Welcome back to the channel.

This week, the Trump administration has put a pause on all federal grants to organizations, to groups, to institutions like universities,

and this includes the NIH.

It's a one-month pause so that institutions can look to see if their grants are in violation with other federal policy,

particularly around DEI, gender identity, and climate, things that the Trump administration

not going to want to fund.

I've seen a lot of scientists express consternation that this is going to set back science,

that we're going to stop cures, and there's a lot of hand-wringing about it.

I think a lot of that is just overblown hysteria.

The pause one month not going to mean a lot in the grand scheme

of things. Also, there was no grant that was magically going to get funded in the next week

and that Trump's put a halt on. And also, the American people have voted and they decided

these are not their priorities. I was talking about it with my research team and I had Ben

Knudson, who is a student at

GW University, ask me some questions about what I think is wrong with the NIH, the study

sections, the problems in the NIH, and he's agreed to join me in this video where he's going

to talk about the NIH study sections, why I think it's such a broken process, and what

I think people are not missing, which is the pause is not the problem. The problem is the status quo. Every year, the NIH is giving out

billions of dollars in grants in a cumbersome bureaucratic process that encourages mediocrity,

that doesn't fund the most trailblazing science, that is extremely bureaucratic, that is

a you scratch my back,

I'll scratch yours mentality.

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