7 ms·

The Gutting of America's Medical Research

91 points by pmags 1y ago

lentoutcry 1y ago
it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
- bediger4000 1y ago
  There will be follow-on effects, too. Like "wellness" ending up on the same tier as "medicine". Without the research, who's to say? This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
  - lentoutcry 1y ago
    yep. I don't wanna be in the shoes of the doctors who'll have to deal with this. although I suspect a part of them will resign, leading to even more "fun" downstream effects
  - sorokod 1y ago
    A TIL, Medical freedom. Very likely those opinions will be shaped by social media and LLMs steering in turn public health policies, plugging into politics and back to start. A neat vertically integrated system.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    > This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron). That's very double-edged. The open question is should humans have the right to take substances individually? Sure, you get Ivermectin/covid deniers. But you also get homemade Solvaldi (cure for Hepatitis C). I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000 Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal, even aside patent bullshit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42538903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42538903 But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Why do we accept really shitty gatekeepers (medical establishment, doctors) gatekeep treatments and cures from us? And more currently, now that der fuhrer quit the emergency use allocation for Covid shots, now you need a doctors scrip for 'allowing to get a vaccine'. I should be able to get this if I pay for it. But nope, now need to pay for needless doctor payment and more barriers. So at least in that side, I'm on Qanon's view that I should be able to personally treat myself with whatever substance I deem. Of course, I'll definitely heed a doctor's suggestion as an expert. But fuck.. My body, my choice.
    - sorokod 1y ago
      > But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Consider this analogy: you should be allowed to put a gun to your own head and pull the trigger. You should not be allowed to put on a suicide vest and blow yourself up in a group of people.
      - mystraline 1y ago
        To the first, yes, I do believe that we humans SHOULD have a right to commit suicide. It should be a right to end your own life. We have a 'right' drink a handle of whiskey a day, up to the point we get liver disease. Same with smoking 3 packs a day of cigarettes. Same with horrendous diet. But those ways of killing yourself are "acceptable" and also legal. But they're slower. The second, you're harming other people. That example is blatantly ridiculous, and appears just to gain an emotional response by invoking terrorism.
        sorokod 1y ago
        "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious.
        bigbadfeline 1y ago
        > "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious. Have you watched a movie lately? Talk about contagious violence. I can tell you this, your fate is just a blip on the back side of other people's large screen TV where the movies are shown.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually matter as someone other than a pill counter. It ends so many stupid discussions we have in the US. Can this medication be prescribed for an off-label use? Who cares because you can just buy it. Do you meet some arbitrary federal weight guideline for Ozempic? Who cares you can just buy it. * every rule has exceptions, don't get bogged down with them.
- msgodel 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - nerdponx 1y ago
    When did they become political? The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      Science in the US became political in like the 50s, when Vannevar Bush decided we should spend federal funds on advancing research since it was so fruitful during WW2, and things like peer review, which did not exist as a formal process in most research, could improve dissemination and the scientific process. It also became political when we were trying to introduce evolution, a well understood and supported scientific discovery, into science curriculums, and that made religious people extremely angry It also became political in like 2000 when Bush jr. banned stem cell research because it made religious people mad. It also became political in like 1980 when Exxon understood unequivocally that they were directly causing the destruction of the Earth's climate and that they could probably just spend money on PR campaigns to make it a culture war issue so they wouldn't have to fix it. It also became political when geology proved the earth was more than 6000 years old. It also became political when Eugenics. This also made religious people angry when scientific racism was demonstrably wrong. It also became political when scientists knew there was a clear connection between cigarettes and lung cancer but it took like thirty years to produce the kind of scientific studies that were required to convince the general public because of immense counter-narrative campaigns by cigarette companies that insisted that cigarettes were healthy. They also became political when the Christian Scientists parlayed their insane cult beliefs