Posted on by rjonakait

Whither NIH and Life Expectancy?

My latest copy of Imprimis, a publication of the beloved-by-conservatives Hillsdale College, has the essay “Launching a Second Scientific Revolution” by Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health. He explains how he is reshaping the NIH to address what he says are three great problems that science now faces.

First, he notes that many published scientific results turn out not to be true (how many, he doesn’t say). Bhattacharya states that this problem can be addressed if NIH funds more replication research. This, he says, will make it easier to find whether scientific ideas have validity.

Second, he wants to address “scientific stagnation.” He maintains that present scientific research does not advance the ball as far as it once did: “For every dollar we spend on science, we get far less scientific advancement than we did over the past five decades. Another way of looking at this is that for every additional research paper in biomedicine, there are fewer improvements in health per paper.” He maintains that NIH funds “old ideas” too often and does not give enough grants to young scientists who are more likely to have new ideas. “The NIH needs to start funding ideas on the bleeding edge of science—ideas that may not work but that offer the greatest chance of advancing science.” [By the way, there has always been a category of grants funded under a heading something like “High Risk, High Payoff.”]

Finally, he believes that NIH funding is too concentrated in a small number of institutions. Good scientists at other places often have difficulty in competing for grants, and he seeks to change that by separating funding that goes to the researcher from funding that goes to institutions for equipment and other costs.

These are concerns worth addressing, but there are other problems at NIH that Bhattacharya apparently does not want to discuss. Thus, as the spouse wrote in the recent post of June 11 “Whither Biomedical Science?”, “Beginning in February 2025 the Trump administration terminated 2,300 ongoing research grants, amounting to cuts of almost $4 billion.” These cuts were made without any evidence that the grantees were failing to do the kind of good science that Bhattacharya claims to want. Nature Briefing reports today that grants that have passed peer review and are set for funding are being held up as they are scrutinized for terms such as “racism,” “fossil fuel,” or “sexual minority,” inclusion of which makes a grant “not clean.” What is the Director’s position on the administration’s slashing of scientific budgets and withholding grant funding on grounds that are different from Bhattacharya’s goals of replication and bleeding edge science?

The Director also suggests that science has moved backwards. He states that the scientific revolution took away from ecclesiastical authorities the power to decide scientific questions and placed scientific questions with a lot of smart scientists.  “Unfortunately,” he continues, “we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science.” At a minimum, this statement is ironical but more likely hypocritical.

As the June 11 post by the spouse makes clear, scientists no longer will control what scientific research will be undertaken. This time it is not an ecclesiastical authority in charge but a nonscientific, secular one. A Trump executive order requires that “discretionary awards must…demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has the task of implementing Executive Orders, has recently promulgated new rules that will apply to the funding of scientific grants. These prohibit money going to recipients that facilitate DEI. As the spouse said, “Technically, awards are granted to institutions, not to individuals. This means that even if a scientific study has nothing to do with DEI, funding can be withheld if the formal recipient of the grant (e.g., a university) engages in something that is determined to be in violation of the administration’s DEI policies. This appears to be designed to punish institutions that are in presumed non-compliance at the expense of what might be relevant and meritorious science.”

Furthermore, “and more insidiously, the OMB regulations would give final approval authority not to a scientific advisory council, but rather to a political appointee whose job it will be to ensure that grant applications are consistent with administrative priorities, do not espouse ‘anti-American’ (undefined) ideas, and are in the ‘national interest’ (undefined). This can and will lead to decisions based on political considerations (undefined), not scientific merit.” What should we make of a Director of the NIH who is outraged at vaccination mandates urged by scientists and health professionals during a pandemic that killed millions but who now serves a system that gives the final approval for scientific research to nonscientist political appointees using vague guidelines that are not scientific?

Bhattacharya also praised the NIH. “Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine.” That’s great, but, of course, that may not be true in the future as the administration seeks to cut scientific budgets. After praising medical advances stemming from NIH activities, he, however, sounds a note of warning: “But when we look at life expectancy in the United States since 2010—and this is not the case in most European countries—we find that there has been no improvement despite the huge investments we have made in medical research.” He presents a graph comparing life expectancy in Sweden and the United States. People on average live nearly eight years longer in Sweden, which has shown a steady increase in that expectancy. The U.S. has had major dips in life expectancy starting in 2018 and again in 2025. (Bhattacharya does not mention who was president when those decreases occurred.) He goes on to state: “We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science.”

The notion, however, that inadequate science is the reason for the difference in life expectancy rates between Sweden and the United States is balderpiffle. The results of NIH and other scientific research are published and available to all. It is not some sort of science available to Swedes but not Americans that allows the Swedish to live longer. If Bhattacharya wants to understand the differences in Swedish and American life expectancies, he should examine other aspects of Swedish government and society.

Swedes do not have to worry about paying doctors. The healthcare system is government funded. Swedes do not have to worry about going bankrupt if sick. Incapacitated Swedes continue to get wages if certified ill by a doctor.

Sweden provides for paid parental leave up to sixteen months. Sweden provides for cash benefits to families with children under sixteen as well as housing allowances for families. It provides public daycare for children under seven. These are some of the reasons that the infant mortality rate in Sweden is about one-third of America’s.

Education is free from preschool through university. Swedes don’t suffer from the stress of educational debt.

Poverty is lower and less entrenched than in the United States. Swedes have shorter working hours with generous vacations and holidays. They are eligible for old age social security at sixty-one. All this correlates with longer life expectancies.

Sweden does have one of the highest tax rates in the world, but it has led to more than longer life expectancies. Surveys of the happiest people always have the Scandinavian countries, including Sweden, with their high tax rates at the top of the list, far outranking the United States.

