biomedical research, just another job...
A news account of a new NIH grant funded at North Carolina A T University blew past on Bluesky, I got grumpy about the lack of specificity about the grant, one thing led to another and I started digging. To be quite frank my initial response was one of surprise that this grant funded at all. [ ]
I got to ranting on the bluski recently and said something about dilution in the context of purported fixes for situations of bias or discrimination. To me this refers for the tendency of majoritarian institutions to respond to evidence of a targeted, limited or focal disparity with a broad brush remedy that tries to address [ ]
hat-tip to one of our OG blog commenters, pinus, who is trolling me today with a new paper in eLife. Comparing the outputs of intramural and extramural grants funded by National Institutes of Health. Xiang Zheng, Qiyao Yang, Jai Potnuri, Chaoqun Ni, B Ian Hutchins https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.108929.3.sa0 My readers are very familiar with how the extramural [ ]
I may have told this story on this blog before but it bears repeating as the setup. There is a distinct culture of academics that both derides and takes pride in what we see as our low salaries. Those of us of a certain age, OG GenX and above for sure, were surrounded through the [ ]
The regime has published a Landmark Report and Recommendations for Renewing American Scientific Discovery and the website lists four bullet points they call key pillars [h/t: Jeremy Berg]. The fourth one caught my eye. Ensure That Science and Technology Better the Lives of All AmericansFederal agencies should integrate hands-on technical training and apprenticeships into STEM [ ]
I had reason this week to post data on the relative proportions of the NIH appropriation that are devoted to each Institute, in this case for the FY2025 appropriation. This came up in relationship to a side comment made by the OMB director in a Congressional hearing but as some of you know, this depiction [ ]
The head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russel Vought was testifying before Congress this week, and a clip from his exchange with Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota circulated on BlueSky. In case this link breaks, the text reads: TINA SMITH: Researchers in MN made a breakthrough in childhood cancer in Black kids [ ]
I have probably urged my readers, once or twice, to contact their Congress Critters about some matter related to NIH activities. In this, I have hopefully mentioned that it is essential to not merely participate in astroturf comment fests promulgated by academic societies or, well, me. I also have likely urged you not to click [ ]
A piece in the Harvard Crimson by Uy B. Pham reports that a whistleblower lawsuit against Harvard will proceed. It is, or should be, of broader interest to my audience because it appears, from the reporting, to be a complaint that the PI of the award has not being doing what he said he would [ ]
I mean at some point all you can do is point and laugh. Michael Lauer, M.D., was the NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health for a decade, from Oct 19, 2015 until Feb 14, 2025. In disclosure, I ve had my differences with his approach to the Ginther gap over [ ]