NIH funding analusis - controversy or not

[In Vitro Infidelium]

http://news.yahoo.com/conformity-mediocrity-win-biomedical-funding-critics-180718620.html

Accusations that the leading U.S. funders of biomedical research "ignore truly innovative thinkers" and "encourage conformity if not mediocrity" are seldom heard in the polite precincts of top science journals. Yet they are front and center in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, which concludes that fewer than half of America's most influential and productive biomedical scientists now receive funding from the National Institutes of Health.

and for a criticsm of the criticism:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/12/10/nih-funding-the-dreaded-issue-of-conformity-again/

Finally, as NIH Director Francis Collins pointed out, scientists funded by the NIH have won 135 Nobel Prizes. The situation is not as clearly a problem as Ioannidis makes it sound. Besides, it is the very nature of science that “game changing” studies tend to be relatively few and far between. Most of the hard work of advancing science does come from incremental work, in which scientists build upon what has come before. We fetishize the “brave mavericks” and “geniuses,” and, yes, they are important, but identifying these geniuses at the time they are doing their work is not a trivial thing. Often the importance of their ideas and work is only appreciated in retrospect.

IVI

 

[Waverunner]

I don't know where the problem in funding is located but I do know, that billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on all sorts of absolute nonsense elsewhere.