into laws to allow them to send their unvaccinated kids to school at everyone else's expense. It also became political in the 90s when the sugar industry funded an immense anti-narrative campaign to trick the majority of the US into believing that fat was more harmful than other forms of the same amount of calories. It is currently political to understand even basic highschool biology like "mRNA won't change your DNA" It was political when a Utah politician and two chemists tried to turn the result of a single extremely poorly run fusion experiment that no physicist was able to replicate and had clear methodological problems (and math problems) that any physicist would have wanted to fix into federal funding to the tune of $25 million after claiming in the Press Release that the intial experiment was funded with $100k of their own money and they wanted maybe a couple million to scale up and confirm their results. It was political when Nazis burned an institute setup to research gender and sexuality. Knowledge has always been political to people who confuse their ignorant beliefs for reality, and rely on public ignorance for their support. You should notice that these events were not politicized by scientists.
notyourav 1y ago
A naive question: So much “tax payer” money is going towards research funding. But it looks like private companies are reaping rewards, mostly as a new drug. Why is this research not (mainly) privately funded?
- wnc3141 1y ago
  While there is value from having the drug becoming available on the market, you would think there would need to be some form price controls in exchange for private production.
- lentoutcry 1y ago
  a lot of basic research is very risky and most of the time it’s not stuff that leads to immediate development of a new drug. it’s basically acquiring knowledge with the hope that some of it might turn out to be practically useful in the future, but in the short term, it just allows us to understand stuff. but it’s not directly profitable, so private companies aren’t motivated to invest so much money in that
  - caycep 1y ago
    This. And per John Maynard Keynes, it's money well spent.
  - lakhim 1y ago
    Its also explicit policy of the US government to encourage use of the new research done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    this sounds like it's a really bad idea for the government to fund. What's to stop someone who happens to have made it in the ivory tower go crazy, spin up some kooky ideas that are highly risky and just blow taxpayer money on something not really accountable?
    - 1y ago
kelseyfrog 1y ago
The positive side seems to be that relinquishing our position[1] as the medical research country should lower healthcare prices. For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research - drug discovery, device innovation, &etc. By destroying our ability to do research, we should expect to see healthcare prices equalize at a price where those costs are no longer factored in, right? 1. By way of self-inflicted damage
- Spivak 1y ago
  Hahaha, prices come down?! In this economy? That's not very pro-shareholder of you.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    If that doesn't happen, then to what degree can we conclude that being a medical research country wasn't in fact the reason why our healthcare prices were so high?
    - postpawl 1y ago
      There’s already a lot of studies about this > More than half of excess U.S. health spending was associated with factors likely reflected in higher prices, including more spending on: administrative costs of insurance (~15% of the excess), administrative costs borne by providers (~15%), prescription drugs (~10%), wages for physicians (~10%) and registered nurses (~5%), and medical machinery and equipment (less than 5%). Reductions in administrative burdens and drug costs could substantially reduce the difference between U.S. and peer nation health spending. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/oct/high-us-health-care-spending-where-is-it-all-going https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
- lapcat 1y ago
  > For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research That was a lie to justify insurance price gouging.
1970-01-01 1y ago
Once again, there is merit to cutting funding when more than half of research is irreproducible crap. A decimation can function as the first step toward rebuilding. The problem is that you DO need to have plans to rebuild it. We don't.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  Why do you think reproducibility will improve if funding is cut significantly? That is less money for labor, instruments, and consumables, which means less money for experiments, particularly for follow up experiments that have no deliverable.
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    Competition is higher people are hungrier, fraud will go up not down
    - biophysboy 1y ago
      Yes, exactly
  - 1970-01-01 1y ago
    I agree that cutting it won't solve the issue, especially without that long term plan, but at the current sky-high level of fraud, this just isn't science anymore. At what level of fraud do you suggest pulling the plug if not right now? Funding research until 90% is fake? 95%? 99%? Taxpayer money can be spent on many other life-critical areas with tangible results.
    - biophysboy 1y ago
