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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hi, I'm Santi Ruiz and this is Statecraft. If you're not a regular listener, a reminder, the complete annotated transcript for this episode is at www.statecraft.pub. if you'd like the option of reading this conversation if you're tired of my voice if you want to see the pie chart of American science funding, please do subscribe there. Today I'm talking to Mike Lauer, previously the Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health, or nih. Mike, my colleague Caleb Watney told me you're one of the deepest thinkers on public science funding, and today we're going to find out if that's true.
- [00:41]
B
That's very sweet of him.
- [00:42]
A
I know my colleagues think quite highly of you. One of the reasons I'm excited for this conversation is extramural research. You were the Deputy Director of the nih. Extramural is the fancy word for grants that go out the door of NIH. And somewhere between 85 and 90% of NIH's total budget flows out the door this way. So if one thinks of NIH as a big investment fund for biomedical R and D, extramural is almost all of the portfolio. Now, you were the Deputy Director for that branch. Does that mean you got to decide who got funding?
- [01:20]
B
Oh no. Obviously it's a very high volume system. When you're dealing with tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of grants, the system by definition has to be a bit decentralized. So there's no one person who's making the decisions about all those grants. We had a very elaborate system that involved tens of thousands of reviewers as well as thousands of program staff that together would make the decisions about what grants would get funded.
- [01:49]
A
So what was your role as Deputy Director of Extramural Research?
- [01:53]
B
So we had an office that was in the office of the Director, that's the main coordinating office of nih. And we were responsible for what you could call the corporate framework of extramural funding. So it included some very down to earth practical things, such as our IT system. We had an IT system called ERA, which handled more than 50% of all the grants in the federal government. And anybody who interacts with NIH in any way, shape or form, sending in applications or serving as a reviewer, would interact with our ERA system. We were also responsible for grant rules and policy as well as compliance and integrity. One thing that took up an awful lot of my time was dealing with non compliance and integrity cases. And then we also played a major role in outreach and communications about NIH grant rules and policies.
- [02:47]
A
You and I had a prep call a few weeks ago before this, and I have some notes here from that prep call and I want to read them to you and then you expound on them. The system of funding science is fundamentally broken. In some respects, it's been an unmitigated disaster. It was a house of cards, and it's not surprising that it's now falling apart. What do you mean?
- [03:08]
B
The system itself suffers from what some have referred to as systemic flaws. I think that's correct. And that goes way before the second Trump administration, even before the first Trump administration. I think the fundamental problem is that the system, which was originally designed to be competitive, has become hyper competitive. There is too much competition going on, so much so that it is actually dangerous and corrosive to the system. Let me explain a little bit about what that means. So back in the 1950s, the late 1940s and 1950s, when the NIH grant system started, it was relatively small and about 60%, 6 0% of all grant applications got funded, which meant that getting funding was not something that would be a source of a great deal of stress. Scientists essentially had to fill out the forms. By the way, the form was four pages long. Today, a typical grant application is 100 to 150 pages long. I've seen grant applications that are over a thousand pages long. So it's a different world that we're in right now. But back then, 60% of grant applications would get funded. Well, what happened over time is that more and more money was fed into the NIH system. And this was a two edged sword. On the one hand, it was great getting more money. But on the other hand, what happened is that the scientific community responded by expanding dramatically. More buildings, more scientists, more graduate students, more PhDs, many more than the monies could accommodate for. So as time went on, the likelihood of getting funding went down and the system became excessively competitive. By the way, I saw that in, in 2025, the success rate was down to 10%. So we went from 60% back in the 1950s down to 10% now. And the many problems that the grant system has, incremental research, the loss of innovation, many of these manifestations are essentially symptoms of the fact that we have too many scientists that are chasing after too few grant dollars. And this has rendered the system quite vulnerable.
- [05:25]
A
Can you expand on that a little more? I think my first response to hearing that would be, what do you mean there's too many scientists? How can somebody who is the director of extramural research. Your job was to kind of encourage and support science happening out in the world. How can somebody in your role say there's a bubble in science?
- [05:46]
B
Here's a way of thinking about this. Imagine that you have a job. I would imagine that hopefully most of our listeners here have a job or have had a job recently. Unless you were in business for yourself, you would be gaining an income. Your income would come from your employer. And your assumption would be that as long as you did high quality work, your employer would continue to pay you. That is not what it's like in science. In science, your employer, let's say you're a scientist and you work at a university. There's a high likelihood that your university doesn't have the money to pay your salary and instead basically says to you it is up to you to get your salary. And in order for you to get your salary, you're going to have to apply for grant money from the federal government. And what that means is that you have to participate in a competition in which the likelihood of success every time you ask for funding is on the order of 10 to 20%. As you might imagine, this is a highly stressful state. So instead of thinking about great deep ideas and experiments that you could be designing, instead of doing that, you're worried about whether or not you're going to have enough money to pay your own salary as well as the salaries of your staff six months from now, a year from now, two years from now. The term that we use for this system is called soft money. Soft money meaning that when a university hires you, they don't have the money to pay you, or maybe they only have the money to pay you for a few years and they make it very clear to you that after that you're on your own. And it'll be your responsibility to bring in your salary or to bring in a big chunk of your salary. And if you fail to do that because you're just not lucky in this extremely hyper competitive system, then your lab will be closed down and you may very well lose your job. This is obviously a very high stress situation and it's not one that is conducive to great science. What's conducive to great science is where people can engage in long term thinking and don't have to worry about their funding.
- [07:55]
A
There's a lot of directions we could take this and we're going to get into a lot of the nuts and bolts in a second. But I'm curious just off the bat, this is a really succinct and punchy critique of the current scientific system. Did your colleagues at the NIH agree?
- [08:12]
B
I think for the most part the answer is yes. Certainly some of my colleagues in the top echelon did recognize that the system was fundamentally broken. There were papers that came out, say, 10, 15 years ago with titles like Rescuing Biomedical Funding from Its Systemic Flaws and Saving Biomedical Research. And I don't think that very many of my colleagues were questioning the premise that the system was in serious trouble.
- [08:42]
A
I want to get deeper into this critique, but first I want to define a couple terms. So I want to make sure we understand what extramural grants are, who gets them, what that competition for those grants, in your view, has on the system. So first, what counts as extramural? My basic understanding, I've got a kind of rough pie chart here, is that most of these grants are individual grants to specific researchers for specific projects that they've applied for funding for.
- [09:10]
B
That's exactly right. So the word extramural literally means outside of the walls. If you think about a government that wants to support science, there are a couple of ways that they could do it. One is that the government has their own scientists, they hire their own people, and they work in their laboratories and get their work done. The scientists themselves are salaried employees of the government.
