Best at https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/05/donald-w-miller-jr-md/the-trouble-with-government-grants/
LewRockwell.com ANTI-STATE•ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET
May 16, 2007
Flush with success in creating an atom bomb, the U.S. federal government
decided it should start funding nonmilitary scientific research. A government
report titled "Science, the Endless Frontier" provides the
justification for doing this. It makes the case that "science is the
responsibility of government because new scientific knowledge vitally affects
our health, our jobs, and our national security" (Bush, 1945).
Accordingly, the government established a Research Grants Office in January,
1946 to award grants for research in the biomedical and physical sciences. It
received 800 grant applications that year. The Research Grants Office is now
known as the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), and it processes applications
submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies in the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2005 CSR received 80,000
grant applications.
The System
Investigators seeking an NIH grant submit a 25-page
Research Plan that begins with an abstract placed in a half-page box on the
form. The Specific Aims of the project, preferably two to four, come next
(recommended length, 1 page). The applicant must show that these objectives are
attainable within a stated time frame. As one NIH center (the National Cancer
Institute) advises in its online Guide for Grant Applications, "A small,
focused project is generally better received than a diffuse, multifaceted
project." The other components of the Research Plan are Background and
Significance (3 pages); Preliminary Studies the applicant has done (6-8 pages);
Research Design and Methods (about 15 pages); and, if applicable, Human Subjects
and Vertebrate Animals considerations. The investigator must also submit a
detailed budget for the project on a separate form.
The Center for Scientific Review "triages"
applications it receives. A cursory appraisal eliminates one-third of the
applications from any further consideration, and it selects the remaining
two-thirds for competitive peer review. CSR sends each application to a Study
Section it deems best suited to evaluate it. Peers in Molecular Oncogenesis,
Cognitive Neuroscience, Cell Structure and Function, Hematopoiesis, HIV/AIDS
Vaccine, and 167 other Study Sections review grant applications. Each Study
Section has 12-24 members who are recognized experts in that particular field.
Members meet three times a year to review 25-100 grants at each meeting. Two
members read an application and then discuss it with the other section members
who collectively give it a priority score and percentile ranking (relative to
the priority scores they assign to other applications). An advisory council
then makes funding decisions on the basis of the Study Section’s findings,
"taking into consideration the [specific NIH] institute or center’s
scientific goals and public health needs" (Scarpa, 2006). CSR’s slogan is
"Advancing Health through Peer Review."
With a budget of $28 billion, the director of NIH reports
that it currently funds 22 percent of all the grant applications it reviews
(Zerhouni, 2006). Among these, multi-year R01 grants are the mainstay of
research by medical school faculties. And in 2005, the NIH funded only one in
eleven (9.1%) of the unsolicited R01 research grant applications it reviewed
(Mandel and Vesell, 2006). In 1998 the NIH funded 31
percent of its grant applications, and since 2003 grant appropriations have lagged
behind inflation (Zerhouni, 2006). The National Science Foundation awards $6
Billion in grants each year. This independent federal agency funds 28 percent
of the 40,000 annual grant proposals it receives.
Twenty-six federal granting agencies now manage 1,000
grant programs. Even clinical trials of drugs, vaccines, and devices, where
industry may profit from the outcome, have come under the purview of
government. Zarin and colleagues (2005) reviewed
ClinicalTrials.gov records and found that the federal government currently funds
9,796 (51%) of the 19,355 interventional trials being conducted. Industry
sponsors 4,734 (24%); and universities, foundations, and other organizations,
4,825 (25%).
Under the current system scientists are expected to spend
time drafting, writing, and refining unsolicited R01 grant applications,
despite a less than one in ten chance of success.
Ethics of Writing Grant Proposals
Ethics in science and society "describe appropriate
behavior according to contemporary standards" (Friedman, 1996). Two
standards that scientists follow for writing grant proposals are: 1) Keep it
safe and survive, and 2) Don’t lie if you don’t have to.
Pollack (2005) addresses the first ethic, noting that the
paramount motivational factor for scientists today is the competition to
survive. A scientist’s most pressing need, which supersedes the scientific
pursuit of truth, is to get her grant funded — to pay her salary and that of
her staff, to pay department bills, and to obtain academic promotion. The safest
way to generate grants is to avoid any dissent from orthodoxy. Grant-review
Study Sections whose members’ expertise and status are tied to the prevailing
view do not welcome any challenge to it. A scientist who writes a grant
proposal that dissents from the ruling paradigm will be left without a grant.
Speaking for his fellow scientists Pollack writes, "We have evolved into a
culture of obedient sycophants, bowing politely to the high priests of
orthodoxy."
