Oh no, NIH study sections are on pause briefly while the new administration comes to power.

If you follow social media, you'll see a lot of consternation about the Trump administration's decision to put a pause on NIH-funded travel and NIH-funded study sections.

People are really worried what's going to happen to science.

But once again, in a Trump administration,

we're living in a sky is falling mentality. This is not that big a deal. Let me point out the facts.

Number one, some people say that because of the pause in NIH travel, that they're going to miss out on some meetings or their time was wasted because they were already in transit.

They're not giving you the broader perspective. Millions of human hours are spent each year writing NIH grants that are unfunded.

The greatest waste of scientific capital is writing unsuccessful NIH grants.

Now, you're going to ask yourself, well, the NIH is surely giving the grants out to the most

meritorious science.

No, there aren't.

They've never studied whether or not their method of

giving out grants is superior to any other method, including a modified lottery. They don't even

know if this arduous, bureaucratic, time-consuming, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours

process is better than just having a low bar cut off and then randomly giving out the money.

They've never done that experiment. They haven't studied scientifically the science of giving out research funding.

It's even worse than that. NIH dollars come with massive indirects, which make researchers who have a lot of NIH dollars untouchable.

Universities usually overlook their errors and keep them on faculty

because they get a lot of cash. That cash is then laundered by universities, given back to them,

and unrestricted slush funds used for all sorts of purposes, including lavish travel and parties

and going out for lab meetings. It's wasted. We don't know what happens to all that money.

Worse, the NIH has funded low value priorities. They went all in on the amyloid hypothesis for Alzheimer's. Where was the

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