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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
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?
It's impossible to discover a basic fact, such as "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," and monetize it fully within the same organization. A million scientists can take a look at that basic fact and involve it in their own research in ten million ways.
It's also not practical to keep those facts as trade secrets over the several decades over which their applications need to develop. Even if an industry consortium was willing to discover that clouds are made of water droplets, it would certainly leak before the science of meteorology had progressed far enough for that consortium to offer saleable rain forecasts.
Finally, companies are unwilling to train people about basic facts. Academia is the only system where "and then you tell everybody" is a part of the incentive structure. Privately, you have a strong incentive to reveal nothing and punish leakers.
Basic research creates foundation knowledge that can drive medical innovation, but rarely does academic research create final composition of matter. Private funded work is all the non-research components of drug discovery - optimization of molecules, regulatory work, commercialization, etc...
To imply that private companies reap the rewards of basic research without contribute much is ignoring the many other components of translational work.
To give a more financial answer, it’s because pharma products have a low probability of success and have long lag times. That means a high cost of capital: lenders and investors are going to expect good returns to make up for the risk.
Second, biotech/pharma actually already do invest quite a lot in R&D. But they tend to focus on translational work rather than speculative exploration, because it is less risky.
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
In part because the expiry of patents puts a cap on the return on investment private research can get you.
Patents last for about 25 years, but important innovations have returns far into the future, hundreds of years. At that rate, you would very often be better off accumulating interest on capital anyways.
Notwithstanding the nature of scientific progress as an accumulation of smaller experiences (each individually harder to justify with a profit motive).
Indeed, even privately funded research is often openly published, such as the now-famous paper "attention is all you need". There's just not that much to gain from keeping every single thing under wraps. More to gain with openness.
A growing suspicion of mine is that maybe the govt is just more efficient at some things, like funding speculative research, which is part of the industrial policy of every prosperous nation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure. But which half? If half is legitimate, and half is fraudulent, who do you expect to still be in the game after you cut half, the legitimate researchers or the fraudsters?
Talking about rebuilding after just shifts this problem instead of solving it. When you start to spin things back up, who's at the front of the line looking for new grant money?
I’m conflicted about this as well. I’ve had a range of chronic illnesses my whole life. I’d love it if there was useful research into them. But after seeing decades with no progress, I have to conclude that most medical research into chronic illnesses is going in the wrong direction.
Most research is still following a medical model that worked for infectious diseases in the 1950s but does not yield any meaningful information or treatments for chronic, complex disorders that have multiple interrelated factors.
And since doctors are trained primarily in the treatment of acute diseases, even the useful information that’s found by research is largely ignored in practice. The ignorance of the average MD about chronic illnesses is astounding.
I’ve been sick for the last two years and I’ve given up going to doctors. They are a waste of my time. I’ve done much better by doing my own research and treating myself. Much of what’s helped has been stuff that I’ve seen described as pseudoscience, even though it’s empirically based, because there aren’t enough RCTs for it to qualify as “evidence”. This makes me incredibly angry.
The system is utterly broken. I’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to start over when the smoke clears.
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?
Honestly; the exact opposite. Removing funding for research means either research is canceled, or funded private.
Funding the research privately increases costs to end user as private ensurer is directly accruing more cost. Research stopping increases costs to end user as new/novel cures/treatments aren't found.
Cost for consumer goes up because of lost opportunity cost of 1) learning to diagnose earlier 2) finding new or cheaper cures/treatments.
You can make the argument 'But other countries will pick up the slack!' - but that doesn't necessarily help either, why would they give us the results of their research cheaper? US already jacked up pricing via an executive order on drug pricing just this year to knock that.
Publicly funded medical research is an absolute positive for the US general public health and wallets. We're all losing here on both ends of the spectrum ($$ and actual general public health).
jmuguy|9 months ago
find|9 months ago
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|9 months ago
It’s not a business. Its job is clearly outlined in the preamble of the constitution.
kylehotchkiss|9 months ago
nerdponx|9 months ago
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.
YossarianFrPrez|9 months ago
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-retu...
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines
jmclnx|9 months ago
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.
lentoutcry|9 months ago
bediger4000|9 months ago
msgodel|9 months ago
[deleted]
notyourav|9 months ago
whatshisface|9 months ago
It's also not practical to keep those facts as trade secrets over the several decades over which their applications need to develop. Even if an industry consortium was willing to discover that clouds are made of water droplets, it would certainly leak before the science of meteorology had progressed far enough for that consortium to offer saleable rain forecasts.
Finally, companies are unwilling to train people about basic facts. Academia is the only system where "and then you tell everybody" is a part of the incentive structure. Privately, you have a strong incentive to reveal nothing and punish leakers.
fgimenez|9 months ago
To imply that private companies reap the rewards of basic research without contribute much is ignoring the many other components of translational work.
biophysboy|9 months ago
Second, biotech/pharma actually already do invest quite a lot in R&D. But they tend to focus on translational work rather than speculative exploration, because it is less risky.
lentoutcry|9 months ago
aeblyve|9 months ago
Patents last for about 25 years, but important innovations have returns far into the future, hundreds of years. At that rate, you would very often be better off accumulating interest on capital anyways.
Notwithstanding the nature of scientific progress as an accumulation of smaller experiences (each individually harder to justify with a profit motive).
Indeed, even privately funded research is often openly published, such as the now-famous paper "attention is all you need". There's just not that much to gain from keeping every single thing under wraps. More to gain with openness.
analog31|9 months ago
wnc3141|9 months ago
gotoeleven|9 months ago
[deleted]
LorenPechtel|9 months ago
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.
carefulfungi|9 months ago
https://taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data/HHS_Grants_Terminated.pdf
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
1970-01-01|9 months ago
biophysboy|9 months ago
NoMoreNicksLeft|9 months ago
Talking about rebuilding after just shifts this problem instead of solving it. When you start to spin things back up, who's at the front of the line looking for new grant money?
dimal|9 months ago
Most research is still following a medical model that worked for infectious diseases in the 1950s but does not yield any meaningful information or treatments for chronic, complex disorders that have multiple interrelated factors.
And since doctors are trained primarily in the treatment of acute diseases, even the useful information that’s found by research is largely ignored in practice. The ignorance of the average MD about chronic illnesses is astounding.
I’ve been sick for the last two years and I’ve given up going to doctors. They are a waste of my time. I’ve done much better by doing my own research and treating myself. Much of what’s helped has been stuff that I’ve seen described as pseudoscience, even though it’s empirically based, because there aren’t enough RCTs for it to qualify as “evidence”. This makes me incredibly angry.
The system is utterly broken. I’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to start over when the smoke clears.
hiddencost|9 months ago
[deleted]
kelseyfrog|9 months ago
1. By way of self-inflicted damage
lapcat|9 months ago
That was a lie to justify insurance price gouging.
Spivak|9 months ago
w0m|9 months ago
Funding the research privately increases costs to end user as private ensurer is directly accruing more cost. Research stopping increases costs to end user as new/novel cures/treatments aren't found.
Cost for consumer goes up because of lost opportunity cost of 1) learning to diagnose earlier 2) finding new or cheaper cures/treatments.
You can make the argument 'But other countries will pick up the slack!' - but that doesn't necessarily help either, why would they give us the results of their research cheaper? US already jacked up pricing via an executive order on drug pricing just this year to knock that.
Publicly funded medical research is an absolute positive for the US general public health and wallets. We're all losing here on both ends of the spectrum ($$ and actual general public health).