Applicants following the ethic of "keep it safe and
survive" propose research that will please the reader-peers and avoid
projects that might displease them. An NIH pamphlet on grant applications
reinforces such behavior by stating, "The author of a project proposal
must learn all he can about those who will read his proposal and keep those
readers constantly in mind when he writes." (Ling, 2004a).
With regard to the second ethic, Albert Szent-Györgyi said, "I always tried to live up to Leo
Szilard’s commandment, u2018don’t lie if you don’t have to.’ I had to. I filled
up pages with words and plans I know I would not follow. When I go home from my
laboratory in the late afternoon, I often do not know what I am going to do the
next day. I expect to think that up during the night. How could I tell them what
I would do a year hence?" (Moss, 1988, p.217). This long-time cancer
researcher, discoverer of vitamin C, and Nobel laureate was unable, despite
multiple attempts, to obtain a government grant.
Friedman (1996) describes a variant of this ethic where
an investigator applies for a grant to do a study that he has already
completed. With this grant awarded and money in hand he publishes the study and
uses the funds on a different project. The misrepresentation enables the
investigator to remain one project ahead of his funding. Apparently enough
seasoned investigators do this that the academic community views the practice
as sound "grantsmanship."
Apollonian Research
When the peer review grant system was established in 1946
people assumed that scientific progress occurs in an evolutionary incremental
and cumulative fashion. Having a panel of experts judge the worth of each
research proposal seeking funds seemed then to be the best way to allocate
federal tax dollars for research. This system assumes that a majority of
specialists in a given field will know where truth lies and how best to get
there and find it (Ling, 2004b). But as Hall (1954) and Kuhn (1962) later showed,
periodic upheavals and revolutions in science disrupt an otherwise steady
growth of scientific knowledge. Long-cherished ideas are replaced wholesale by
new ones that lead science in a different direction.
The grant system fosters an Apollonian approach to
research. The investigator does not question the foundation concepts of
biomedical and physical scientific knowledge. He sticks to the widely held
belief that the trunks and limbs of the trees of knowledge, in, for example,
cell physiology and on AIDS, are solid. The Apollonian researcher focuses on
the peripheral branches and twigs and develops established lines of knowledge
to perfection. He sees clearly what course his research should take and writes
grants that his peers are willing to fund. Forced by the existing grant system
to follow such an approach, Pollack (2005) argues that scientists have
defaulted into becoming a culture of believers without rethinking the
fundamentals.
Intuitive geniuses, like Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur,
Ernest Rutherford, and Albert Einstein, take a Dionysian, transformational
approach to science. Their research relies on intuition and
"accidental" discoveries. Szent-Györgyi
describes intuition as "a sort of subconscious reasoning, only the end
result of which becomes conscious." The Dionysian scientist knows the
direction he wants to follow into the unknown, but "he has no idea what he
is going to find there or how he is going to find it. Defining the unknown or
writing down the subconscious is a contradiction in absurdum." And, citing
Pasteur, who said, "A discovery is an accident finding a prepared
mind," Szent-Györgyi notes that "accidental"
discoveries are rarely true accidents (Moss, 1988, pp. 216-217).
Although it is the Dionysian method of research that
produces transformative scientific breakthroughs, peers possessing the power to
judge grants do not support this kind of research. They abuse the trust and
power of government, which does not know science, to advance their own careers
and, in some cases, protect their investments in companies that profit from the
reigning paradigm. Knowing this government might be more amenable to supporting
potentially transformative, Dionysian research.
To make matters worse, this system is replacing other
sources of funding that formerly supported Dionysian scientists. Ling (2004b)
observes, "Oversupply of scientists, the rising cost of living and of
research, the decline of private foundations and scientific niches which these
foundations once sustained [has] completed the dismantling of the
socio-economic environment which once protected revolutionary scientists and
their young followers."
Unassailable Paradigms
Paradigms in the biomedical and climate sciences that
have achieved the status of dogma are:
Scientists that question these state-sanctioned paradigms
are denied grants and silenced (Moran 1998). But valid questions nevertheless
have been raised about each of these established orthodoxies.
The idea that cholesterol causes coronary heart disease
is now close to being dogma, and investigators that question the lipid
hypothesis need not apply for funding. But there is growing evidence that the
hypothesis is wrong, as Ravnskov (2000) documents in The
Cholesterol Myths.
Aneuploidy (an abnormal number and balance of
chromosomes), instead of mutation-produced oncogenes, may well prove to be the
true cause of cancer (Bialy, 2004; Duesberg and Rasnick, 2000; Miller, 2006).
The human-caused global-warming paradigm is most likely
false (Soon et al., 2001; Editorial, 2006). Two climate astrophysicists, Willie
Soon and Sallie Baliunas, present evidence that shows the climate of the 20th
century fell within the range experienced during the past 1,000 years. Compared
with other centuries, it was not unusual (Soon and Baliunas, 2003). Unable to
obtain grants from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), Soon
(personal communication, August 31, 2006) observes that NASA funds programs
mainly on social-political reasoning rather than science.
