture may well involve removing some regulations, though. That won't exacerbate regulatory capture.
Jerrrry 2y ago
[flagged]
- ChicagoDave 2y ago
  The amount of scrutiny on Wuhan has been astronomical and they actually proved last year it was one of a handful of wild animals as the source of Covid-19. The infections started and were initially concentrated in the market, not the lab. The Wuhan lab is a convenient conspiracy theory distraction. mRNA vaccines are miracle and I've been saying this from day one... If any virus were to start kill kids, you'd all be lined up in milliseconds for the vaccine. We got extremely lucky that Covid-19 left children out of its attack vector. The next pandemic may not be so gracious. The Spanish Flu in 1917-18 killed young and old in its first wave. Then the second wave it also took out 25-35yo adults. And if you got it, you were dead in 48 hours. You people don't actually read anything and know nothing about why the CDC and Fauci acted as they did. They were expecting another Spanish Flu, and they got something very different. Different incubation time. Different attack vector. But they adapted and saved lives. You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy. You know every single Republican was vaccinated as soon as they got the chance. They just forgot to tell you.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    > You're LUCKY those people knew what they were doing DESPITE Trump's actions. And he KNEW. He acted the way he did because he knew the proper action was to lock down everything and stop the spread, but he also knew that would destroy the economy. He traded a million lives in the U.S. for the economy. As a non-US person - I don't understand this. Didn't all the locking down happen state by state anyway? He didn't stop anyone locking down, from what I understood? And he allocated $18bn to finding and distributing a vaccine for Covid[0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
    - 2y ago

grahamj 2y ago

Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?

petesergeant 2y ago
I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still
- grahamj 2y ago
  amazing :D

notjoemama 2y ago

> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) $47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not? > The hiring freeze is governmentwide > pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration? > NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said. I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off? I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".
dekhn 2y ago
NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job). As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.

serf 2y ago

would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources? another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?

b112 2y ago

But screw it, they need to get in line with the party. To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring. Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.