- [09:33]
A
And that does happen.
- [09:34]
B
That certainly does happen. In fact, the NIH has a rich intramural program that has been enormously successful, that's produced great scientific discoveries and Nobel Prize winners. And exactly as you say, the extramural approach is to fund grants that go to universities, mostly universities and medical schools, research institutions that hire scientists to conduct specific projects. And even there, there are different approaches that can be taken. One approach might be to give universities large sums of money and then rely on them to figure out what projects that they're going to conduct and which scientists they will support. That is, for the most part, not the system that we have. The system that we have is to fund lots of relatively small individual projects, something that actually came out of various events that took place around World War II.
- [10:29]
A
When you say very small, will you give me a sense of the scale of these R grants, which are these, these classic investigator driven grants, and then kind of put in context what's the whole pie chart. So these are small grants, but how much money is going out the door in these grants?
- [10:42]
B
The most common type of grant that NIH funds is what's called an rpg, which is not a rocket propelled grenade. It is A research project grant. In 2024, the agency issued around 40,000, a little bit more than 40,000 research project grants, each one for about $600,000 each. And to put that in perspective, the overall NIH budget, everything extramural, intramural, and various other expenses, adds up to $48 billion. So each individual grant is a very small part of the overall whole.
- [11:20]
A
And taken together, I'm trying to do the math in my head. These RPGs or the R grants are something like half of the NIH's grant making.
- [11:29]
B
The R grants make up actually most of the grant making. The other major component is training. They're about roughly a billion dollars got spent in 2024 to pay for fellowships and training grants. About $26 billion for research grants. Well, it's more than that, actually. It's probably more like $30 billion for research grants.
- [11:51]
A
And you mentioned a moment ago, this system basically dates back to the Second World War. I think some folks will be familiar, some folks will not be familiar with this kind of pocket history of how the federal science funding apparatus developed in this particular way.
- [12:04]
B
Yeah, sure, it's fascinating. So before World War II, government did not fund very much science. Scientists wanted government to be as far away as possible. They did not want the government to be controlling their lives. World War II changes things because suddenly the government has a need for science and needs it very fast. And so the government put in a huge amount of money into supporting science. Most famously was the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project. But another big project that happened in our sphere was the development of methods to mass produce penicillin. When the war came to an end, science had been so successful that the government decided that there was a need to produce, continue supporting science and perhaps increase its support of science. After World War II, question was how to do that. And the NIH started almost by accident. The agency existed, but it was a small laboratory. What happened was they found themselves with some extra money because the price of penicillin had suddenly gone down. The person who actually had my job way back then sent out a letter to university dean saying, if you have any need for some extra money, please let me know. And he got an overwhelming response. And that was the beginning of the NIH grant program. It did not start with an act of Congress. It started because of a series of accidents. By 1946, 47, the program was de facto running. Congress liked it so much that then they. They did make it legal.
- [13:30]
A
But where does the specific RPG model come from? You can imagine a lot of systems where the federal government gives money to researchers, you know, maybe even researchers at universities. But the particular model we have is one where researchers say, here's the project I'd like to do over the next few years and I need this much money for it. And that's how they get the grants allocated. Why is it that way?
- [13:52]
B
The model is based on what happened to the Rockefeller foundation in the pre war years. So in the pre war years, the main nonprofit supporter of, of biomedical science in the United States was the Rockefeller Foundation. Initially, the way they did their business was they gave large institutional grants to universities around the country. Then in the late 1920s and the early 30s, two things happened. One is that they underwent a reorganization and the second was the Great Depression. And with the Great Depression, of course, their investments shrunk and their financial situation became a bit more problematic.
- [14:31]
A
Just to interject here, I think lots of listeners won't be aware. The Rockefeller foundation was the biggest. That's right, Funder of science in the U.S. at this point, which is kind of funny to think of a foundation being not just like the. A plurality, but I believe the outright majority of science funding.
- [14:46]
B
That's right. I mean, today if people think about foundations that support science, you might think about the Gates foundation, which supports a lot of science, but compared to nih, it's relatively small.
- [14:57]
A
It's pennies.
- [14:57]
B
Yeah, that's right. So facing this reorganization and facing financial pressures, the Rockefeller foundation was concerned that if they gave out these large institutional grants, they could put themselves at risk. And therefore they figured that it would be a lot safer for them to give out small project grants. If a project fails, it's no big deal. The other thing is that these would be short term grants just for a few years. So they were not obligating themselves to a lot of money down the line. Now, what's interesting is the person who headed the medical science division at Rockefeller, his name was Alan Gregg, he later on won the Lasker Prize. He was vehemently opposed to this. And he said that what this was going to do, it was going to gum up the works, there was going to be a huge amount of administrative work and essentially the Rockefeller foundation would turn into a dispensary of chicken feed. That was the term that he actually used. He vehemently pushed for nih, once NIH became the main funder, to not follow the Rockefeller model and to go back to the way things were before. Essentially, the reason why NIH did follow the Rockefeller model is because universities were now used to it. This was the accepted approach for nonprofit sponsors to support science. Nobody ever sat down and had a thoughtful policy discussion or an analysis about what might be best. It just evolved this way. And this is the system we have now.
- [16:28]
A
So let's go back to those hyper competitive pressures you talked about as a result of this system. I'm trying to figure out where to take this in your read that fact of competition, of ruthless competition for these grants, drives a lot of the paperwork requirements and a lot of the unpleasantness associated with being a scientist today. Will you say a little bit more about that?
- [16:52]
B
Again, there's no way to really understand this without a little bit of history. During the first 15 years that NIH ran, the paperwork was kept to an absolute minimum. Essentially, scientists were given money. Theoretically, they were given money for a project, but the reality was they could use the money however they felt fit. There was remarkably little oversight from, from government staff. When this came to the attention of a particular congressman, Lawrence Fountain, he was a Democrat from North Carolina in the late 50s and early 60s, he was appalled. He said this is no way to run a government program. To just trust people to give them money and just trust them and not carefully oversee what they're doing made absolutely no sense. So he called on the NIH to change their system. The NIH actually resisted this initially. They said that they agreed, but they didn't really agree. They didn't do anything. They just said, yeah, thank you very much for your wonderful advice. And then they just moved on. But Fountain was insistent. There was a series of contentious hearings held in 1962 when the then NIH director, James Shannon, said point blank that you have it all wrong. The whole idea, the reason why our system works well, it is that we give scientists money and we let them loose. And for you to ask us to run this like we would run, say, a weapons program makes absolutely no sense. Congress would not have it. They said this was totally unacceptable for the agency to run things this way. And that was the beginning of the extreme bureaucratization that we have with hundreds if not thousands of laws and regulations and rules and the insistence that scientists must stick to projects, that they must propose a project and they must do the project that they actually said that they were going to do. So that was a major event, or maybe I should call it a series of events that took place in the 1960s. There were actually three reports that were put out by the committee. Each report was more caustic than the one before it. We often talk now about the poor relationship between politicians and the nih and unfortunately I lived through a good part of this and was very, very sad to see this. But we've been through this before and. And in fact the consequences were quite serious.