Duesberg
(1996), Hodgkinson (2003), Lang (1993-2005), Liversidge (2001/2002), Maggiore
(2000), and Miller (2006), among others, have questioned the germ theory of
AIDS. All 30 diseases (which includes an asymptomatic low T-cell count) in the
syndrome called AIDS existed before HIV was discovered and still occur without
antibodies to this virus being present. At a press conference in 1984
government officials announced that a newly discovered retrovirus, HIV, is the
probable cause of AIDS, which at that time numbered 12 diseases (Duesberg, 1995, p. 5). Soon thereafter "HIV causes
AIDS" achieved paradigm status. But, beginning with Peter Duesberg, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the
University of California, Berkeley, a growing number of scientists, physicians,
investigative journalists, and HIV positive people have concluded that HIV/AIDS
is a false paradigm. The NIH awarded Duesberg a
long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant and a Fogarty fellowship to spend a
year on the NIH campus studying cancer genes, and he was nominated for a Nobel
Prize. When Duesberg publicly rejected the HIV/AIDS
paradigm the NIH and other funding agencies ceased awarding him grants.
Government-appointed peer reviewers have rejected his last 24 grant
applications. Peter Duesberg (personal communication,
September 20, 2006) writes: When I was the blue-eyed boy finding oncogenes and
“deadly” viruses, I was 100% fundable. Since I questioned the HIV-AIDS
hypothesis of the NIH’s Dr. Gallo, and then the cancer-oncogene hypothesis of
Bishop-Varmus-Weinberg-Vogelstein etc. I became 100% unfundable.
I was transformed from a virus- and cancer-chasing Angel to
u2018Lucifer’."
Rather than being harmful, as predicted by the linear no
threshold hypothesis, low doses of radiation are actually beneficial
(Calabrese, 2005; Hiserodt, 2005). Its beneficial
effect is based on hormesis, where radiation in small doses stimulates immune
system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damages, and suppresses cancer. The
dose must exceed a certain threshold to stop having a simulative and start
having an inhibitory effect on the body and become toxic — and in high doses,
fatal (Miller, 2004).
Research in cell physiology is based on the concept that
the cell, the basic structural unit that makes up all living things, is an
aqueous solution of chemicals enclosed within a cell membrane. Drug research
adheres to the concept that a drug’s action is mediated by fitting into a
specific receptor site on the cell membrane. Ling (2001) and Pollack (2001),
however, make a strong case that the membrane paradigm of cell physiology is
wrong. They show that cell function does not depend on the integrity of the
cell membrane, and membrane pumps and channels are not what they seem. These
investigators hypothesize that the three main components of a living cell —
proteins, water, and potassium ions — are structured together in a gel-like matrix,
where the cell’s water is organized into layers alongside proteins. Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a product of this view of cell physiology, known as
the association-induction hypothesis, which was first proposed by Gilbert Ling
in 1962. For more than 45 years government granting agencies, guided by their
"expert" peer-reviewers’ verdicts, have refused to provide funds for
this pioneering investigator to pursue research on this hypothesis, even after
it brought about the important medical technology of MRI (Ling 2004b). Despite
multiple attempts, Gerald Pollack (personal communication, September 13, 2006)
also has been unable to obtain government grants to conduct research on this
alternative hypothesis of cell physiology.
Peer review enforces state-sanctioned paradigms. Pollack
(2005) likens it to a trial where the defendant judges the plaintiff. Grant
review panels defending the orthodox view control the grant lifeline and can
sentence a challenger to "no grant." Deprived of funds the
plaintiff-challenger is forced to shut down her lab and withdraw. Conlan (1976) characterizes the peer-review grant system as
an "incestuous u2018buddy system’ that stifles new ideas and scientific
breakthroughs."
Science is self-correcting and, in time, errors are eliminated,
or so we are taught. But now with a centralized bureaucracy controlling
science, perhaps this rhetoric is "just wishful thinking" (Hillman,
1996, p.102). Freedom to dissent is an essential ingredient of societal health.
Braben (2004) contends that suppressing challenges to
established orthodoxy sets a society on a path to its doom.
Science in Service to the State
Over the last 60 years a new power structure, the state,
has taken control of information. It uses federal tax money to fund and control
research through the peer-review grant system. It forms mutually advantageous
partnerships with industry and the academic community, which do its bidding.
The state holds sway over education. And to round out its control of
information an increasingly powerful centralized government bureaucracy has
persuaded the mainstream media to accept and espouse state-approved ideas. The
Western tradition of information ethics dating from ancient Greece to the 20th
century, characterized by freedom of speech and inquiry, has been co-opted by
government. Knowledge advances by questioning accepted paradigms (Hillman,
1995). The state thwarts this and requires its tax-funded scientists to conform
to the official establishment view on such things as global warming and HIV/AIDS.
