Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I've worked and still work in science, and his description of grant proposals and research focus is correct.
[flagged]
The Gutting of America's Medical Research
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#52it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
[flagged]
When did they become political?
The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your reasoning, but our efforts to prevent this is part of why professors spend so much time writing grants and filling out other paperwork these days. It’s better in my opinion to just accept reasonable risk. I would add that weird ideas can be surprisingly useful; nobody expected research on gila monsters to lead to our most successful weight loss treatment to date.
the fucking gila monster story is pure revisionist history. back in the late aughts after the human genome got sequenced and qpcr started picking up it was pretty obvious from islet alpha cell proteomics that glucagon would be an interesting drug target.
Researchers were exploring GLP applications in the 90s
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#54Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who should judge scientific quality, if not individuals familiar with the methods used to generate the results? We are living the counterfactual right now, where political opportunists with axes to grind have replaced the pattern matchers you describe.
nobody is saying this is not the least worst way to fund science in general. the point is that use of taxpayer money demands a higher level of accountability that this method cannot satisfy.
The problem is that 1) accountability creates bureaucracy and 2) accountability currently means "aligns with a political ideology".
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#56A naive question: So much “tax payer” money is going towards research funding. But it looks like private companies are reaping rewards, mostly as a new drug. Why is this research not (mainly) privately funded?
While there is value from having the drug becoming available on the market, you would think there would need to be some form price controls in exchange for private production.
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#57it's so surreal to me how this is happening under our eyes and nobody's stopping it. the impact this will have on our health is so staggering. and what's worse, even if these cuts were reversed tomorrow, it would still take quite some time to reverse the negative effects
[flagged]
I agree that institutions did research/comms that should have been done by an independent non-profit or some other org.
The problem is that the current admin's actions/proposals go far, far beyond this issue.
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#58Once again, there is merit to cutting funding when more than half of research is irreproducible crap. A decimation can function as the first step toward rebuilding. The problem is that you DO need to have plans to rebuild it. We don't.
I’m conflicted about this as well. I’ve had a range of chronic illnesses my whole life. I’d love it if there was useful research into them. But after seeing decades with no progress, I have to conclude that most medical research into chronic illnesses is going in the wrong direction.
Most research is still following a medical model that worked for infectious diseases in the 1950s but does not yield any meaningful information or treatments for chronic, complex disorders that have multiple interrelated factors.
And since doctors are trained primarily in the treatment of acute diseases, even the useful information that’s found by research is largely ignored in practice. The ignorance of the average MD about chronic illnesses is astounding.
I’ve been sick for the last two years and I’ve given up going to doctors. They are a waste of my time. I’ve done much better by doing my own research and treating myself. Much of what’s helped has been stuff that I’ve seen described as pseudoscience, even though it’s empirically based, because there aren’t enough RCTs for it to qualify as “evidence”. This makes me incredibly angry.
The system is utterly broken. I’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to start over when the smoke clears.
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#59Once again, there is merit to cutting funding when more than half of research is irreproducible crap. A decimation can function as the first step toward rebuilding. The problem is that you DO need to have plans to rebuild it. We don't.
Why do you think reproducibility will improve if funding is cut significantly? That is less money for labor, instruments, and consumables, which means less money for experiments, particularly for follow up experiments that have no deliverable.
Competition is higher people are hungrier, fraud will go up not down
Re: The Gutting of America's Medical Research
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
When did they become political? The Project 2025 document makes a lot of accusations about this or that department being politicized and left-aligned. But that's not exactly a good standard to go by.
Science in the US became political in like the 50s, when Vannevar Bush decided we should spend federal funds on advancing research since it was so fruitful during WW2, and things like peer review, which did not exist as a formal process in most research, could improve dissemination and the scientific process.
It also became political when we were trying to introduce evolution, a well understood and supported scientific discovery, into science curriculums, and that made religious people extremely angry
It also became political in like 2000 when Bush jr. banned stem cell research because it made religious people mad.
It also became political in like 1980 when Exxon understood unequivocally that they were directly causing the destruction of the Earth's climate and that they could probably just spend money on PR campaigns to make it a culture war issue so they wouldn't have to fix it.
It also became political when geology proved the earth was more than 6000 years old.
It also became political when Eugenics. This also made religious people angry when scientific racism was demonstrably wrong.
It also became political when scientists knew there was a clear connection between cigarettes and lung cancer but it took like thirty years to produce the kind of scientific studies that were required to convince the general public because of immense counter-narrative campaigns by cigarette companies that insisted that cigarettes were healthy.
They also became political when the Christian Scientists parlayed their insane cult beliefs into laws to allow them to send their unvaccinated kids to school at everyone else's expense.
It also became political in the 90s when the sugar industry funded an immense anti-narrative campaign to trick the majority of the US into believing that fat was more harmful than other forms of the same amount of calories.
It is currently political to understand even basic highschool biology like "mRNA won't change your DNA"
It was political when a Utah politician and two chemists tried to turn the result of a single extremely poorly run fusion experiment that no physicist was able to replicate and had clear methodological problems (and math problems) that any physicist would have wanted to fix into federal funding to the tune of $25 million after claiming in the Press Release that the intial experiment was funded with $100k of their own money and they wanted maybe a couple million to scale up and confirm their results.
It was political when Nazis burned an institute setup to research gender and sexuality.
Knowledge has always been political to people who confuse their ignorant beliefs for reality, and rely on public ignorance for their support. You should notice that these events were not politicized by scientists.