[earljwagner]

Wow, $1.3 billion is a huge amount for a single study. For comparison, the Framingham Heart Study, going on 65 years, has an annual budget of about $10 million: (Concerns that the 2013 sequester would cut about $4 million, about 40% of its budget here: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/blog/2013/10/09/framing... )

Any good accounts of how the $1.3B was spent?

[Fomite]

Calling the NCS a single study is like calling the moon landing a single rocket launch. For example, from the report:

"There are 112 papers resulting from NCS efforts so far, primarily papers about methodological design issues, but also including preliminary results related to environmental exposures."

[xrange]

Am I misunderstanding things? From reading the linked article, there was $1.3 billion spent studying whether we should actually undertake the study. Not the actual study itself (which presumably would cost significantly more?)

[preinheimer]

They spent money on a lot of things:

- Trying to figure out how the heck to enroll people (vanguard study)

- Decide which variables are worth tracking, and actually trackable. Every variable they track will cost a tonne, if they don't track a variable and decide they need later it's too late.

- Figure out how long they will successfully be able to track people, will they lose 5% a year? 10%? Is there a huge cliff when kids turn 12 where they all move? WHO KNOWS?

- Actually enrolling people and tracking the variables that seemed worthwhile

- Revising surveys based on stuff they're learning.

It was to be a huge study, to be honest if completed I think it would have been the landmark medical advancements of our time.

(I briefly worked on one small piece of software supporting one small aspect of the study)

[earljwagner]

Thanks for the insights. OK, that makes more sense and I can see the utility of the published results.

Now it sounds to me like when a corporation or large federal agency fails in implementing a new or upgraded software system because the process has become unmanageable. From your perspective in both worlds (setting aside the results published so far) does that analogy capture it?

[Fomite]

I don't think it quite captures it, because the NCS might not be "unmanageable", but simply too expensive for what people think its budget will be, or not be able to achieve some of its goals (good followup, a nationally representative sample, etc.).

It would be more like...if you rolled out an upgraded software system in a couple departments, collected some feedback, and decided not to go with the company wide rollout.

[saryant]

In terms of enrolling and tracking children, didn't the Early Childhood Longitudinal Program tackle a lot of those same issues? They managed to track my brother between kindergarten and eight grade which for my family spanned three states over five moves.

http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/

[Fomite]

No - $1.3 billion was spent laying the groundwork and running the pilot study, from which one of the conclusions was "Running the main study may not work, and will cost a lot".

To use the space program analogy I advanced before, it would be like running Gemini and Mercury, then deciding to scrap the Apollo program because things weren't working out. A lot of science was done just laying the groundwork.