The NIH is an abomination. Everyone knows this.
Every time I talk to a biologist they say "yes, the NIH is horrible, it's impossible to get anything interesting funded by it, it's getting worse by the year, and God I hope Congress increases its budget because my career depends on it."
The NIH is a tyrannical, capricious, self-serving $50 billion a year Kafkaesque Leviathan ruled over by a clique of septuagenarians who couldn't care less for science or for scientists.
The reason biomedical science advances one death at a time is because if you're not about to die the NIH will not give any money. It provides 7 times more funding to scientists 66 years old and older (literally retirement age) than to those 35 and younger. And it's getting worse every year.
(I have nothing against old people, I love them, they're great, I think they're actually very underappreciated by the young. But come on, know when to step back and become a mentor and not a boss. Mike Tyson should've never taken that fight and you should've never applied for that R01 grant.)
The reason we still have no idea what's going on with Alzheimer's, after decades upon decades of research, is because the NIH enabled an entire field based on lies and fake data. This has been well-documented by publications like Stat
.
For example, one of the biggest researchers in the field became a senior NIH official and oversaw a $2.6 billion/year budget until a few months ago when it was discovered that he faked data in at least 132 research papers. How is it even possible to publish so many fraudulent papers and for every single person in the entire field not notice this for decades?
The NIH world is the world in which the majority of cancer papers are fake, NIH's Cancer Institute ($7b/year budget) fails to report data on time for the cancer clinical trials it runs a staggering 70% of the time, and yet a researcher who cured herself of cancer couldn't publish her results and is being castigated by the establishment for lack of "ethics".
This is why "believe science" has turned into a stupid joke.
Despite all of this, the NIH will simply not accept any kind of oversight.
In 2006, the Congress mandated a creation of the Scientific Management Review Board at the NIH that was specifically created to provide legislative oversight into the activities of the agency and to suggest improvements to its operations. In 2015, the NIH simply abandoned the committee and has not convened it ever since.
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported on how the NIH's senior staff in the office of Anthony Fauci, including his senior advisor of 24 years, committed to a campaign of destruction of any evidence that might show up in the FOIA requests related to the agency's role in Covid-19 ("I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia'd but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe") (more details).
I don't care whether you think covid came from bats or leaked from a lab. It's the dedication to escape public oversight, combined with any lack of consequences for anyone involved that is staggering.
2 years ago Joe Biden tried to set up a new life sciences funding agency modeled after DARPA, called Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The idea was to set it up completely independently of the existing funding structures, giving ARPA-H the full freedom to pursue the most ambitious projects it can find. Instead, the NIH swallowed ARPA-H up, denying it independence and ensuring that the NIH maintains its virtual monopoly on biomedical research.
A Professor friend of mine who received more than $10 million over the years from the NIH told me: "All of my most interesting work has been done in spite of the NIH rather than thanks to the NIH".
How did lying for money become a part of a scientist's job description? How did the public get used to no longer believing scientists? How did we grow so complacent to accept billions of dollars that are supposed to be pushing the frontier of science being set on fire year after year? How did we become so cynical to just accept all of this as a status quo?
We've had 70 years of the NIH. It was built for a post-WW2 world that hasn't existed for decades; it has done its job; and it has turned into something closer to a mafiosi organization than a science funding agency.
It's time for us to figure out better ways to fund science: we should gradually sunset the NIH over the next 10-15 years. And if you make the NIH stop awarding new funding to literal retirees, it'll free up about $5 billion every year to run all kinds of experiments.
For example, the government could solicit proposals for different funding agencies, each with a $1 billion/year budget and a 10 year mandate. Pick the 5 most interesting ones, fund them, study them, and then decide which models are working and which aren't, while continuing on with all of the existing NIH funding allocated to people of working age. Is there any reason on earth not to do it?
It's time to abolish the NIH. America deserves better. The world deserves better.
"It provides 7 times more funding to scientists 66 years old and older (literally retirement age) than to those 35 and younger." This is an absurdly distorted way of making a claim about the funding distribution. The graph clearly shows a nearly completely uniform distribution of funding across all age brackets. The smaller portion going to those under 35 could easily be an artifact of fewer applications in that age bracket - likely there are relatively much fewer lab PIs under 35.
Destroying the NIH would be a disaster on many levels, both from a scientific perspective and from an economic one. As we’re already seeing, the entire academic enterprise is being destabilized, with graduate programs rescinding offers from students and labs having to close down in response to the uncertainty. The NIH also provides millions to billions in economic output on a state and national level, and the loss of jobs that will occur due to loss in funding will destabilize local, state, and the national economy. Scientific research is one of the last places where the U.S. leads the world. While the NIH has its faults, as you’ve depicted rather grandiosely in this post, these are shortsighted reasons to decimate one of the world’s leading research institutes. Why not fix the problems instead?