- [19:18]
A
I've got two questions here. One is I'd love you to just explain what that explosion in paperwork is. These 150 to 200 page grant applications, what's in them? And then on the other side, I'd love to hear some more about what's so wrong about having scientists submit and then stick to individual projects.
- [19:40]
B
Okay, so the first part is what? What's in them? The actual research plan. The science itself is relatively short. That's about 12 pages. The rest of it consists of a lot of information about the administrative structure of the institution, information about the facilities, performance sites, a lot of information on budget, detailed biographical sketches, then depending upon the specifics, information about protection of human subjects, vertebrate animals and how they're going to be used, data management and data sharing, how that's going to happen. Biosafety select agents. I could go on and on. There's a long, long list of various requirements and some people have questioned why all of this has to appear in applications when there's only a 10 to 20% chance that the application is going to get funded anyway. And wouldn't it make much more sense to not worry about that until later? Another way of thinking about this is how much time do scientists spend on administrative issues as opposed to doing actual science? This is something that has been carefully studied by a group called the Federal Demonstration Partnership, or fdp. They have conducted well designed surveys. They started doing this in 2005, and then every about six or seven years or so they do another survey. And they also showed the same thing, which is that scientists are spending about 45% of their time related to federally funded research on administrative issues, on addressing administrative requirements, not doing actual science. There's no way that you're going to be able to completely eliminate administrative requirements. The administration is important and it has to be done properly. But when you have a situation where people are spending 45% of their time handling paperwork and only have 55% of their time to do actual science, you've got a big problem.
- [21:43]
A
How much control does the NIH have over the content of that paperwork and how much is statutory? It's because Congress says you must do such and such, because I know some of it is in statute, biological agents, and the national security side stuff. Some of that is just handed down from on high. How much leverage did you have Internally to kind of toggle other parts of the grant application.
- [22:08]
B
Not much. There is some, but not much. And I think we can think of this in two ways. On one level are explicit statutes. So as you mentioned, there are explicit statutes regarding protection of animals, protection of people, export controls, agents, biosafety and so forth. But in part, it's also an understanding of what congressional expectations are. And in many respects, congressional expectations have not changed since the 1960s. The congressional expectations are that the agency will run a very tight ship. Running a very tight ship, which may sound like a good thing, but running a very tight ship means that if anything, you err on the side of more administration, more oversight, more data that needs to be collected. There is some discretion, and I will say a number of my colleagues, I give them great credit for it, have attempted to make the system simpler and to remove some of the administrative steps. Another problem is that we don't have one federal agency that supports research. We have dozens of federal agencies that support research. And every single one of them have their own culture, they have their own set of laws and regulations and rules. Sometimes they contradict each other. So for example, one agency may say, you know, thou must do A. And another agency must say, might say, thou must never do A. And then if you're the poor grants administrator at the university and you're sending out grants to both agencies, somehow you're going to have to manage to keep it straight. The agencies also use different computer systems. And so that also creates all kinds of problems. And that's something where, where the agencies do have some control if they wanted to. But I would say for the most part, the degree of leverage is relatively small because it's, it's congressionally directed.
- [24:01]
A
From your perspective, watching over the system for a long time, what are the paperwork requirements that are the most onerous for scientists? Like on a pound for pound basis, if you could go to Congress and say get rid of these two or three requirements or pare them down, what would give you the most kind of will give scientists the most of their time back?
- [24:22]
B
I think one would be to figure out ways to streamline or make much simpler the requirements that are related to human subjects protections and animal welfare. These are very important, they need to be there, but they're way too complicated. I think another is filling out all the information on the initial grant applications. One suggestion has been that the initial grant application should be maybe 15 pages, 12 pages of the research grant, one page that has the, of the research plan, one page, a high level look at the budget and one page with just additional stuff. And that would take a lot less time to put together. And then only for those 10 to 20% who are lucky enough to get funded. Then you ask for all the additional information that could potentially save a lot of time just by doing that. And it actually would not decrease the amount of information that the government gets on the grants that it actually funds.
- [25:24]
A
One of the kind of classic streams of economic evidence that we think about a lot at IFP is a set of papers from a variety of sources over the last couple decades that say the amount of money we spend as a country on science, on R and D could be a lot higher and you'd still get positive payments, payoff. You could double or triple the amount of your tax dollars that go to R and D. And the payoff for society and cancer, drugs and, you know, geothermal energy and whatever, whatever else you want to put in there, it would still be positive. Like you could keep putting more into that. If that's true, if that kind of high level economic analysis is true, how could you dole out that money such that you don't create these incredibly bad hyper competitive effects for individual scientists and for researchers on the ground? How would you go about doubling the amount of money the NIH spends and limit this kind of horrible rat race dynamic?
- [26:21]
B
There are several layers, so let's unpack that a little bit. One big question is whether or not we should be focusing on individual projects as opposed to scientists or programs or departments or even universities. All right, now one of the questions that you had asked me before, which it gets directly to this, is, so what's wrong with asking scientists to stick to the projects that they actually proposed? And the problem with that kind of thinking is that science is fundamentally different than say, remodeling a kitchen. Let's say that I hire a contractor to remodel my kitchen. I know exactly what I want, and I work it out with the contractor that he's going to remodel the kitchen in this particular way. And I hold him to it. If he doesn't do it, then there's a potential breach of contract with science, and particularly with a scientific grant. By definition, it's incompletely specified. We don't know what exactly is going to happen. The hypothesis may turn out to be wrong. The experiments may yield surprising results. New technologies may come on the scene which completely change the way that one thinks. There may be new public health threats. Like for example, nobody predicted COVID 19 until it actually happened. And all of a sudden the needs change. So the thing is that the very nature of science is that you don't know what you're going to be doing over the next even year, or for sure not five years. I saw this interesting commentary by a guy named Peter Lawrence is a zoologist at Cambridge University who said that essentially we're asking young scientists to become bureaucrats and astrologers and they're supposed to write an astrology about what they're going to be doing over the next five years and then stick to this particular fiction. So I think one of the problems with this project based approach is that it's based on a false premise. Now the other thing is, one of the other reasons why we have a surplus of scientists is that the incentives are all wrong. The grants that we fund support salaries. And so if you're a university, you like getting grants because then you don't have to pay your faculty's salaries. In fact, you go so far, as I mentioned before, to say to them, not only are we not going to have to pay your salaries, we're not going to pay your salaries, you're responsible for getting your salaries. But it's even worse than that because the way grants are structured by we not only pay for the cost of the research, we also pay for the overhead. It's called indirect costs.
