[tired_and_awake]

174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l...

Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".

But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.

[dekhn]

NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.

[chii]

> funding much of the basic research

it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).

I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.

[kmos17]

Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.

[robertlagrant]

Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.

[kmos17]

In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.

[robertlagrant]

Undoing regulatory capture may well involve removing some regulations, though. That won't exacerbate regulatory capture.

[dekhn]

NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).

[grahamj]

Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?

[petesergeant]

I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still

[grahamj]

amazing :D

[b112]

But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.

To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring.

Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.

[serf]

would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?

another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?

[notjoemama]

> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)

$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?

> The hiring freeze is governmentwide

> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.

Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?

> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.

I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?

I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.

[_yb2s]

> the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?

Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress, e.g. they set what specific diseases, etc. should be worked on. This represents more than half of all funding for academic scientific research in the USA.

> Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community?

Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town.

Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located.

When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live.

[notjoemama]

Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.

[lightbendover]

[flagged]

[AlotOfReading]

Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".

[dekhn]

NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job).

As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.

[notjoemama]

Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.

> breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US

I didn't say or imply that. I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. I've traveled for work both paid and not, both with implicit and explicit frugality. I'm not seeing how a pause on paying for travel, as the norm quoted within the article, is an egregious practice, nor how it could break the NIH. Especially given it appears to be a norm when administrations turn over.

[dekhn]

The propaganda of Trump's people has been very effective. They managed to paint a bunch of people who work hard for the US and aren't particularly well-compensated (compared to what tthey could get in industry) are some sort of "elites" who are actively working to keep conservsatives down.

The way to look at it is like this: even if previous administrations froze travel for a bit (I don't recall that ever happening; a bigger impact was when the state or the federal government failed to pass a budget. That would break everything for weeks to months), the intent of the Trump administration is to harm the people they don't like. This freeze is only an opening move; we can expect to see far more dire and serious attempts at damaging our valuable public institutions (which fairly serve liberals and conservatives alike).

I appreciate you saying "people like me just don't know". It's rare that people will actually listen to the other side and admit they lacked perspective.