In the early 1990s, Katalin Kariko was obsessed with an idea that most of his scientific colleagues were rejected: MESSAGE RNA, or RNA, a genetic molecule that helps cells synthesize proteins, be exploited to create new types of treatments?
She thought that if it were used correctly, mRNA could ask the cells to produce their own drugs, transforming the way we fight on disease. But Grant after Grant was refused. Critics of the National Institutes of Health were skeptical about his work. His career has stalled. She was demoted. However, she continued to go through a grain and a little opportune line of life colleagues. Her research has changed the course of the Pandemic Covid -19 – and she won a Nobel Prize – but only after being delayed At a decade because our system was so opposed to the risk.
Scientists have complained for years that the way we finance science is wrong. Researchers are too often waiting 20 months For grant funding, eternity in rapidly evolving fields such as genetic engineering. Project managers report that Almost 50% of their time has spent documents and other administrative tasks. THE average age Where scientists receive their first traditional NIH grant are 43.
Earlier this month, thousands of scientists walked on Washington to defend science against the Elon Musk government’s effectiveness department, while NIH personnel reductions and the National Science Foundation and abrupt reductions in biomedical funding turned to the scientific establishment. But it is difficult to fully defend the status quo, which made it difficult for a scientist like Kariko to continue his visionary work.
At the same time, I fear that the current approach of this administration aggravates things. THE The new NIH policy To cap what he pays, universities to cover “indirect costs” on subsidies (for things such as public service bills, research facilities and administrative staff) at 15% will represent a reduction of $ 4 billion in biomedical funding per year if it is justice. He could force universities to dismiss researchers and shutter laboratories. Some universities already have frozen and important hiring long -term Studies have been interrupted.
Currently, DOGE treats efficiency as a simple cost reduction exercise. But science is not a supply process; It is an investment portfolio. If a venture capital company measured efficiency only by the little money it spent, rather than by the yields it generated, it would not last long. We invest in scientific research because we want yields – in knowledge, in vital drugs, in technological capacity. The generation of these yields sometimes requires spending money on things that do not integrate perfectly into a single subsidy proposal.
If it is true that indirect costs fulfill an important function, they can also create perverse incentives: when the government promises to cover expenses, spending tends to increase. But instead of reducing funding without discrimination, we should think about how to make the most of each dollar that we invest in science.
This means rationalizing research regulations. Universities drown in bureaucracy. Since 1990, there has been 270 new rules This complicates the way we do research. Institutional revision committees, intended to protect people from experimentation in a contrary to ethics in studies, now regularly examine the low -risk social science surveys that do not pose any real ethical concern. Researchers generate documents of documents in legally compulsory disclosure of each foreign contract and collaboration, even for countries like the Netherlands which have no geopolitical risk.
We must also rethink the way we select scientific research to finance. The Trump administration candidate to direct the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, A writing On the way the agency does not finance the advanced sciences to the rhythm it has done in the past. He is right. The current grant process is far too slow, rigid and opposed to risk. We must experiment with quick return projects and “Golden tickets” – which allow Greenlight examiners, unconventional ideas – and implement a rationalized examination system that begins with a two -page land instead of a 50 -page proposal.
A large part of this advanced science is now from the outside of traditional university laboratories, and NIH is struggling to support it. Organizations love Janelia research campusTHE Arc Institute and a whole class Non-profit start-ups called targeted research organizations use philanthropic dollars to create tools that could accelerate scientific progress. The Arc Institute, which does not receive funding from the NIH, has just published a model of artificial intelligence called Evo 2which is formed on DNA of the way Chatgpt is formed on the language. EVO 2 can predict whether specific genetic mutations are harmful or help to design new genetic publishing systems, which could treat disorders, including cystic fibrosis.
Projects like EVO 2 are increasingly the future of science, and they require an infrastructure on a scale that traditional NIH subsidies have never been designed to support: massive IT clusters, specialized automatic learning engineers and several million dollars laboratory equipment.
The NIH should set up a new financing mechanism to support scientific organizations with the flexibility to build this type of infrastructure. In other words, the future of scientific discovery will probably require more expenses on certain types of indirect costs, and less for others. Researchers should spend less time writing grant reports and more time exploring unconventional hypotheses.
The story of Dr. Kariko should force us to rethink what efficiency really means in science. These are not mainly dollars that we could save – these are the breakthroughs that may be missing.