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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#901

Post by lbarron6868 »

muaytimbo wrote: post #877

It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various…

This isn't an auditing. This is a gutting based on senseless and illegal procedures. You want to get rid of DEI, fine. That doesn't mean get rid of the whole agency. This is incredibly alarming.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#902

Post by madhadron »

ggm wrote: post #22
bawolff wrote: post #4

Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists. I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy. You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifesty…

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#903

Post by insane_dreamer »

alaxhn wrote: post #69
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #6

So many brilliant researchers in the US are funded by NSF grants. Even beyond public research, just the private sector benefits just from the training (and associated freedom from not having to chase money and TA) that NSF fellows get is immense. Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (s…

So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?

Including statements on diversity, and defunding projects because they have diversity are two very different things.

And yeah, as a white male who sees few women, and even fewer people from minorities other than Chinese and Indian, in the hard sciences (especially computer related), I definitely support efforts to try to include them more. It results in more diverse views of a problem, which often leads to better science.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#904

Post by lnwlebjel »

scarab92 wrote: post #151
flocciput wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forced to NOT include == "not being allowed to include" i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"

Diversity statements were used to facilitate race-based grant approvals. They should never have been legal.

This is false. The grants were not approved based on race. The grants were approved based on merit toward the goals of the field of science to which they were submitted. Showing how your work had broader impacts toward a more diverse, equitable and inclusive society was one part of a list of many criteria, recently updated here:

https://new.nsf.gov/funding/merit-review#our-merit-review-cr...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#905

Post by ironhaven »

muaytimbo wrote: post #877

It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various…

Here is another perspective, there are many more deserving research proposals than there are grants. Even if they banned all minorities from grant funding there would still be many disgruntled and unfunded scientists languishing without grants.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#906

Post by desumeku »

Xelynega wrote: post #874
Gareth321 wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. This is demonstrably false. Harvard and many other universities recently lost a Supreme Court case due to persistent racial discrimination over decades ( https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/29/us-supreme-court... ). Whites and especially Asians were methodically discriminated against…

Why are so many people saying "Asians and whites were discriminated against" and pointing to this case? The judges ruled that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed, not that Harvard had been illegally discriminatory in their admission practices(as was attempted years prior by the same conservative funded activism group) Just because you personally see racism, doesn't mean it's actually happening(aka,…

Is it quite possible that the program was unconstitutional and had to be changed because they were being illegally discriminatory in their admission practices?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#908

Post by vharuck »

cbracketdash wrote: post #458
einrealist wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society. Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he…

It's easy to dismiss eccentric people as conmen. But you have to consider, he has been at least partially instrumental in at least 2 impossible companies: electric cars and rockets. Regardless of what you think of his intellectual capacity, he has a proven track record of organizing people to produce exceptional outcomes ! An inevitable characteristic of his algorithm is chaos: delete as many constraints and parts as…

"You can't be loony and rich. You've got to be eccentric if you're rich.

- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#909

Post by Empact »

jonstewart wrote: post #309
softwaredoug wrote: post #206

The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain: > The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the det…

Of course it’s not about saving money. It’s about extinguishing facts. This is Orwell 101.

So you still believe government-funded research is equivalent to facts in 2025? What about the replication crisis? The political control of research finance e.g. in Alzheimer’s research?

It takes either an extreme amount of naïveté or motivated reasoning to maintain that perspective, IMO.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#910

Post by stevenbedrick »

muaytimbo wrote: post #877

It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various…

I can only speak for my own experience, but this is 100% not what I have seen (as an NIH-funded white male PI, and one of many at my institution and in my field). I just submitted an R01 last week, and can firmly say that there is no "DEI" language in the grant application forms or in the program announcement; anybody who is interested can easily see the kinds of documents that are required in NIH grants: https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process/write-application/samp...

No "DEI" boogeymen in there.

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