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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I tend to believe the NIH is better at administrating grants than I am.

I'd absolutely agree they're better than I am personally, since I'm neither a medical researcher nor an expert at evaluating medical research. But I don't believe they're better than an organization focused on solving a specific problem.

As a random example of inefficiency: there's a lot more money going into research on specific degenerative diseases than into the causes and solutions for degeneration. Solve the root cause, not the symptoms.

While the idea of pursuing a 'root cause' is attractive, in many cases, including the one you point out, there is not a clear cause to be attacked.

Neurodegeneration is a pattern of response to multiple disease processes - we can only understand the response by studying the cases in which it arises.

For the tech-minded crowd, this is like wanting to create responsive designs without actually making websites to demonstrate them.

But the proportion of your tax dollar they're getting makes that a bit of a moot point if you were thinking about donating directly and making a tax deduction.

They're actually pretty terrible. It isn't a high bar to do better than the NIH when it comes to supporting new technologies. Almost all important early fundamental research, the high-risk part leading up to new knowledge and potential new technologies, is supported by philanthropy.

The NIH really only funds follow-on work for things that are already known. In order to win a grant you have to have already proven your thesis. It is somewhat ridiculous.

So if you want to delegate your vote, delegate it to a non-profit. Or invest in a startup in the field you care about. Anything other than giving to the NIH.

Ironically, you skipped "Give it to a lab whose research you want to support."

True. In fairness, that's much harder to do at lower levels of money than either of the options I suggested, despite efforts like labcures.com. You need to know a lot more about the field than you'd need to know in order to give to a non-profit in the space.

True. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of spaces in science where there isn't a clear and direct non-profit necessarily working in the space and funding research.

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