- [28:57]
A
We did a whole episode with.
- [28:58]
B
I heard that. It was great.
- [29:00]
A
A couple folks on, on this topic getting far deeper than I think any of our listeners wanted to know.
- [29:05]
B
It was great. I actually, I listened to that and I thought it was very well done. The problem here, here I'm not going to talk about the wonkiness of overhead, I'm just talking about the incentives here. So part of the, of the way overhead payments are structured or the indirect payments are structured and is that the grants will include indirect payments for people's salaries. So not only will the grant pay for the professor's salary, it will also pay like a bonus fee on top of that in the form of indirects, which means that universities are incentivized to hire people that they do not have the resources to support. And it gets worse than that because the same thing applies to graduate students and postdocs. Grants will pay for their stipends, their tuition, as well as overhead on top of their compensation, which means that universities are incentivized to bring in more graduate students and more postdocs, irrespective of whether or not they have any hope of getting an academic job when they're finished. So essentially we have this whole layer of perverse incentives which is creating this bloated system.
- [30:11]
A
So this all makes perfect sense to me in terms of the incentives for the institutions. Why would the university structure itself this way? And so on. If you're like a. You're considering grad school and a hard science, and you, you've seen from talking to peers this insane rat race for grants, and you know that there are way fewer opportunities at the postdoc level or to have your own successful lab, then there are people trying to get in. Why do the grunts, people like me? Aren't there other places I could go? Couldn't I go into industry or to some big pharmaceutical company and avoid this whole rigmarole entirely? What keeps people there?
- [30:51]
B
That's absolutely correct. From an economic point of view, it would be absolutely irrational to go down this route. And in fact, we do see that in that over time, fewer and fewer American students are going to graduate school in the biomedical sciences, and fewer and fewer American graduates are getting postdocs in the biomedical sciences. To a large extent, we've become increasingly reliant on foreign students and foreign postdocs to fill those spots. And they are willing to come in and accept a situation that an American person would not be willing to accept because they think that maybe. I can see, they think a couple of things. One is that they'll get outstanding training which they could potentially take back to their home country. Or the other is that they might be able to stay here in the United States and be successful here, like many foreign scientists have.
- [31:49]
A
Another related question is you mentioned a lot of your colleagues shared this kind of general critique of the way that the NIH doles out money. Showing my. My youth and inexperience here. But I feel like when I was first started to pay attention to these topics, there were people my age and 10 years older talking about this problem, that science had slowed down, that the way we funded science no longer reflected how science works, et cetera. I guess we can talk about some of the kind of the green shoots here, some of the good signs in a little bit, but why have we been in this regime for the better part of 75 years?
- [32:26]
B
Well, I think one reason is that there are some fundamental questions that have not been answered. One fundamental question is why should the government fund science in the first place? Should the government be funding science because it's the right thing to do? Because if the government doesn't fund basic science, nobody else will? Or should the government be funding science to produce a direct benefit to the public? And if we are funding, going to be funding science for a direct benefit to the public. What exactly does that mean? Does that mean a direct benefit next year or five years from now? Or does that mean that we would accept a direct benefit that may be ill defined and happen 20 to 25 years later? All right, now to put some, I'm going to say meat on this or fat on this. Maybe I should say put fat on this. You'll see why very quickly. Back in the, in the 1970s and the 1980s, NIH and the VA funded some scientists both on the intramural side and on the extramural side to conduct work on sugar metabolism. And part of that included work on a hormone called glucagon. Glucagon we can think of as the anti insulin. So insulin reduces blood sugar, glucagon increases blood sugar. So there were a group of scientists in various parts of the country who were doing very basic research on how sugar metabolism works, on how glucagon is made. And it's something that at the time seemed extremely esoteric just to define terms.
- [34:00]
A
Which maybe most of you listeners already know. Basic research here in this context means there's no immediate commercial application. Nobody's thinking, oh, once we learn this, we can produce. That's right, X widget.
- [34:10]
B
This is curiosity based research. It is. I want to better understand how nature works. I'm not thinking about a drug that I'm going to be able to produce within the next few years and get approval from the FDA or a device that I'm going to be able to manufacture and sell. I'm just interested in how nature functions.
- [34:31]
A
Pure science.
- [34:32]
B
Pure science. Some people might call it science for science's sake. So one question is, should the government be supporting this?
- [34:39]
A
Should we?
- [34:40]
B
Now back in the 70s, 60s, 70s and 80s when this work was being done, nobody could say where this was going, including whether it was going to go anywhere. Well, where it eventually led to are the drugs like Wegavy and Ozempic and Zepbound. These are the blockbuster weight loss drugs, the GLP1 drugs that now are the top selling drugs and have dramatically changed the way we think about obesity. So that's why I brought up fat. Actually. These drugs were not developed to help people lose weight. These drugs were developed because of as a potential treatment for diabetes. Then it turned out that these drugs also induced a great deal of weight loss. Turns out they prevent heart disease. It's amazing, it's an amazing story, but this is a story, a success story of where the government supported basic Science that a company would not support, industry would not support because there was no clear benefit for them in the short term. Also, they could not be guaranteed that they would be able to keep all the benefits. There's nothing to stop other companies from taking advantage of that knowledge and making money themselves. So this is a fundamental question and it has not been answered. Back in 1960s, President Johnson, and we're talking now, the very, very top of the executive branch of government, President Johnson said point blank, we're spending too much money on basic research. As you can imagine, this sent the scientific community into panic. Eventually things settled down and things stayed the same. I think one reason why we are where we are right now is that fundamental questions like this, should the government be spending most of its money or a big chunk of its money on basic research? Should we be paying for salaries for university faculty? Should we be paying for, for, for more graduate students and postdocs? These questions were never answered. And so we are where we are.
- [36:41]
A
I'm nervous to push back here.
- [36:43]
B
No, that's fine.
