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Up To 1000 NIH Investigators Dropped Out Last Year
sciencehabit writes "New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade, the number of investigators with National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding dropped sharply last year by at least 500 researchers and as many as 1000. Although not a big surprise—it came the same year that NIH's budget took a 5% cut—the decline suggests that a long-anticipated contraction in the number of labs supported by NIH may have finally begun."
Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
Now that the anti-tax movement has won, we can look forward to the destruction of the greatest source of innovation the U.S. -- and the world -- has ever seen.
Get ready for the visionaries who tell us that the source of American innovation is guys working in garages, and all we have to do is lower taxes on garages to unleash the flow of productivity.
I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
We all know how the 'bad' researchers game the system by hyperciting to up their impact numbers, maybe they know they can't pull that shit w/ open-access & have moved on to the private sector? IDK, just pure speculation from someone outside the field...
NIH employs roughly 19,000 people. Given the 5% cut in budget and projects, can we expect a 5% reduction in staff? Not holding my breath on that one.
theÂNational Institutes of Health is an arm of big pharma, get a clue kids
"Dropped Out" implies it was the decision of the researchers to quit.
Instead it was the decision of the NIH to quit funding them.
idea. they said they could do better. they didn't.
New data show that after remaining more or less steady for a decade ...
Did they even look at the graph? It shows a steady decline from 2004 and 2008. The current level had not reached the 2008 level yet.
And the federal budget will be nothing but entitlement spending and interest payments on debt if we keep on the path Congress has us on now.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
The federal government has no constitutional authority to establish or fund a National Institute of Health.
Without something to anchor your 500-1000 number, who will know how outraged they need to be?
And without knowing what those investigators were doing neither number is particularly useful. That's 1000 investigators and their entire lab staff most of them being scientists doing useful research not administrators etc. Unfortunately this doesn't just affect the current generation of scientists, it affects the next generation too. Not all of these labs will close, but there will certainly be a lot less capacity to take students and post docs. How this will impact research is pretty hard to predict, unfortunately it looks a bit more like the blunderbuss approach than the precision cull of the herd with a rifle and scope.
it's that we're losing _any_. We've had 30 years of constant productivity increases. These are the sort of jobs we were promised would replace all the Manufacturing jobs that went away for those 30 years. Now some of them are going away. It's suppose to be growing, not shrinking.
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Democrat in Name Only. There's several of them. Plus the Dems aren't really in power. The Republicans have threatened to drive this country over a cliff multiple times (debt ceiling). This last time the Pres said: "Go for it, I think we can survive and you won't", but it wasn't that he called their bluff. They were never bluffing. The only reason they backed down is they thought they'd be hurt themselves....
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Austerity driven stupidity intentionally trying to destabilize this country. It's too bad we can't be strict constitutionalists and call up the militia to put down the insurrection or the far right fanatics, anti-science, anti-education, anti-Christian right. It really is simple: stupidity doesn't lead to innovation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
There are very simple solutions to this, and that involves not giving the bulk of research money to the same big bloated labs. To do this you must 'stir-up' the allocation business (it is!) to direct younger smaller researches get more the the pie.
No, simple - well known by those in the system - solutions... they just don't follow the same beat as the psycho leaders, is all.
We wouldn't want well established people to be challenged by new sharp people - keep them begging at the door, as we do now in all fields.
Time to wake up.
So they removed a thousand employees getting a $100,000 each to find new ways to drug so-called untermenschen while calling it a cure — sounds good to me.
Nice sample of one proof you've got there, AC.
Being one of these 500 to 1000 scientists I can only say to young people: Don't pursue any science career anymore - it is probably not gonna feed you.
True on Social Security, but Medicare has been highly undercapitalized since its inception, due to medical cost inflation and recipients' expectations which outstripped all projections when Medicare tax rates were set. Thus your Medicare taxes (and everyone else's) are very unlikely to pay (even accounting for hypothetical investment gains) for your Medicare expenses in old age. The Medicare system is unsustainable as is; the oldsters who got it already got a great deal but sooner or later that will have to change.
Is that some number between 0 and 1000, or could it also be negative?
Let's start with the NIH main campus, in Bethesda, MD, where somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people work every day. That include maintenance, cafeteria and hospital staff. If between 500 and 1000 left, that's 2.5%-5% reduction.
Then consider the fact that it's probably the largest pure medical research institution in the world. Note that I said "pure research" - we're not talking about billions used to find a drug that's equivalent to, or only marginally better than an existing drug... because your patent on that one's about to run out.
And I suppose most of you are twentysomethings who never get sick, and will live forever (aka willfully ignorant children).
And the US, biggest economy in the world (for the moment) can't keep the budget up, since we have to have 15% or lower taxes on the people whose annual income is larger than most countries, because, heaven forfend, they might have to scrimpt and save, and maybe would be unable to buy that next Hawaiian island....
This sucks.
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