Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by karaterobot 502 days ago
This is pretty vague and gestural, I'd love specific examples to support your accusation. I work on NIH funded grants, and while I don't write the grants, I'm reasonably familiar with the process. I disagree with your assessment when it comes to any grant I've been involved with. I've never seen corruption like that. These grant proposals look a lot like private sector bids: here's what we want to do, and how it aligns with your mission, and here's how we plan to do it, and how much we're asking for. The process is competitive, and a committee decides on the outcome. Everything has oversight, and is very procedural. Before working on NIH grants, I worked in the private sector doing large contracts for 13 years, and the downside of the way the NIH does it is not corruption, if anything it's bureaucratic slowness and overcaution. The private sector was much shadier and prone to cronyism, and has nothing to teach the government on that count... believe it or not.
1 comments
pizlonator 502 days ago
Don’t know about NIH.

I used to work in academia and was involved in NSF and DOE grants. I’ve been in industry (IC then manager) since then.

My sense is that grant funding was less merit based than industry funding. I’m not saying it’s so corrupt that it should be completely torn down, but there’s just less accountability in academia - you can get a grant, fail to deliver on what you promised, and still get another grant after that and that can be your whole career if you know how to play the academic social game and are good at writing proposals.

link
sanderjd 501 days ago
The whole point of many of these grants is to invest in research on the leading edge where, by definition, nobody knows whether what they're trying to do is going to work, because it's actually new.

Of course that can be gamed, and of course we need good faith oversight, but if none of the research projects we're funding were to ever fail, that would be evidence that we're being massively too conservative in the avenues for new discoveries that we're investing in exploring.

link