Government-sponsored scientific research reflects the
biases, preferences, and priorities of its leaders (Moran, 1998). The state
uses science to further its social and political purposes.
Its actions follow Lang’s First Law of Sociodynamics, where
"The power structure does what they want, when they want; then they try to
find reasons to justify it. If this does not work, they stonewall it (Lang,
1998, p. 797).
When inconvenient facts challenge paradigms the state
promotes, it justifies them by consensus. If polar bear experts (Amstrup et al., 1995) find that the bear population in
Alaska is increasing, placing doubt on the government’s stance on climate
change, this finding is dismissed as being outside the consensus and ignored.
Science magazine supports the prevailing view, stating, "There is a
scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change" that
accounts for "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years"
(Oreskes, 2004).
In 21st century America, consensus and computer models
masquerade as science. They supplant experimental data. As Corcoran (2006) puts
it, "Science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge,
reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by
politics and bureaucrats." Reduced to a belief system, a majority of
scientists and groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can
declare, without having to provide scientific evidence, that they believe
humans cause global warming. This alone makes the hypothesis become an
established fact and received knowledge (Barnes, 1990). Peer review compounds
the problem. It competes with objective evidence as proof of truth.
Computer models purporting to make sense of complex data,
particularly with regard to climate change, have replaced the scientific goal
of supplanting complicated hypotheses with simpler ones (Pollack, 2005).
Researchers offer computer models as evidence for global warming. When unsound
assumptions and faulty data render one model unreliable, other improved ones
are constructed to justify the state’s desire to promulgate this
"truth," which it can use to exert greater control over the economy
and technological progress.
AIDS research serves the interest of the state by
focusing on HIV as an equal opportunity cause of AIDS. This infectious,
egalitarian cause exempts the two primary AIDS risk groups, gay men and
intravenous drug users, from any blame in acquiring this disease(s) owing to
their behavioral choices. Duesberg, Koehnlein, and Rasnick (2003)
hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three other things, singly or in
combination, rather than HIV: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use —
cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs
doctors prescribe to people who are HIV-positive — DNA chain terminators, like
AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the
cause of “AIDS” in Africa. HIV/AIDS has become a multibillion-dollar enterprise
on an international level. Government, industry, and medical vested interests
protect the HIV/AIDS paradigm. The government-controlled peer review grant
system is a key tool for protecting paradigms like this.
Grant Reform
Bauer (2004) proposes that there be mandatory funding of
contrarian research, along with a science court set up to adjudicate technical
controversies. In addition, science journalism needs to investigate established
orthodoxies more vigorously.
Pollack (2005) proposes several remedies to the
competitive peer review grant system. Government should establish forums where
the most significant challenge paradigms can compete openly with their orthodox
counterparts in civilized debate. Open-minded "generalists" who have
no stake in the outcome should adjudicate, like a jury does in law. Pools of
money should be set aside to support multiple grants on selected schools of
thought. Training grants that encourage curiosity and thinking outside the box
should be made available. And the NIH should provide lifetime support for a
select cohort of Dionysian scientists.
The peer review grant system stifles innovation and
protects reigning paradigms, right or wrong. The 60-year experiment of
"Advancing Health through Peer Review," the NIH Center for Scientific
Review’s slogan, has failed. It needs to be dismantled. Tax-funded research
would be better conducted and more productive if government allocated funds
directly to universities and foundations to use as they see fit for advancement
of the biomedical and physical sciences.
One alternative to the competitive peer review grant
system that the NIH and NSF might consider for funding specific research
projects is DARPA, the Defense Advance Research
Projects Agency. This agency manages and directs selected research for the
Department of Defense. At least up until now it has been "an
entrepreneurial technical organization unfettered by tradition or conventional
thinking" within one of the world’s most entrenched bureaucracies (Van
Atta et al., 2003). Eighty project managers, who each handles
$10-50 million, are given free reign to foster
advanced technologies and systems that create "revolutionary"
advantages for the U.S. military. Managers, not subject to peer review or top-down
management, provide grants to investigators who they think can challenge
existing approaches to fighting wars. So long as the state controls funding for
research, managers like this might help break the logjam of innovation in the
biomedical and physical sciences.
Science under the government grant system has failed and
new kinds of funding, with less government control, are sorely needed.
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This paper, titled “The Government Grant System:
Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation?”, was published in the Spring 2007 issue of
the Journal of Information Ethics 2007;16:59-69.
Donald
Miller [send him mail] is a
retired cardiac surgeon, a Professor Emeritus of Surgery and former Chief of
the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Washington School
of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors
for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects
for LewRockwell.com. His website
is www.donaldmiller.com.