What’s with NIH funding?

NIH research funding: vital, wasteful or both?

Over $120 billion research grants at universities are federally funded. Of course the federal government funds all sorts of things at our colleges like research grants, financial aid and student loans. Here are the top ten recipients of federal funds for 2023.

1. Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

$9 billion.

2. Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore, Maryland

$2.9 billion 

3. University of California, San Diego

San Diego, California

$1.54 billion 

4. University of Washington

Seattle, Washington

$1.52 billion. 

5. University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan

$1.35 billion 

6. Columbia University

New York City, New York

$1.3 billion

7. Stanford University

Stanford, California

$1 billion

8. Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

$899 million.

9. Duke University

Durham, North Carolina

$863 million

10. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

$800 million

Harvard looks like a misprint. In 2023 NIH awarded $35 billion in grants to more than 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities. With advent of Donald Trump, NIH has been terminating grants for LGBTQ, public health equity and DEI related research. For example, NIH had awarded grants to “transform culture at NIH-funded extramural institutions” by “building a self-reinforcing community of scientists committed to diversity and inclusive excellence.” A grant proposal from Vanderbilt which received funding explicitly stated the intent to “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.” Personally, I would reject any proposal that contained the recently invented word “Latinx.”

Naturally, the recipients and their universities are crying foul saying things like “These cuts ignore the needs of our communities and hinder medical advancements that benefit everyone” and “We’re halting lifesaving science.” Others have said that “The discoveries treating cancer and diabetes originated from basic research conducted decades ago.  A sudden funding freeze would force us to halt the recruitment and training of brilliant scientists, abandon purchasing cutting-edge equipment and dramatically curtail our experiments at the threshold of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases and aging. The effect would be to harm millions of Americans awaiting these medical advances.”

Some of this is true and also totally beside the point. Researchers would contend that every penny received is vital to their mission and is spent wisely. But is it? We all have seen examples of funding that is just plain weird. Consider the following

•  NIH provided $533,000 to study the “effects of meditation…from reading Buddhist texts,” $1.5 million to develop a smartphone game to help parents of children with picky-eating habits, $387,000 to provide Swedish massages to rabbits, and $371,000 to study whether moms love dogs or their own children more.
• The National Science Foundation awarded an $856,000 grant to train three mountain lions to use treadmills to study mountain lions’ use of energy while hunting. This follows NSF’s earlier grant to study shrimps’ ability to walk on treadmills.
•  Researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, released a 2018 report that honey bees dance more, a move that signals food location—when they’re given cocaine. 

Also in addition to these types of grants, as I have reported before, the integrity of the research has been called into question. A noted researcher has said that “The NIH is fundamentally broken and morally corrupted. Corruption, waste, and fraud are not occasional lapses but systemic failures. The agency must be gutted and reformed if we are to salvage scientific integrity.

One of the most damning indictments against the NIH is the reproducibility crisis. Science is supposed to be built on verifiable, repeatable results, yet the vast majority of research funded by the NIH fails cannot be duplicated. Dr. Isaiah Hankel notes that much of the research produced via NIH grants cannot be reproduced and that only 11 percent of the oncology studies can be replicated. I have noted similar findings throughout much of academic research calling into question recommendations and policies that flow from findings that cannot be corroborated.

However, this is ending with the appointment of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH. Dr Bhattacharya testified at his confirmation hearing that NIH funded fraudulent Alzheimer’s research that misled the entire field for years. It seems to me that NIH should mandate that all research proposals have results that can be replicated and that funded research can only be published if results can be duplicated. We know that to say that all the federally funded research is essential and vital is a lie. What we must make certain is that bogus results generated from research are not incorporated into public policy.

BTW I searched for how much in Federal grants was going to UT-Knoxville but found only $12 million while Vanderbilt’s was $77 million. Most of the funding is for medical research rather than in the academic areas.