Non paywall version https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-...

Basic research has a lot in common with startups. The unicorn rate is <1%, the best new ideas sound like bad ideas, and nearly all value from the best ideas is locked in the long-term future. The ideal startup/scientific program failure rate is not 0%, and could be 95%.

The current research system has serious problems, but we need accurate criticism to build a better future. "YC is all wasteful spending; why doesn't YC just choose to only fund the hits?" is absurd, but somehow we allow this argument when discussing NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA.

It's questionable if the health secretary even believes that germs are real, so this checks out. Unfortunately, as a county, once you set a poor governing standard like this, it's hard to recover back to where we were. Biology is not convenient nor does it follow the ruling political parties platform. The leadership of this country seems to believe it can in fact influence biology to take its positions.

> It also axed research on Covid-19, including studies that could have helped the nation respond to many infectious disease threats. Among them: a grant to Emory University and Georgia State University, where researchers had developed three potential drugs that showed promise against many RNA-based viruses, including coronaviruses, Ebola, avian influenza and measles, said George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory who was co-leading the research.

Just to reiterate a few things, while estimates vary, every $1 spent on medical research returns multiple dollars of economic value. One study out of England suggest that for ever pound invested in medical research, the return is .25 pounds every year after, forever. [1] The cost of these cuts, as others have said, is quite large.

In addition, these grants are peer reviewed by expert panels, and only grants that score within certain top N percentiles which are determined each year. For the marquee grants, you have to score in the top ~10th percentile (see [2], for example.) This scoring is done by expert panels, which are composed of leading experts / professors from around the country. While one can adjust funding priorities, part of the price to pay for having cutting edge basic research always available is that there will be certain things one disagrees with.

There is plenty of room for a discussion of how to increase the efficiency of scientific funding, and if the current science-funding institutions are at... 'a near-optimal position in tradeoff space.' However, taking a chainsaw to the agencies to punish them is like blaming doctors for outbreaks of diseases, the latter being sadly predictable.

[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/health-research-offers-a-big-retu...

[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/niaid-paylines

it'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

Many people think this will hurt the old the most, but in reality, as an old person, it will hurt our children far more more than old people.

Once again we are proving the US is just "I got mine, the rest of you can suffer" Country.

Examples are research on ALS, Childhood Diabetes and Cancer and many more issues too numerous to list. Already funding has been cut for ALS and Cancer research.

Welcome to depending upon China and Japan for ground breaking treatments. From what I have read Japan has been doing a lot and I think China is ramping up quickly.

A 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?

If you just read the study titles that appear in the little animated graphic you may spot a pattern. I can't read more than this because it is paywalled but I've seen other articles about this same thing and they show the same pattern. "Support for Collaboration and Networking Among Diverse Pain Researchers" is one.

The fact that the headline from the NYT is "The Disappearing Funding for Chronic Diseases" not "The Disappearing Funding for Health Research that Critics say has Dubious Value" is dishonesty.

The headline, at least, is one big question beg. The issue is whether these particular research avenues, which overlap heavily with left wing politicking, should be funded by taxpayers, not whether chronic disease in general should be researched. As usual though the NYT hopes you're too stupid to notice what they're doing.

Once 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.

The positive side seems to be that relinquishing our position[1] as the medical research country should lower healthcare prices. For decades we've been told that our healthcare prices were due to medical research - drug discovery, device innovation, &etc. By destroying our ability to do research, we should expect to see healthcare prices equalize at a price where those costs are no longer factored in, right?

1. By way of self-inflicted damage