      Irreproducibility is not the same as fraud. In any case, I would support high-risk research - stuff that may not be repeatable - if it has a high direct ROI, economic spillover (USA has a big biotech/pharma ecosystem), and leads to cost savings (e.g. no more dialysis machines).
jmclnx 1y ago
Many people think this will hurt the old the most, but in reality, as an old person, it will hurt our children far more more than old people. Once again we are proving the US is just "I got mine, the rest of you can suffer" Country. Examples are research on ALS, Childhood Diabetes and Cancer and many more issues too numerous to list. Already funding has been cut for ALS and Cancer research. Welcome to depending upon China and Japan for ground breaking treatments. From what I have read Japan has been doing a lot and I think China is ramping up quickly.
gotoeleven 1y ago
[flagged]
- carefulfungi 1y ago
  Here is the data. Your comment is misleading - HIV, Alzheimers, diabetes, and improved anti-viral and vaccines (all of which are research areas impacted by these cuts) aren't leftist idealogies. https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- LorenPechtel 1y ago
  But said critics have no basis for saying it's dubious. Just look at that MAHA report. Exactly the sort of thing you would expect when you ask an AI to support something false. A human generally recognizes when a search throws up a totally false hit. And, in general, the right hits show up in the results before the wonky stuff--but when you're searching for something that doesn't exist, or doesn't exist in a web-readable form all you get is the wonky stuff. But the AIs don't have the ability to recognize they're in the garbage and distill it out so you no longer see it's pedigree. But it's still garbage.
jmuguy 1y ago
Non paywall version https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-cuts-nih-grants-research.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU8.G76b.aZYUMXS3sHoT&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-...
YossarianFrPrez 1y ago
> It also axed research on Covid-19, including studies that could have helped the nation respond to many infectious disease threats. Among them: a grant to Emory University and Georgia State University, where researchers had developed three potential drugs that showed promise against many RNA-based viruses, including coronaviruses, Ebola, avian influenza and measles, said George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory who was co-leading the research. Just to reiterate a few things, while estimates vary, every $1 spent on medical research returns multiple dollars of economic value. One study out of England suggest that for ever pound invested in medical research, the return is .25 pounds every year after, forever. [1] The cost of these cuts, as others have said, is quite large. In addition, these grants are peer reviewed by expert panels, and only grants that score within certain top N percentiles which are determined each year. For the marquee grants, you have to score in the top ~10th percentile (see [2], for example.) This scoring is done by expert panels, which are composed of leading experts / professors from around the country. While one can adjust funding priorities, part of the price to pay for having cutting edge basic research always available is that there will be certain things one disagrees with. There is plenty of room for a discussion of how to increase the efficiency of scientific funding, and if the current science-funding institutions are at... 'a near-optimal position in tradeoff space.' However, taking a chainsaw to the agencies to punish them is like blaming doctors for outbreaks of diseases, the latter being sadly predictable. [1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-return-on-investment https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-retu... [2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines
kylehotchkiss 1y ago
It's questionable if the health secretary even believes that germs are real, so this checks out. Unfortunately, as a county, once you set a poor governing standard like this, it's hard to recover back to where we were. Biology is not convenient nor does it follow the ruling political parties platform. The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions.
- nerdponx 1y ago
  > The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions. That or they would rather simply ignore biology in service of this or that politically-motivated special interest, and put off any problems for the next generation to deal with.
find 1y ago
Basic research has a lot in common with startups. The unicorn rate is <1%, the best new ideas sound like bad ideas, and nearly all value from the best ideas is locked in the long-term future. The ideal startup/scientific program failure rate is not 0%, and could be 95%. The current research system has serious problems, but we need accurate criticism to build a better future. "YC is all wasteful spending; why doesn't YC just choose to only fund the hits?" is absurd, but somehow we allow this argument when discussing NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA.
- conception 1y ago
  Never take anyone serious who says “The government is not making enough money/losing money on this.” It’s not a business. Its job is clearly outlined in the preamble of the constitution.

