I think if we want research to survive we need to start funding it on a basis other than paycheck-to-paycheck. We need to acknowledge the adversarial nature of the current political situation.

If you have a $50M study that takes 10 years, $50M leaves the budget on approval and goes into a foundation dedicated to that study.

The alternative is this sort of atrocity - https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1kh21p5/discarding...

Ideally, we'd sever and isolate the NIH (and probably the CDC) from the government and make it operate a bit more like the federal reserve or USPS. We attempted to do that with the CFPB, but having an executive that can simply fire everyone running an agency really messes with the ability for such agencies to properly operate.

Funding would be tricky. Nobody has pocketbooks big enough to send to the NIH other than the US government and we'd run the risk of it going years without money with hostile administrations. You might be able to self-fund if you included someone like the FDA in the mix and charged approval fees. But, ideally these organizations would be funded through general taxation as everyone benefits from their output. Funds shouldn't have to solely come from pharmaceuticals.

Perhaps their funding could be self-generated if they were to patent their findings and license them in such a way to generate revenue where there's some juice to squeeze from the pharma sales.

The difficulty is that you still need a way to build accountability into the funding system.

There are valid reasons to pull a study's funding early, politics aside.

I think putting public money beyond political oversight is unlikely something politicians will do, but I’d love to see more Wellcome Trusts created vs whatever the fuck it is than Elon and Bezos are spending their money on.