- [36:44]
A
Your, your CV and my cv. But I don't know if this answers my question because I can imagine, I, I think these debates about the role of government in funding basic research or applied research or to a certain extent, those questions will always be with us, right? I mean, that is a question for democratic society and different political leaders can have different answers, and that's normal. What I'm hearing you say is wherever you fall on that axis of basic versus applied, you should want to experiment more aggressively with the way that we fund science, the tools that we use to get the science that we want.
- [37:15]
B
I completely agree with that. I think part of the issue here is who should be making these decisions about how the system runs. Should the decisions be made by politicians and their proxies, or should the decisions be made by technocrats, by scientists, either scientists out in the field or scientists who work in the government. And this was a question that also has never been satisfactorily answered. There's been a continuing tension here going back to the very beginning. So back into 1950 40s when the post World War II science apparatus was being set up, there was a big debate going on. On the one hand, were the Democrats primarily led by Harley Kilgore from West Virginia, who said the politicians should control this. Yes, the government should be supporting science, and yes, the government should be supporting science in universities, but it should be the government who decides how this system works. Should be the politicians who decide how the system works. Should and the politicians should be essentially all over it. And on the other hand you have Vannevar Bush and actually Cassius Van Slyke, who was the initial head of the NIH grants program and they were taking the exact opposite stance and they were saying, oh no, the only role of the government is to, is to write a check. The, the scientists should have complete control over this. That not only means the science that they do, but also the policies that govern how the science shall be conducted that should be in the scientists hands. So you've got this tension and this tension's been going on for a long time. And I think part of the reason why we've got the system that we have is that nobody's ever really done a careful review or a careful assessment of what's the way in which we can get the best of both worlds. On the one hand, the best of the world in which the politicians are overseeing the and calling the shots, figuring out how this system should work is that there's accountability and transparency, responsiveness to public needs. The best, on the other hand of having the scientists run the show is that they have the expertise, they have the knowledge and they may also arguably have a higher degree of competence to make sure that a program runs well. What you want is both of those.
- [39:39]
A
The other point that you've emphasized is you don't know in advance what you're going to find in science. And so pre specifying the outcomes or gating the funding until you get till you produce the product that you promise you're going to produce is just as you said, harder in the sciences. And in fact you want to leave some room for scientists to find things out and to change course as they.
- [40:02]
B
Learn the nature of this. You can almost think of this as a kind of an investment. Let's think about this. If you're putting together an investment portfolio, you as a wise investor, what you do is you put together a diverse portfolio with a wide range of assets. You don't know which assets are going to be the most successful. Some of them are going to be extremely successful. But what you do is since you don't know what they're going to be, you invest in a wide range. Similarly, this is what venture capitalists do. They try to get their money into many different places. And the idea being that most of their investments will not do very well, but a few are going to do so well that it more than justifies everything else. That's very, very similar to what we have in science.
- [40:42]
A
It's an interesting metaphor and one that we've been talking about a lot here at ifp. And I think it's funny because in terms of number of investments, the system does very well at, quote, unquote, diversifying, as you said, you know, 40. You say 40,000 RPGs in a given year. So look at a huge number of grants. But the problem is each of those grants is a relatively small dollar amount. And a lot of the breakthrough science, a lot of the stuff with really huge upside, you can't fund on $600,000 over three years. And so what you end up doing is, my colleague Caleb Watney likes to say it's like your portfolio is 90% bonds with a 3% return. You're massively undiversified in terms of the kinds of returns that the scientific portfolio is expected to give you.
- [41:27]
B
Yeah, actually, that's a very interesting way of thinking about it. And also what that does is you're fixed in terms of your commitments. So, yes, each individual project is very small, and so the potential loss from each individual project is quite small. But on the other hand, if what you're giving up is a huge amount of flexibility, which is inherent in the value of science, then overall there's going to be a net loss. The other, the other thing is, is that if 45% of your most important people's time is being spent on administrative work, and much of that administrative work is because they're attending to a large number of relatively small projects, that is going to be inherently wasteful. One way I sometimes think about this is we can think about bureaucratic units. I don't know whether that's a formal term, but a grant application is a bureaucratic unit. An annual award is, is a bureaucratic unit. And each of those units come with a whole set of administrative tasks that are attendant upon them. So if we think about it this way, nih will issue 60 to 70,000 awards every year. Both competing awards, new awards, as well as renewals. We also get tens of thousands of applications. I think it's up to 80,000 applications a year. When you put all that together, that's well over 100,000 bureaucratic units. And every single one of those entails work. And every single one of those also entails opportunities for mistakes. They're draining, they drain the system.
- [43:03]
A
One alternate way that we've argued you could go about pushing out federal funding for science is something we've called X Labs, this idea of a new kind of grant. It's a big block grant to an outside institution. Maybe it's a University. Maybe it's not a university. Maybe it's a different kind of research entity altogether. That's for various reasons, may have lower overhead or maybe more incentivized to pursue these big breakthrough innovations. I believe by the time this episode comes out, the National Science foundation will have announced a program very similar to this. But I'm curious just generally, and maybe for the NIH in particular, it sounds like you'd be supportive of something like that. I'd be curious if so, what form you think it should take.
- [43:46]
B
Yes, I would be extremely supportive of this. I think the key to having something like this be successful is that it's got to be big enough. It cannot be too small so that it is essentially set up for failure. But let's do a bit of a thought experiment. And let me point out, this is not an original thought experiment. Other people have thought of this before me, but we'll go ahead and think this through. You know, let's say you have a university that's getting $100 million a year, and that $100 million a year comes in the form of a very large number of small grants. What you would do, let's also, just to make this thought experiment easier, let's assume that all of that money is going into basic science. So it's going into laboratories that are working on a wide variety of things. So what we'll do is we'll tell that university, okay, we're going to give you $100 million, maybe a little less, maybe $90 million, one grant. So now we only have one bureaucratic unit, not thousands, just one. And with this one grant, you're going to run a basic science program. Now, we can define, and Congress could help do this, define what the boundaries are, what kind of work would be allowed and what is not allowed, what can be paid for and not so. For example, I would say that we can pay for salaries for faculty and for staff, but not for graduate students and postdocs. That should be handled someplace else. And then we now leave it up to the university to figure out how to spend that money most wisely. They know who their scientists are. They know who the team players are. They know who's collaborative. They know what their strengths are, and they would be in a position to make an appropriate judgment. Now, in order for this to work, the system has to be accountable. And I could imagine various ways that that could be done. One is there would be regular financial audits to make sure that the monies are being handled properly. The other is that there would be a retrospective scientific audits or reviews. And essentially what we would tell the university is we expect you to produce some great science. We're not expecting you that every single scientist in your staff will produce great science, because we know that's not possible. But we expect you to set up an environment that will assure that somebody, somewhere, actually, or maybe somebody's somewhere within your system, will produce great science. And, and we're going to use that retrospective review which will be conducted by experts to determine whether or not you will continue to get funding further on down the line. But in order for this to work, it has to be big.