91 points by pmags 1y ago

it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects

bediger4000 1y ago
There will be follow-on effects, too. Like "wellness" ending up on the same tier as "medicine". Without the research, who's to say? This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron).
- lentoutcry 1y ago
  yep. I don't wanna be in the shoes of the doctors who'll have to deal with this. although I suspect a part of them will resign, leading to even more "fun" downstream effects
- sorokod 1y ago
  A TIL, Medical freedom. Very likely those opinions will be shaped by social media and LLMs steering in turn public health policies, plugging into politics and back to start. A neat vertically integrated system.
- mystraline 1y ago
  > This will also compound the Qanon fascination with "medical freedom", where the patient gets to dictate to the doctor what to do (i.e. use ivermectin against COVID, or whatever other superstition rises to the top of the Qanon imagination cauldron). That's very double-edged. The open question is should humans have the right to take substances individually? Sure, you get Ivermectin/covid deniers. But you also get homemade Solvaldi (cure for Hepatitis C). I can make it for $300 for the 12 week course, and it retail costs $84000 Of course, even making and taking this drug you manufacture is illegal, even aside patent bullshit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42538903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42538903 But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Why do we accept really shitty gatekeepers (medical establishment, doctors) gatekeep treatments and cures from us? And more currently, now that der fuhrer quit the emergency use allocation for Covid shots, now you need a doctors scrip for 'allowing to get a vaccine'. I should be able to get this if I pay for it. But nope, now need to pay for needless doctor payment and more barriers. So at least in that side, I'm on Qanon's view that I should be able to personally treat myself with whatever substance I deem. Of course, I'll definitely heed a doctor's suggestion as an expert. But fuck.. My body, my choice.
  - sorokod 1y ago
    > But why shouldn't I be able to treat myself? Consider this analogy: you should be allowed to put a gun to your own head and pull the trigger. You should not be allowed to put on a suicide vest and blow yourself up in a group of people.
    - mystraline 1y ago
      To the first, yes, I do believe that we humans SHOULD have a right to commit suicide. It should be a right to end your own life. We have a 'right' drink a handle of whiskey a day, up to the point we get liver disease. Same with smoking 3 packs a day of cigarettes. Same with horrendous diet. But those ways of killing yourself are "acceptable" and also legal. But they're slower. The second, you're harming other people. That example is blatantly ridiculous, and appears just to gain an emotional response by invoking terrorism.
      - sorokod 1y ago
        "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious.
        bigbadfeline 1y ago
        > "you're harming other people", yes as in the case where you are contagious. Have you watched a movie lately? Talk about contagious violence. I can tell you this, your fate is just a blip on the back side of other people's large screen TV where the movies are shown.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually matter as someone other than a pill counter. It ends so many stupid discussions we have in the US. Can this medication be prescribed for an off-label use? Who cares because you can just buy it. Do you meet some arbitrary federal weight guideline for Ozempic? Who cares you can just buy it. * every rule has exceptions, don't get bogged down with them.
msgodel 1y ago
[flagged]
- nerdponx 1y ago
  When did they become political? The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Science in the US became political in like the 50s, when Vannevar Bush decided we should spend federal funds on advancing research since it was so fruitful during WW2, and things like peer review, which did not exist as a formal process in most research, could improve dissemination and the scientific process. It also became political when we were trying to introduce evolution, a well understood and supported scientific discovery, into science curriculums, and that made religious people extremely angry It also became political in like 2000 when Bush jr. banned stem cell research because it made religious people mad. It also became political in like 1980 when Exxon understood unequivocally that they were directly causing the destruction of the Earth's climate and that they could probably just spend money on PR campaigns to make it a culture war issue so they wouldn't have to fix it. It also became political when geology proved the earth was more than 6000 years old. It also became political when Eugenics. This also made religious people angry when scientific racism was demonstrably wrong. It also became political when scientists knew there was a clear connection between cigarettes and lung cancer but it took like thirty years to produce the kind of scientific studies that were required to convince the general public because of immense counter-narrative campaigns by cigarette companies that insisted that cigarettes were healthy. They also became political when the Christian Scientists parlayed their insane cult beliefs into laws to allow them to send their unvaccinated kids to school at everyone else's expense. It also became political in the 90s when the sugar industry funded an immense anti-narrative campaign to trick the majority of the US into believing that fat was more harmful than other forms of the same amount of calories. It is currently political to understand even basic highschool biology like "mRNA won't change your DNA" It was political when a Utah politician and two chemists tried to turn the result of a single extremely poorly run fusion experiment that no physicist was able to replicate and had clear methodological problems (and math problems) that any physicist would have wanted to fix into federal funding to the tune of $25 million after claiming in the Press Release that the intial experiment was funded with $100k of their own money and they wanted maybe a couple million to scale up and confirm their results. It was political when Nazis burned an institute setup to research gender and sexuality. Knowledge has always been political to people who confuse their ignorant beliefs for reality, and rely on public ignorance for their support. You should notice that these events were not politicized by scientists.

