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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

I'm concerned by #3 "Nothing works the way you would naively think it works (for better and for worse)" which seems to imply that all or most of life sciences is funded by the NIH. What % of life sciences funding comes from the NIH and what are the other big sources?

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The vast majority of life sciences is funded by NIH. This is one reason why the nonstop "revelations" of crazy projects funded by gasp Anthony Fauci are really meaningless. NIH doles out an enormous bucket of cash year after year for all sorts of research.

>the nonstop "revelations" of crazy projects funded by gasp Anthony Fauci are really meaningless

I'm not really aware of any of those other than the gain of function research on bat coronaviruses by EcoHealth Alliance, which was only controversial beacause Fauci denied it in front of Congress and was technically not supposed to happen due to Obama's moratorium. What are the other revelations are you talking about?

Not gp, but there was another one that made the rounds about dogs being subjected to being bitten by desert insects. Iirc It turned out that this wasn't funded by the nih?

In the US the NIH funds the vast majority of life sciences ($30B/year), but NSF, DOD(IIRC at least a billion a year each), and private institutions also provide life sciences funding (several more billions). NIH definitely is the big gorilla, many young investigators are trying to get established by getting R01s and using them to publish papers at the start of their career.

Fascinating. I guess I am surprised because I had thought of NIH as focused on human/public health, and there is so much to life sciences that is non-human. I would have thought there would be more major sources of funding. For example, something around ag science.

The NSF funds basic science, including life sciences. NIH targets diseases. (and the NSF or NIH will not fund something if it better fits under the other) I certainly think it's a valuable thing to have a federal agency doing. If you want more basic life science, funding this area in the NSF more would be the way it's done in the system we have today. NIH has the cancer institute and the institute of mental health and so on. It is therefore really the domain of physicians. They want a path through mouse (or whatever) then human clinical studies, and want to see doctors as co-PI's.

The fact that this careful practical system still pumps out so much bs is very problematic. I think it's the same problem as other research areas, not the fault of the NIH system itself.

the NIH is awesome. we owe those civil servants a debt of gratitude for sacrificing higher compensation in industry and performing as well as they do given the constraints.

breakthrough ideas typically come from unconventional ideas, i.e., risky ideas or ideas likely to fail -- and thus waste taxpayer money.

yet the funding process is mostly about conforming to traditional assumptions, which naturally gates scientific breakthroughs.

the problem lies upstream. politicians don't allow the NIH to fund risky research and waste money.

>politicians don't allow the NIH to fund risky research

how about NIH funding those gain-of-function coronavirus experiments (which included human testing) in Wuhan? And when DARPA refused to fund as too risky the additional human targeting coronavirus genetic manipulations in Wuhan, it was NIAID (led by Dr. Fauci - the top politician in life sciences today) which funded it.

>how about NIH funding those gain-of-function coronavirus experiments (which included human testing) in Wuhan?

Politicians expressly disallowed those experiments. Don't stir stuff up just to stir. It was a non-political agency exec (Fauci?) who apparently sidestepped the typical review process where they would have been killed, and funded them anyway

to me transfer of the research to China is exactly a typical solution by politicians - maintaining the perception of prohibition while in reality scaling the research even more into risky territory.

you know what annoys me the most about this? I wanted to be an NIH researcher (US citizen, working in the US, on non-risky research and I couldn't get funding. That NIH is funding chinese institutes really bothers me, if legit us researchers can't get funding.

"You're doing it wrong" as SRCUM peddlers like to say :) If you look at EcoHealth NIH grant for Wuhan you'll see that only about 25% of the grant money actually went to Wuhan. I'd guess you in your grant application didn't have 75% allocated for general sales and administrative/whatever money black hole and thus for example couldn't hire as a visiting professor/consultant some useful people :)

Amusingly, after my first R01 was rejected, I kept an eye on that study section and several people submitted R01s with exactly my proposal the year after and got funded. Those were people that were likely on the study section the year before and saw my proposal.

I also learned from that if you want to get funded by a study section, you volunteer for that section for several years and then you know exactly what to say to get funded.

NIH likely funds 2/3rds of US biomedical research and ~1/3rd of global biomedical research by dollar value [0]. That link lists other big sources (ERC, MRC, US DoD, HHMI). My sense is that this landscape will change rather quickly with pandemic-inspired biomedical/defense initiatives and more private institutes in the US.

Moreover, NIH funding, due to its central role in supporting biomedical research, is often necessary for getting a tenured PI position. Many high caliber R1 schools require multiple R01 NIH grants for tenure. Often private funding sources are less valuable to universities because they pay lower indirect rates (<10% vs >40%) on sponsored research. As institutions are so dependent on NIH funding, the NIH can exert influence far beyond the research it funds directly.

[0] https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Well for one, if anyone says "they weren't funded for X grant, so it didn't happen", it's implicitly encodes the idea that people don't do research before they get the grant money. They do.

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