Funding of science

They are publishing fantastic research because they're publishing my research.

you know and that will kind of help I think overcome this kind of perception that they're not as good quality and that they have you know lower impact factors and scores like this because you know as long as these kind of things are still ruling the roost in terms of promotion decisions and tenure decisions and who gets research funding you know it is almost impossible to ask people to step away from that so it's It is sort of that carrot and stick.

I think we need to push, you know, funders and, you know, national sort of research bodies and things to, you know, having more kind of sticks in the way of, you know, yes, we want you to be publishing open access, we want you to be compliant, but there needs to be more of that sort of incentive side of things.

There needs to be more of the people wanting to publish open access, not just because they have to, but because they see the benefits of it.

But again, that can be subjective sometimes because they're just as, you know, riven with politics and, you know, issues.

It would be something I think you'd have to put a lot of thought into, but it can't be a worse system really than the current one in many ways.

I think there definitely needs to be a better way of determining research funding and I think it needs to be more contextual.

I think it needs to be about what the research is and who it's intended to benefit and where it's taking place and who is involved with it and And I'm sure to a certain extent, those things do come into play with research applications, but...

And this is a way to route around these prohibitions around gain-of-function research? Is that the sort of implied theory here?

Well, the research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology, to Xu Zhongli and her project on bat SARS coronaviruses began in 2002 and 2003 from the NIH, Fullerton International Center.

It was routed through this cutout, through this path at a time when there were not U.S. policies in place that prohibited that funding.

In 2014, when those policies were put in place, the Equal Health Alliance continued to be used as a funding cutout and pass-through.

They contacted Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, to inform him of their concerns.

His response was to organize an emergency weekend meeting for February 1st, 2020.

That meeting included himself, the NIH director, Francis Collin, the director of the largest British research funding agency, Jeremy Farrar, and several researchers who work on gain-of-function virology research supported by the NIH or by Wellcome Trust, in addition to the four researchers that I mentioned.

The four researchers came to that meeting, we know this because of their own records, their own private communications, expecting to make a case that there was a laboratory origin and expecting that case to be received by their funding agency heads and acted upon.

Well, I think we should make a pivot and go into my least favorite segment of the podcast, but I think it's important.

Your least favorite segment is talking about all the depressing news and the federal government and science funding.

It is really this contrast where I think the Genesis Mission Conference, filled with a lot of optimism around capabilities, But then also when you look at the discourse in sort of the political part of Washington, so outside the agencies, there's a lot going on and we'll see what happens between sort of now and The end of the fiscal year and then the end of the fiscal year to the midterms and then the midterms to the actual turnover of Congress.

Right.

But the overall, like, you know, funding situation remains, like, uncertain, I would say, from my vantage point.

Yeah, there's still an enormous amount of chaos.

And I think we'll end this with really pointing out Derek Lowe's piece that came out on July 23rd, titled The Assault on Science Funding Continues.

And I think it was just one of the most blunt and straightforward and really courageous pieces of writing to just talk about really what is this chaos ensuing, of just that all of this chaos and these changes and These statements of gold standard science or the reproducibility crisis are really just covers to prevent academic science funding.

And China h- you know, has had this massive ongoing investment in AI and robotics and biotech.

It is really gaining traction just at this moment that the Trump administration continues to pull back on federal science funding.

And so China is moving ahead.

The US is, you know, the progress is stalling a bit, and some observers think that there might be ways in which China bypasses us.