notyourav 1y ago

A naive question: So much “tax payer” money is going towards research funding. But it looks like private companies are reaping rewards, mostly as a new drug. Why is this research not (mainly) privately funded?

wnc3141 1y ago
While there is value from having the drug becoming available on the market, you would think there would need to be some form price controls in exchange for private production.
lentoutcry 1y ago
a lot of basic research is very risky and most of the time it’s not stuff that leads to immediate development of a new drug. it’s basically acquiring knowledge with the hope that some of it might turn out to be practically useful in the future, but in the short term, it just allows us to understand stuff. but it’s not directly profitable, so private companies aren’t motivated to invest so much money in that
- caycep 1y ago
  This. And per John Maynard Keynes, it's money well spent.
- lakhim 1y ago
  Its also explicit policy of the US government to encourage use of the new research done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  this sounds like it's a really bad idea for the government to fund. What's to stop someone who happens to have made it in the ivory tower go crazy, spin up some kooky ideas that are highly risky and just blow taxpayer money on something not really accountable?
  - 1y ago

kelseyfrog 1y ago

The positive side seems to be that relinquishing our position[1] as the medical research country should lower healthcare prices. For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research - drug discovery, device innovation, &etc. By destroying our ability to do research, we should expect to see healthcare prices equalize at a price where those costs are no longer factored in, right? 1. By way of self-inflicted damage

Spivak 1y ago
Hahaha, prices come down?! In this economy? That's not very pro-shareholder of you.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  If that doesn't happen, then to what degree can we conclude that being a medical research country wasn't in fact the reason why our healthcare prices were so high?
  - postpawl 1y ago
    There’s already a lot of studies about this > More than half of excess U.S. health spending was associated with factors likely reflected in higher prices, including more spending on: administrative costs of insurance (~15% of the excess), administrative costs borne by providers (~15%), prescription drugs (~10%), wages for physicians (~10%) and registered nurses (~5%), and medical machinery and equipment (less than 5%). Reductions in administrative burdens and drug costs could substantially reduce the difference between U.S. and peer nation health spending. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/oct/high-us-health-care-spending-where-is-it-all-going https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
lapcat 1y ago
> For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research That was a lie to justify insurance price gouging.

1970-01-01 1y ago

Once again, there is merit to cutting funding when more than half of research is irreproducible crap. A decimation can function as the first step toward rebuilding. The problem is that you DO need to have plans to rebuild it. We don't.

biophysboy 1y ago
Why do you think reproducibility will improve if funding is cut significantly? That is less money for labor, instruments, and consumables, which means less money for experiments, particularly for follow up experiments that have no deliverable.
- nothercastle 1y ago
  Competition is higher people are hungrier, fraud will go up not down
  - biophysboy 1y ago
    Yes, exactly
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  I agree that cutting it won't solve the issue, especially without that long term plan, but at the current sky-high level of fraud, this just isn't science anymore. At what level of fraud do you suggest pulling the plug if not right now? Funding research until 90% is fake? 95%? 99%? Taxpayer money can be spent on many other life-critical areas with tangible results.
  - biophysboy 1y ago
    Irreproducibility is not the same as fraud. In any case, I would support high-risk research - stuff that may not be repeatable - if it has a high direct ROI, economic spillover (USA has a big biotech/pharma ecosystem), and leads to cost savings (e.g. no more dialysis machines).