- [46:29]
A
How big?
- [46:30]
B
Well, big enough so that scientists are not going to be incentivized, either implicitly or explicitly, to be spending their time writing grant applications. The whole idea of something like this is that their sole incentive should be to do great science, and that's what they should be spending their time on. And the administrative work that they should be doing should be solely that which is necessary to get the science done, not to, not to deal with government administrative issues. That should be kept to an absolute minimum issue. So the problem is if the system, if it's too small, then the scientists are going to still be writing grant applications on the side.
- [47:09]
A
On company time. I'm filling out some application for another 150k somewhere.
- [47:13]
B
That's exactly right. And that, that then completely defeats the purpose.
- [47:17]
A
So it's interesting because I haven't thought about that side of things as much, about freeing scientists to spend less time on the paperwork. The other argument I've heard for these kinds of big block grants is that they actually let you do a specific kind of science that you can't do on smaller budgets. You can't pay for the kind of team based, really breakthrough science, the leading edge these days of science, unless you've got capital to spend. And that these kind of nickel and dime grants here and there will just never add up enough to buy the piece of equipment that will let you do the breakthrough experiment.
- [47:51]
B
Well, that's absolutely true. So the thing is that a block grant system like this enables actually a wide diversity of work to be funded. And so, for example, it would be very reasonable for universities to, to devote some of the money to what you might call skunk works, relatively small exploratory projects. You give people six months to see whether or not there's anything there. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, no worries. And we, we then move on to something else. But what it also does is it gives them the resources to buy expensive equipment, put together large teams of scientists to do more ambitious projects. So I think ironically, something like this, where there's only one grant, this is in our thought experiment here, actually would allow for a greater degree of diversity than what we have now, where the university is saddled with a whole bunch of individual small projects.
- [48:42]
A
I mean, in a sense, right now, the system incentivizes universities or other research institutions not to go for big swings. Like, there's no, there's no added upside to trying to chase down a really huge grant for something that has a high likelihood of failure. And I think that one of the upsides of what you're recommending is you get some political guardrails. But you also say to universities and other research institutions, you're going to be judged on your portfolio on if you can get some big hits on science, you know, the next crazy weight loss drug. We're going to forgive, you know, some shots on goal that were totally wrongheaded or in the wrong direction or creative and didn't pan out. We're going to look at the whole portfolio as a whole.
- [49:25]
B
I would say not only forget, I would be a bit stronger than that. I would say we fully expect that they will happen. And in fact, we would be very worried. If you come back to us and say, let's say I have 500 scientists who are working in my institution and all 500 of them produce great work, then I'm worried, I'm worried that you're being too conservative. I certainly expect all 500 of them to have managed their money responsibly and.
- [49:51]
A
Have abided by research regulations.
- [49:53]
B
Yes, exactly. And I expect them to, you know, to run their labs in a civil and safe way, all of that. But I fully expect that a large proportion of them won't have much to show scientifically because that's just the nature of the beast.
- [50:08]
A
Well, while we're on the topic of institutional reorganizations, I want to ask you about the different institutes or centers in the NIH, what are called the ICs. For those who don't know, there's a few handfuls of different ICs. That's why it's the national institutes, plural of health. And there are a few that I think are the kind of, maybe more commonly known, these kind of big disease focused ones like the National Cancer Institute or niad, the Infectious Diseases Institute or the National Institute on Aging that are the vast majority of NIH dollars. But then there's a, a whole bunch of them that don't often get public attention. At various points there have been arguments that the number of institutes should be consolidated. I think Project 2025, for instance, said there should be a lot fewer. It's not just a right wing view. There have been all kinds of perspectives on this over the years. What's your take?
- [51:02]
B
I used to say that I work for the National Institutes of Health. The key word is the second word institutes, and the key letter is the S that comes at the end. There are 27 institutes and centers. That means that at any given time there are 54 different opinions. So it was a difficult place to work in in that regard.
- [51:18]
A
Why double the number of opinions as institutes?
- [51:22]
B
I'm being a little sarcastic here, but the thing is, is that it's a very. It's a remarkably fragmented agency with each unit doing their own thing. They have their own culture, their own set of rules. There are certain rules that, that are common to the entire agency. But it's remarkable the degree of variation that was there. On the one hand that was a good thing because it enabled some innovation. But I think the downsides were actually much worse. And it also, it's problematic for scientists because if you submit a grant to, let's say, the National Cancer Institute, your likelihood of getting funding even before 2025 was maybe 10 to 12%. And if you submitted a grant to the Basic Science Institute, your likelihood of funding was 30%. Well, why, why should there be such a big difference? And it has to do with the fact that the agency is split up into these administrative units. So actually, if it were entirely up to me, I would say that there should be one institute, the National Institute of Health. That's actually what it was way back when. And just like the discussion that we just had about giving one block grant or one bureaucratic unit to a university, the same set of arguments could be applied to the nih. And by the way, even taking this to a higher level, what Vannevar Bush proposed back in 1945 with his endless Frontier Report was one agency to cover all civilian research for the government. So it would cover physics, chemistry, computer science and biomedicine. We could take this to different levels, but I think it's the same theme here. The more bureaucratic units you have, the messier things are, the more difficult things are to manage.
- [53:04]
A
How different are the individual institutes? Does each director have their own fiefdom? How much variation is there in how they run?
- [53:12]
B
There's an enormous amount of variation. So for example, the National Cancer Institute and NIAID devote a larger Proportion of their funds to intramural search. The National Cancer Institute devotes a fair amount of money to research centers. That means that there's less money available for the relatively small grants. Some of the institutes, the way they decide what grants they're going to fund is by scores that come out of peer review committees. They simply look at the numbers, and the numbers alone will determine which grants that they're going to fund. There's very little thinking that goes into it. I'm being a little glib, but not by much. And then there are other institutes like the Basic Science Institute, where they take a more holistic approach to deciding which grants to fund the peer review outcomes. The scores that come out of the peer review meetings play a major role in determining what grants get funded, but only. It's only one component of a more holistic decision. The cultures are quite different.
