Hacker News

NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers

58 points by brandonb 3 hours ago | 18 comments

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.

spwa4 56 minutes ago

... who are unfortunately backed by a large part of the US population who have elected them on exactly that promise, for various reasons. From fear of vaccines to having various other nations freeride on US research.

That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.

carbocation 54 minutes ago

The public overwhelmingly supports NIH-funded research. https://www.aacr.org/about-the-aacr/newsroom/news-releases/n...

cogman10 48 minutes ago

The issue, I think, is a large number of people don't realize the NIH or NIS exists or know what they do.

I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.

bonoboTP 14 minutes ago

They play a classic motte and bailey. When funding is scarce suddenly all they do is cure cancer. When funding is abundant they start to do... other stuff. Substitute that for yourselves.

Academia has thoroughly discredited itself and is incapable of self reflection. They will play this game forever.

It's like this all over. Academia, Wikipedia, Mozilla whatever. The Great Cause diverts all the money to itself.

gr_norm 9 minutes ago

> 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.

bonoboTP 5 minutes ago

Not my job to educate you. It's emotional labor.

(I will not mention the topics because even just naming them makes people throw their brains away.)

gr_norm 4 minutes ago

Then be ignored. Your subjective feelings bear nothing on the question of science funding.

epistasis 2 hours ago

It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.

A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.

There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...

nielsbot 2 hours ago

I'm going to call it malice. Either way the people running the government now are the avowed enemies of functioning institutions. No need to give these freaks the benefit of the doubt.

(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)

tokioyoyo 23 minutes ago

From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste. But it’s also funny because it’s not something that can be achieved in a span of 4 years and without long term goals/objectives/process changes/changing the pipelines/etc.

I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.

bonoboTP 7 minutes ago

This is certainly part of the potential outcomes when a sector chooses a side and that side loses.

jjtheblunt 42 minutes ago

> 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?

epistasis 2 minutes ago

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 at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.

jltsiren 27 minutes ago

Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.

dgellow 53 minutes ago

Why would you ever give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt after the past 10y? They’ve been more than clear about the fact they want to destroy federal and scientific institutions (other than ICE of course)

jmcgough 34 minutes ago

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 already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.

Escapado 10 minutes ago

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 misinformation campaign to further then it makes sense why you would want to take out the voices of treason. But maybe I just misunderstand the whole situation.