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NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

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Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The Great Cause diverts all the money to itself. Be very specific about exactly what you mean here, with links to reputable sources. You're making extraordinarily strong accusations; vagueness does not suffice to convince.

Dignity is the fundamental problem that they're bemoaning. When scientists and other intellectual positions are funded beyond scraps and subsistence wages, they use some of the breathing room to start to asking questions about societal power structures. When they're afforded political voices, they start applying their critiques to how their own institutions are run - rather than keeping their heads down as "efficient" worker bees for the business vectoralists. And critiques/conclusions where they've gone cloyingly overboard then serve as convenient straw men that demonstrate how "out of touch" they are from "the real world".

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says. Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?

They are not similar types of research. It's like asking why Knuth doesn't do systems research for a social network or advertising company. Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built. There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody…

I see what you're saying, and think it makes sense.

Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#25
Derek Lowe sees darker motives in the program of cuts to Federal research grants in NIH and NFS. I don't know how to fix some of the problems with how and to whom grants are awarded, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater, deliberately, looks like the very bad kind of malice. (I think this article may have been referenced on HN.) https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-fu...

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#26

We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so. And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has al…

Not a US citizen. From the outside it looks like the US administration simply does not care about advancing science and technology or care for their citizens or their future very much. It looks like it cares about furthering wealth and influence of the head of the in-group by means of fear mongering, scape goating and dismantling structures that threaten this agenda. And if there is a penny to save and a misinformati…

As others have said, this is about deliberate reality-destruction.

Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.

Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]

Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#27

We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so. And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has al…

Not a US citizen. From the outside it looks like the US administration simply does not care about advancing science and technology or care for their citizens or their future very much. It looks like it cares about furthering wealth and influence of the head of the in-group by means of fear mongering, scape goating and dismantling structures that threaten this agenda. And if there is a penny to save and a misinformati…

It looks like that from inside the US too. At least, to a lot of us.

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#28

Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.

Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? I can understand (not saying I approve) targeted opposition to specific scientific claims to favor commercial interests (climate change denial to favor oil & gas, etc), but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run and directly hurt industries like pharma/etc?

Punishing apparent ideological enemies is a long standing mechanism for fascists and dictators - and scientists in the US qualify. It's an attempt to make people fear standing against them.

Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#29

Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.

Please understand that so many high IQ tech and science people support this, they voted and decided.

Re: NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

#30

Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.

Please understand that so many high IQ tech and science people support this, they voted and decided.

Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding? I’m not asking out of anger I genuinely don’t get it. Culture war issues like, idk, people becoming more brown by default in America, or a trans teenager participating in a game, they’re… they don’t seem as important as ensuring well funded science??
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