- [54:11]
A
When you look at the relative sizes of the different institutes, I think you see a pretty consistent pattern, which is the institutes that have a patient advocacy group that would be associated with it are much bigger. So the national cancer institute gets 20% of the budget of NIH, and that makes a lot of sense. I mean, just as from a. From a lay perspective, a lot of people with a direct stake in that. Whereas the Genomics Institute or the Basic Biomedical Science Institute. How did the advocacy groups shape how the institutes work?
- [54:47]
B
They play a major role. The reason why the National Cancer Institute is as big and as powerful as it is is because Mary Lasker lobbied for it so effectively way back when.
- [55:00]
A
And Mary Lasker is so.
- [55:02]
B
Mary Lasker of the Lasker family, was a strong proponent for research. She essentially was a lobbyist. She was an extremely effective one. And she, along with a number of colleagues, successfully lobbied the government, including President Nixon, to pass the national cancer Act of 1971, which led to the National Cancer Institute becoming much bigger and more powerful than it previously was before. In 1948, the National Heart Institute was formed. That was also a result of a lobbying effort. So the lobbyists and the advocacy groups have played a major role in how the agency is organized. And of course, the institute directors pay very close attention to the advocacy groups because they want their support. Their support translates into lobbying on Capitol Hill. I was reminded a gazillion times that as a federal employee, I was not allowed to lobby. I was not allowed to lobby, but the advocacy groups could lobby. And they did. And they did very effectively. And so I think that it's not a stretch to say that I'm going to pay a great Deal of attention to what their wants and desires are, because I want them on my side.
- [56:18]
A
If I'm head of the National Cancer Institute, say I can't lobby Congress, but I can take meetings with the cancer advocacy groups and say, your voice is so important and it needs to be heard on Capitol Hill.
- [56:31]
B
Yeah. The National Cancer Institute made a bit of a tenuous example because that is actually a political position that was set up in 1971 as part of the National Cancer Act. Bill, the director of the National Cancer Institute is a political appointee. But let's put cancer aside and consider the other 26 institutes. So let's say the head of Heart, Lung and blood. That's exactly right. What you said is exactly right. We greatly value your support. And we greatly value your support.
- [57:00]
A
Stick around. What motivates the heads of the individual institutes or centers?
- [57:08]
B
I think what motivates them is they want to do what's best for the public. They are in an enormously powerful position to help great science happen. And by helping great science happen that potentially are not just potentially actually improves public health. And I have to say, with very few exceptions, the institute directors that I got to work with were some of the most amazing, wonderful, public spirited people that I have ever met. Very hardworking, very mission oriented, dedicated to what they're doing. You know, one example that the public can. Might be able to relate to, Tony Fauci, who was a very controversial figure, unfortunately. But one of the things that he did was he set up research networks to run trials on emerging infectious diseases. That was his idea, to set up these research networks that were large, well structured, well administered, and highly flexible. But because he, he did that, his institute was able to get trials running on COVID 19 in essentially zero time. They actually produced the first major trial demonstrating a treatment for COVID 19 in less than a month after the pandemic started. That's because of the. Of the network that he set up, or networks that he set up. That was absolutely brilliant thinking on his part. So, you know, this is an example, you know, another example that people might relate to, and it goes back many years. But Tony was the director of NIAID when the AIDS epidemic first hit. And he engineered research platforms to that made it possible to develop and rapidly deploy effective drugs that eventually turned AIDS from a rapidly fatal disease to a chronic disease. Absolutely amazing triumph of modern medicine. And this happened because of the efforts of top leadership at niaid, also the National Cancer Institute as well. So I think the world of them, I have to say, there's Been a.
- [59:08]
A
Lot of turnover in the heads of institutes and centers. And let's do a thought experiment. Let's say somehow I'm suddenly plucked to the highest heaven and I'm placed as head of one of these institutes. You're advising me. You know, I gotta, I get on the phone with you before I go in. What advice would you give to a new institute head?
- [59:29]
B
I did have conversations like this with new institute directors. And so one thing I told them is, is that the government is a very different world than academia. It's a different culture, there's a different set of norms and there's a different set of rules. And if you're going to be successful in the government, you don't have to like them, but at least you have to respect them. And so one very important piece of advice that I gave was you should have an extremely low threshold to get in touch with me and ask me even the stupidest question, because I could potentially get you out of trouble. So let me get to something very practical. When you run a grants competition where only 10 to 20% of applicants are going to be successful, you're going to have many unhappy people. And some of those unhappy people are going to be high power academics who know you from your previous life and who will try to reach out to you and lobby you for help on their own individual grants. Or they may ask you why their specific grant was not funded. And one piece of advice I would give them is you need to stay as far away from this as you possibly can. Your role is to advocate for the agency, to advocate for the public, not to advocate for individual scientists. And you need to stay out of these, I won't say petty, but you need to stay out of these small fights, otherwise they will eat you alive.
- [60:48]
A
They'll just take all your time, they'll.
- [60:49]
B
Take up all your time. They'll make you miserable. You know what I would tell them is you punt something like this off to your staff and you let your staff handle it. But what we tell people is that we're very sorry that we can't fund your grant because we don't have the money.
- [61:03]
A
More good applications than there's money to fund them.
- [61:06]
B
Yeah. And that's the truth. I mean, that's not just a bureaucratic excuse. That's the actual truth. You don't want to get into an argument about specific details on specific projects. So I think the main message that I would give, or that I did give IC directors is that you're in the government now. It's a different environment, and you need to learn the culture. I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but if you don't do it and you pretend that you're still in academia, you're going to get yourself into a lot of hot water and you will not be able to accomplish what you really want to do.
- [61:39]
A
You don't have to name names or identifying details. But did that happen? I see heads who come in and act like they're still academics and get burned for it.
- [61:47]
B
Yes. Yes.
- [61:49]
A
What does that look like? Let's imagine I'm that guy. What am I doing wrong? Specifically?
- [61:54]
B
One thing you may be doing wrong is that. And let's put Trump aside here. Let's go. We'll go before Trump here. So one thing is, the administration may have a certain view of the world and may want to impose a particular policy, and you think that's stupid, and that's fine. You have every right to think that it's stupid. But then what you do is you. You're very open about it. You're very open. You pretend that you're still in the university where you can essentially say what you want, because in the university, academic free freedom rules above all else. So you're open about your objections, so much so that you actually get in the way of the administration's desire to accomplish a particular goal. That is a great way to not do things well. So the thing is, in a university, if you disagree with the university policy, let's say I'm a department chair and I disagree with the university policy, I can be open about it.
- [62:44]
A
You're tenured.