jmclnx 1y ago

Many people think this will hurt the old the most, but in reality, as an old person, it will hurt our children far more more than old people. Once again we are proving the US is just "I got mine, the rest of you can suffer" Country. Examples are research on ALS, Childhood Diabetes and Cancer and many more issues too numerous to list. Already funding has been cut for ALS and Cancer research. Welcome to depending upon China and Japan for ground breaking treatments. From what I have read Japan has been doing a lot and I think China is ramping up quickly.

gotoeleven 1y ago

[flagged]

carefulfungi 1y ago
Here is the data. Your comment is misleading - HIV, Alzheimers, diabetes, and improved anti-viral and vaccines (all of which are research areas impacted by these cuts) aren't leftist idealogies. https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
LorenPechtel 1y ago
But said critics have no basis for saying it's dubious. Just look at that MAHA report. Exactly the sort of thing you would expect when you ask an AI to support something false. A human generally recognizes when a search throws up a totally false hit. And, in general, the right hits show up in the results before the wonky stuff--but when you're searching for something that doesn't exist, or doesn't exist in a web-readable form all you get is the wonky stuff. But the AIs don't have the ability to recognize they're in the garbage and distill it out so you no longer see it's pedigree. But it's still garbage.

jmuguy 1y ago

Non paywall version https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-cuts-nih-grants-research.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU8.G76b.aZYUMXS3sHoT&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-...

YossarianFrPrez 1y ago

> It also axed research on Covid-19, including studies that could have helped the nation respond to many infectious disease threats. Among them: a grant to Emory University and Georgia State University, where researchers had developed three potential drugs that showed promise against many RNA-based viruses, including coronaviruses, Ebola, avian influenza and measles, said George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory who was co-leading the research. Just to reiterate a few things, while estimates vary, every $1 spent on medical research returns multiple dollars of economic value. One study out of England suggest that for ever pound invested in medical research, the return is .25 pounds every year after, forever. [1] The cost of these cuts, as others have said, is quite large. In addition, these grants are peer reviewed by expert panels, and only grants that score within certain top N percentiles which are determined each year. For the marquee grants, you have to score in the top ~10th percentile (see [2], for example.) This scoring is done by expert panels, which are composed of leading experts / professors from around the country. While one can adjust funding priorities, part of the price to pay for having cutting edge basic research always available is that there will be certain things one disagrees with. There is plenty of room for a discussion of how to increase the efficiency of scientific funding, and if the current science-funding institutions are at... 'a near-optimal position in tradeoff space.' However, taking a chainsaw to the agencies to punish them is like blaming doctors for outbreaks of diseases, the latter being sadly predictable. [1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-return-on-investment https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-retu... [2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

It's questionable if the health secretary even believes that germs are real, so this checks out. Unfortunately, as a county, once you set a poor governing standard like this, it's hard to recover back to where we were. Biology is not convenient nor does it follow the ruling political parties platform. The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions.

nerdponx 1y ago
> The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions. That or they would rather simply ignore biology in service of this or that politically-motivated special interest, and put off any problems for the next generation to deal with.

find 1y ago

Basic research has a lot in common with startups. The unicorn rate is <1%, the best new ideas sound like bad ideas, and nearly all value from the best ideas is locked in the long-term future. The ideal startup/scientific program failure rate is not 0%, and could be 95%. The current research system has serious problems, but we need accurate criticism to build a better future. "YC is all wasteful spending; why doesn't YC just choose to only fund the hits?" is absurd, but somehow we allow this argument when discussing NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA.

conception 1y ago
Never take anyone serious who says “The government is not making enough money/losing money on this.” It’s not a business. Its job is clearly outlined in the preamble of the constitution.