“…science takes time to change. This changing process often involves searching for new ways of funding and the influence of leaders in the field.” Let’s find those field-changing ideas and fund them sooner. https://wapo.st/46dS4mU

RE: https://fediscience.org/@eLife/116053224379843487 🧵

Your word list and my word list are not the same.

My muse needs to keep better hours.

Reading an incredibly thoughtful, deeply referenced review this morning written by an academic in a BRICS state and published in a journal that some of my colleagues in the American academy would no doubt look down on. We lose so much when we give a narrow set of authorities a privileged place […]

Nice modeling by former NIGMS director Jeremy Berg showing the impact of forward funding more #nih awards. Don’t miss the subtle point he makes early on about decreasing probability of award driving a delayed increase in application numbers […]

Current status: making questionable decisions about caffeine consumption.

#dc #dmv #snow #sneachta

Supportive of this necessary move, but it highlights a question I’ve increasingly wrestled with: how do you balance the need for Mertonian universalism with the need to establish trust, especially in a system where there are definite bad actors? #metascience ArXiv preprint server clamps down on […]

A thought I find myself coming back to lately.

RE: https://flipboard.com/@bbcnews/health-2g9ldae7z/-/a-V5LX7TKbSay96SZ6TsukiA%3Aa%3A3199692-%2F0 Three cheers for CAR-T !! A little good news in the world

New at The Progress Bar: The system for funding science is fundamentally broken. To fix it, we need to do more than change who gets funded, we need to change how funding decisions are made. https://theprogressbarwpi.org/p/doing-experiments

Ugh. I really really want to run and it is 48F and raining. Worst running weather ever.

“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.” Happy to see Mike Lauer, former director of extramural research at #nih, and I are on the same page here […]

Getting used to being a free-range academic again

80 years after Vannevar Bush, we have an opportunity to rework the systems that fund and shape research. We can accelerate scientific progress - if we make the right choices. New substack: https://theprogressbarwpi.org/p/the-next-frontier

“To understand what work AI can do on its own today, researchers collected hundreds of examples of projects posted on freelancing platforms that humans had been paid to complete .. the best AI successfully completed only 2.5% of the projects” Unsurprisingly, genAI chatbots made errors, dropped […]

So many important points here it was hard to pick a pull quote, but this one speaks to my personal experience at #nih: “We are systematically underutilizing our collective capacity for discovery and transformation… Our own funding mechanisms have become a bottleneck rather than a catalyst” […]

New year, new science, new Substack. I'll be talking about studies of scientific progress, and how we can leverage our understanding of how science works to produce more breakthroughs in less time. If that sounds interesting, give me a follow […]

Highly recommended reading. A great framing of how far biomedicine has come in a short time, and how we’re still striving for more progress every day https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-breakthroughs-in-2025

Happy almost New Year from Zoo Lights!

PubMed wrapped: categorizing the top 5 high-level topics of papers published in 2025. LLM-based classification of 1,783,299 documents in total 1/3

Great story illustrating the impact of recent funding instability on lab techs, who are often underpaid, under-credited, and under-appreciated by the modern research enterprise. One of my long held pet theories is that some part of our struggles with reproducibility is linked to the lack of […]

Happy Monday before Christmas! We’ve almost made it through the year. But before we wrap it up, I have one more paper to add to your holiday reading list 1/

Friday Christmas cocktails

We found an additional 19 signals when we analyzed the data for 2014-2017. To learn more about those predicted breakthroughs, one of which has already won a Lasker award, read the preprint! 11/15 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.16.694385v1

Today is a big day. After many years of work, I’m excited to finally share a paper describing a novel approach to identifying potential breakthroughs in biomedical research, up to twelve years before the breakthrough itself occurs. 1/15

When the study confirms intuition: "We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues." https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3003532 Decades […]

Rebuilding trust in science requires people to see themselves in science: expanding representation and social connection across race, gender, class, religion, and rural identity, not just sharing more information.

US R&D spending on fundamental research in constant 2005 dollars from 2013 Press, W. Science 342:817

@bsky.brid.gy @richardsever.bsky.social

Dr. Yaghi said his invention (which can harvest water from air!!) “was inspired by his boyhood scrambles in Amman, Jordan, to secure water for his family.” “That discovery would not have happened if I didn’t have that background,” Dr. Yaghi said. “Mixing talent helps us solve big problems.” […]

Proportion of #nih awards to medical schools versus other institutions, 1952-1961 from Basic Data Relating to the National Institutes of Health, 1961 -1965

percentage of #nih R01 applications by priority score, using human subjects as a (useful but imperfect) proxy to identify clinical research from 04 Kotchen et al JAMA

Thinking about new beginnings. Timeline for the first 20 years of #nih from 96 Mandel, A Half Century of Peer Review

Friends. I have news. This coming Monday will be my last day at NIH. Serving the public good and the American taxpayer has been an honor and a privilege - truly! And I will miss it every day. But I have mixed emotions, because what comes next is exciting. I […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

“… scientists want the warm blanket of journals. They crave shortcuts, proxies, and pre-digested truth. Build what users want, and even with the best intentions, you’ll rebuild what’s killing science.” Thought provoking and well worth your time […]

Award rates for applicants for new #nih grants, FY1968 to 1977 From 1979 Wyngaarden NEJM 301:1254-1259

“Nobody believes that a fourth-percentile and a fifth-percentile grant are clearly of different quality,” Dr. Sarah Kobrin said. “It’s just not that precise a measurement.” […]

NIH support for fundamental research in 1982, as a fraction of national (left) or federal (center) support for fundamental research; and as a fraction of total federal support for fundamental research at universities & colleges (right) source: 1984 NIH Data Book

“.. the Institute’s traditional administrative practices for budget allocation did not provide an adequate basis for managerial decision-making, since attempts to establish program priorities were ineffective. .. This dissonance stemmed from the presence of two […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

Been writing code in python these last few months. Working on finishing up a long-standing project tonight that uses R and … that still feels more fluent, despite not having used it in A While.

Upholding the great Thanksgiving tradition of manually updating the firmware in the ancient family printer

“Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages […] [Original post on mstdn.science]

Holden's onto something here. Snarkily shouting (or un-snarkily repeating til you're blue in the face) facts isn't an effective way to change minds. People who are convinced by data, will be convinced without snark or (too much) repetition. For a subset of the rest, communicating empathy […]

Sometimes projects that should work, don’t. But sometimes you get the reverse situation — where an idea shouldn’t work in theory, but it attracts people who are so resourceful and committed … that it somehow does.

Some important points here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/opinion/headache-migraine-science-research.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare beginning with this, which extends to more than headache: “.. basic headache science has long been considered … unworthy of the […]