- [62:45]
B
Yeah. You're tenured. Well, my dean may not love me, but the thing is, that's the culture. The. That's the way things are in the government. It's not quite like that. Now, I have been in many situations, countless situations, where I did not agree with what the higher ups were doing. And the way to handle it is behind closed doors. You present your arguments. You explain why you think there may be a better way of accomplishing what it is, whatever it is that they want to accomplish. And in this discrete way, things get done and things get negotiated. Ultimately, if you're not happy with the way things are turning out, you then have two choices. You can go along with it and help them out even though you disagree with it, or you leave. I mean, those are what your options are. But to act like you're in academia and scream out protests is just not a wise strategy.
- [63:33]
A
Mike, What? Did I forget to ask you today? I feel like I got through. We got through a lot. What's left on the table?
- [63:39]
B
All right, so I think we did talk about the questions. Faculty salaries. This was a big problem that came up in the early 1960s when President Eisenhower put together a commission to look at the government university partnership. President Eisenhower, interestingly enough, he strongly supported the government university partnership. But just as he was concerned about the military industrial complex, he was also concerned about a biotechnical complex. Biotechnical elite. He was concerned about that as well as at the time, his advisory group. They expressed concern about government grants being used to support faculty salaries. They were afraid that it was going to create a soft money system and they said that they were very much against it. But nonetheless they said the government should go ahead and support faculty salaries. They did not come up with a way of dealing with the problem. And I think that this has set off the bubble that has only gotten worse and worse and worse over the years and has led us into our hyper competitive state. By the way, let me take a step back. I think one of the reasons why, another reason why that block grant system would work so well is that you say to the university, you can use this money to support salaries to pay for research efforts, but now you figure out how you're going to use that money. You only have a limited amount of money to spend, and so you figure out how best to use it. You can also use that money to support your facilities and administrative costs. You want to spend enough on your indirect costs so that you are providing appropriate support and oversight of your program. But you don't want to spend too much, because if you do that, then what you're going to do is you're going to take away from your science.
- [65:23]
A
I'm curious, how does your typical institute head think about the difference between the intramural research they support and the extramural? The grants going out the door are both equally important. Is one of them more valuable to society than the other? Is one of them more exciting to work on if you're inside the nih?
- [65:40]
B
Like many things in life, it depends. I think some of the of our institute directors care very deeply about their intramural program. One, of course, is that they have much more control over it. These are their scientists, they're their employees, and they're right there in Bethesda. And so the other thing with the intramural program is that because you're not bound by short term grants, you can think much more in the long term and you can develop programs Accordingly, you know, intramurals is fundamentally different from extramural. The way intramural works is that scientists have their laboratories, their research groups, they have a budget which has been assigned to them. They do their work, and after four or five years, they undergo a formal retrospective review. Very different from the kind of review that occurs in extramural, where peer reviewers are asked to predict what's going to happen in the future. Here instead, the reviewers are asked to look at what a scientist has been doing over the last four or five years and render a judgment accordingly. And if the scientist is doing outstanding work, they will continue to maintain their budget. If their work is not so good, their budget may be shrunk. If their work is entirely unsatisfactory, they the laboratories may actually be closed. I've had an opportunity to see this in action. It's a very rigorous review and I think that many of the results of the program speak for themselves. There have been Nobel Prize winners who've come out of the intramural program. I'll tell you one very quick anecdote. I went to a lecture that was given by Barney Graham. He was one of the key people who helped develop the modern day Covid and RSV vaccines. He worked in Vanderbilt and then he came to the NIH intramural program where he developed this vaccine laboratory. As part of the vaccine laboratory, he figured out a way to modify viral proteins so that they could be used for effective vaccines like the RSV vaccines and the COVID vaccines. He gave a fascinating lecture. I asked him afterwards, could you have done this work in the extramural world? And he said, absolutely not. There's no way he could have done it. And the reason is, is because within the intramural environment, he could take risks. And he did. I mean, some of what he did at the time seemed kind of crazy. In retrospect, it was brilliant. But he could take risks and he didn't have to worry about whether his lab was going to be funded next year or the year after that. He could think long term. I think it is a fantastic model for how to do research.
- [68:07]
A
A lot of what we've been saying in this conversation amounts to should create the conditions for extramural research to look more like that, to take these risks and take these big swings for homers instead of for singles.
- [68:18]
B
That's exactly right.
- [68:19]
A
One last thing I want to ask you about one more question about the talent pool of people who do get these extramural grants. As you'll be quite familiar with the average age of These grant recipients has creeped up and up and up over the past few decades. And there's all kinds of arguments for why that maybe is normal in an era where as science deepens and to get to the frontier of a field, you got to spend more and more time learning everything that's going on. But then I think there's counter arguments that say, no, it's really about these kind of calcified structures that we've built. And actually, if we wanted to get more breakthrough science, more really crazy moonshots, we would reverse some of the rules, some of the structures that have meant. If you're a young gun, you're likely not getting a grant, and it's going to somebody who could be your father or your mother. What do you think?
- [69:10]
B
I think there are two related phenomena that are going on. It's a symptom, the fact that somebody doesn't get their first independent research award until they're in their mid-40s, which, if you think about it, is 45.
- [69:22]
A
Right?
- [69:22]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's nuts. Just to put this in perspective, I went to medical school. I then went through internal medicine and cardiology training, and I started taking care of patients when I was in my late 20s as a fully trained doctor. Okay. So somehow society thinks that's okay, but.
- [69:39]
A
You need 15, 17 more years before you should expect to start getting federal support for.
- [69:44]
B
For research before you can become an independent scientist. So I could be and be an independent doctor in my late 20s, but I could not be an independent scientist until I'm in my mid-40s? Absolutely nuts. So I think it's a symptom of two things. One is what we talked about before, the inn is just simply too crowded. And because the inn is too crowded, it's more difficult for people to get in. And then something very specific. Back in the. In the early 1990s, mandatory retirement went away. And that meant that successful scientists, and I'll define a successful scientist as somebody who's bringing in grant money into their university. They didn't have to retire when they turned 65. They could stay on board. And of course they stayed on board. They were doing good work. They were bringing in money to the university. The universities were very happy. And so as a result, the overall age of the workforce increased because we had far fewer people retiring at the time when they previously would retire. Now, the thing is, is that if they're staying in the system and they're bringing in a lot of grant money, that's less grant money, which is going to be available for younger investigators who have not yet had an opportunity to put together a proven record. So I think there are two things that are going on. One is just that the inn is way too crowded, but the other is, I think this is an unintended consequence of eliminating mandatory retirement.
- [71:06]
A
Mike, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining Statecraft.
- [71:09]
B
Thank you. Santi. It was a great pleasure talking with you today. Sa.