If Bhattacharya wants longer American life expectancies, he should be looking first to reforming our healthcare, welfare, education, and social support systems. But, of course, people in this conservative administration will not last long if they advocate reforms to make us more like Sweden, even if we would be healthier and live longer.

Instead, we have cut the budget for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps people with lower incomes to buy groceries essential for health and nutrition. The One Big Beautiful Bill has cuts of up to $1 trillion to Medicaid with millions of our poorest neighbors projected to lose coverage. Medicare changes will increase costs or reduce access for many. Subsidies for health insurance have been cut causing many to abandon health insurance altogether. And unless changes are made to the program, social security benefits will see a reduction as early as 2032. These “reforms” are not the kind that will decrease our life expectancy gap with civilized nations but will only increase the divide.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Whither Biomedical Science? (Guest Post by the Spouse)

Starting out as a small federally-funded Laboratory of Hygiene in 1887, the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) has become the largest and, arguably, the most prestigious biomedical institution in the world. It has fueled virtually all of the advancements in the treatment of heart disease, cancer, stroke, multiple sclerosis, AIDS, other infectious diseases, and much more. It can be considered the jewel in the crown of scientific excellence. It funds a cadre of in-house scientists as well as academic scientists across the United States and around the world. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is trying to hobble it…no, destroy it.

Beginning in February 2025 the administration terminated 2,300 ongoing research grants, amounting to cuts of almost $4 billion. Most of the cuts were at medical schools and hospitals, but they reached into other institutions — mostly universities — as well. More than 60% of these terminations were aimed at research and development, but an alarming 38% targeted research training and career development. Most of these were Post-doctoral Individual National Service Awards. Is this a problem? Yes. Emphatically, yes.

Training to become a scientist is time-consuming and expensive. It usually begins (in the U.S. at least) at the 4-year undergraduate level. Graduate training (course work and hands-on laboratory experience) can consume another 4-6 years. A written thesis and its defense are required for completion of the doctorate. Attainment of the PhD, however, is only the beginning of the ending point. It’s followed by another 2-4 years of post-doctoral training. When one finally takes her place as an assistant professor with a research lab of her own, she needs microscopes, centrifuges, PCR machines, supplies (glassware, chemicals, paper towels, for heaven’s sake), computers, animals, and a helping hand to get things underway. NIH often provides a good deal of the funding for this extensive training. Moreover, those recipients of NIH training grants at the graduate and post-doctoral level provide established laboratories with essential intelligent labor. Experiments that would not get done without trainees get done with them. Explain to me, then, why the Trump administration is cutting the very training that leads to the health of a scientific future.

One answer is a sad one. Over the years it had become clear that the scientific work force was almost exclusively white and male. Surely there were women and minorities out there who could be recruited to this important enterprise, and it just might be in the national interest to find them. So the NIH (and other scientific agencies) began to actively recruit from these populations, and sometimes, even to insist on the inclusion of them.

Then came Executive Order 14281, issued in April 2025 just months after Trump took office. It was the opening salvo of the Trump administration’s assault on Civil Rights legislation. This EO direct all agencies (not just scientific ones) to “deprioritize” enforcement of statutes and regulations imposing “disparate impact liability.” In everyday language this meant that agencies could not take into account the fact that certain groups had been discriminated against, and that they should not give priority to these so-called “underrepresented minorities.”

This injunction was elaborated more specifically for scientific grant funding in EO14332 later that year. “Discretionary awards” it states, “must…demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” One has to assume that some of those policy priorities were enumerated in EO14281. So, in short, no priority is to be given to minority groups.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is given the task of implementing Executive Orders, and it has recently promulgated its new rules that will apply to scientific grants funding. It includes the language of EO14332, but goes further: A “federal award is not to be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate ‘diversity, equity or inclusion’ (DEI)….This includes racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination used by the recipient”[Emphasis added]. Technically, awards are granted to institutions, not to individuals. This means that even if a scientific study has nothing to do with DEI, funding can be withheld if the formal recipient of the grant (e.g., a university) engages in something that is determined to be in violation of the administration’s DEI policies. This appears to be designed to punish institutions that are in presumed non-compliance at the expense of what might be relevant and meritorious science.

Moreover, and more insidiously, the OMB regulations would give final approval authority not to a scientific advisory council, but rather to a political appointee whose job it will be to ensure that grant applications are consistent with administrative priorities, do not espouse “anti-American” (undefined) ideas, and are in the “national interest” (undefined). This can and will lead to decisions based on political considerations (undefined), not scientific merit. It is ironic that the EO14281 is entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.”

Another provision of EO14332, the order underpinning these new OMB rules, is that funded grants must not “compromise public safety.” This, too, is ironic. Because some of the current administration policies are demonstrably anti-intellectual and anti-scientific (anti-vaccine rhetoric that has undermined public confidence in vaccines that have been in use for decades, quashing anti-mRNA research, decimating the Centers for Disease Control, removing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, canceling studies examining effects of global warming, etc., etc., etc.), the administration itself poses threats to national safety thereby violating its own prohibition. Political appointees of this administration cannot be considered qualified to determine what is a threat to national safety.

There are other egregious aspects to the new OMB regulations (they log in at 238 pages of single-spaced type). Many of them handicap researchers sometimes to maintain accountability (not necessarily a bad thing), but often to punish them and their institutions for perceived grievances — grievances defined by political appointees, not scientists. The most troubling rules allow an authoritarian overreach that can have a chilling effect on creative and necessary scientific endeavor. These proposed regulations taken together do not advance the scientific enterprise. American scientific know-how and ingenuity used to be the envy of the world. The Trump administration is rapidly darkening that sparkling reputation.