How many of us have read enough of these papers that they can be a good judge of the quality of all these papers…
I’ve lived my life in the Silicon Valley and we are heavily reliant on the basic science that the government does. In the world of R&D, its the US government that does most of the “Research” and companies do the final development to create products from the initial research. Without the basic research, you’ll see much slower progress in innovation and new products, and this hurts everyone.
I listened to a good podcast on what is going on at the NSF right now - here are some quotes I found interesting:
NOAM: That’s Derek Lowe. He’s been working in pharmaceutical research for over thirty years , and he writes, In The Pipeline, is one of the most influential and longest running science blogs out there.
Derek has kind of an insider/outsider perspective on all of this. He’s super well connected to researchers on the inside of the national science agencies, but because his research isn’t funded by the NIH or the NSF, he’s not financially tied to what happens. He doesn’t have government grants that are going to get cancelled here. And as someone who works on the applied side of science, he knows what can happen when basic research gets disrupted.
So he’s been following the disruptions over the last couple weeks extremely closely.
…
NOAM: Why do you think it matters whether the research is coming out of the U.S. or somewhere else?
DEREK: Because I don’t think that the amount of research is going to be the same if you take the U.S. out of the equation. I don’t think the rest of the world can or will suddenly rev up their own research spending to make up for the gap, the huge, huge gap that would be there if you took the U.S. out of the equation. It would be a loss for, for, for humanity.
NOAM: I’m curious if you think there are any inefficiencies in these agencies?
DEREK: I mean, they are a huge bureaucracy. I’m sure there are inefficiencies in there. I’m sure there are things that take longer than they should and could lose an extra layer of review or something like that. There’s no doubt. But I think if you just come in and start hacking with a machete, thinking, well, odds are all the stuff I’m cutting away is just junk, that is going to lead to harm. So, I feel positive that there are ways these agencies could run more efficiently. Problem is that a lot of the people, and not just now, a lot of the people come in talking about, we just want to make things more efficient, actually have other goals in mind.
NOAM: So Derek, if this stuff doesn’t get walked back, what do you think the future of scientific research in America could look like?
DEREK: I mean, the NIH does a lot of fundamental research in a number of disease areas. You just have to look at the institutes that are under the NIH umbrella. You have the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, on and on and on. They do a lot of very important work themselves, and they fund a lot of very important work on these things. A lot of fundamental research where we’re still trying to figure out the causes. And they also do things all the way up to the clinic. They fund some clinical trials of their own to try to answer questions that aren’t getting answered. And the thing is, these things take a long time. Scientific research is really slow. But if you stop it now, you might not even notice for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two, but then you’ll start to notice because the progress will slow down. The ideas that get generated for new ways to study or treat these diseases start disappearing quietly, unobtrusively. Everything gets smaller and poorer.
NOAM: Hmm. I wonder if you can give me an example, maybe, just to drive this home for the audience of something that came out of the NIH or the NSF in the last few years that maybe we wouldn’t get if the agency was cut by a half or a quarter.
DEREK: Right. For example, some of the fundamental work on the idea of using mRNA vaccines and the various hurdles that had to be overcome because it wasn’t something that worked the first time. In fact, it didn’t work for years and years and years. That came out—a good chunk of it—out of NIH funded research. We have things going on for not only infectious diseases, up to and including HIV, but also things for various kinds of cancer that could be treated this way. And the NIH had a big hand in that.
NOAM: I don’t know, our show talks a lot about unanswered scientific questions, what we don’t know.
DEREK: Right
NOAM: And this might be a case where a lot more questions are going to end up unanswered that didn’t need to. And we don’t know what kinds of things we’re going to end up not knowing.
DEREK: Oh, we don’t. That’s, that’s 100 percent accurate. I mean, you look at some of the big advances over the past 20 or 30 years, things like CRISPR to edit genomes or mRNA as a therapeutic avenue and you think, my god, you know, I remember working when we didn’t know anything about this. God knows I remember working when we didn’t know about it. And I think to myself, People 20, 25, 30 years from now will look back at us and they’ll say, “Oh, those poor people. They didn’t know about X or Y or Z. No wonder they weren’t making progress against this disease.” But now my fear is people 20 years from now will look back at us and man, I wish we’d been able to learn more, but everything stopped dead. God damn it.
NOAM: Yeah, Elon Musk is playing a big role here through his DOGE cost cutting mission, and I know he’s criticized what he sees as the inefficiency of a lot of scientific research, like he had this quote where he said something like, most scientific papers are pretty useless.
DEREK: Mhm
NOAM: And I guess, it seems to me, like, maybe he is misunderstanding how scientific research is supposed to work.
DEREK: He is
NOAM: Like, if you’re going for efficiency, you might end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
DEREK: That is exactly what happens. I mean, he has lived his entire life on the applied end of it. And I should talk, because that’s where I’ve lived most of mine, too. In industry, we are driving toward the goal of finding a compound to affect this pathway, this protein, this enzyme, in this disease. Very applied. But we are standing on the shoulders of a great deal of basic research. And some of that basic research looked pretty weird or obscure or even useless at the start. RNA interference, which is a tremendously useful research tool and is also the basis of marketed drugs. RNA interference started out when people had trouble explaining the colors of petunia flowers. And I’m sure Elon would have really had a good time making fun of these morons wasting public money trying to figure out why the petunia flowers turned out different than they expected them to. But you never know where this stuff is coming from.
NOAM: Yeah, I mean, GLP-1’s like Ozempic, you know, they come from saliva we got from Gila monsters.
DEREK: Gila monster saliva. Boy, what a stupid idea. These people are out there taking swabs from lizard mouths and studying that. You can make fun of any of these things. William Proxmire used to be the senator from Wisconsin back in the 60s and 70s. He used to do that all the time. He had this thing he called the Golden Fleece Award, would pick the stupidest sounding research projects and talk about how those idiot eggheads are wasting your money, studying, you know, mosquitoes and, you know, whatever, these tiny little fish that no one cares about. It’s an anti-intellectual cheap shot. I mean, if they had stopped that petunia flower experiment, how long would it have taken us to pick up on the mechanisms of RNA interference, et cetera, et cetera. It’s really impossible to say. There are a lot of these studies that are never going to turn out to be much good for anything, but we don’t know which ones those are.
NOAM: Yeah, we can’t just do the studies that are gonna work.
