The Globe‘s reprint of Michael Crow’s story on restructuring NIH was bound to draw a lot of

comments. You can find some here with the original Nature publicaton.Crow argues that NIH needs a revamp with a focus on cures and outcomes.

So, we were expecting comments like this one:

Michael Holloway said: I see nothing in this proposal other than a desire to shift even more of the NIH budget away from basic biomedical research and into social sciences. The implication that this can, or will, be done without cutting into money for molecular, cellular and biochemical research can’t possibly be sincere. Federal money for research is shrinking, and federal money per researcher is shrinking even faster as a smaller and smaller percentage of research proposals receive a just review. The stated problem (that American health care is deficient) has absolutely nothing to do with funding basic science, therefore scrapping basic biological science research in favor of more social science studies of innovative ways of telling people to exercise and stop smoking will not solve the stated problem, but will solve employment problems for many social scientists at the expense of “The Ascent of Man”. The US needs to set a very high priority on continuing its lead in basic science research, not finding new excuses to outsource it to China.