SPONSORED RESEARCH IS RISK-AVERSE AND UNIMAGINATIVE.

I've come close to, but never explicitly said, that the use of the national institutes and national endowments to support academic research is censorship per se.  The closest I have come is to suggest that creativity that might otherwise be unbridled and more enthusiastic gets diverted into chasing whatever it is the institutes, endowments, and charitable foundations are funding.  "Whether the work so funded is better than the work professors develop on their own initiative remains to be seen."  It might be worse than that.  "Even if it's not that bad, the sponsored research imperative diverts thoughtful people from playing with whatever ideas appeal to them (yes, many of them might turn out to be bad or trivial, but that's how emergence works) in order to follow what appears to be a Hot Topic (the tragedy being that by the time those grants and working papers hit the conference and journal circuits, the discipline's stars are on to other things) or to make some money."  (That post might have had one of the last references to Stanford's John Ioannidis that didn't have something to do with Wuhan coronavirus.  We'll let the public health types clean up their own systematic biases.)

Marginal Revolution's Emergent Ventures has since sponsored an investigation of the National Institutes of Health, and what turns up is not encouraging.

Yes, the NIH has been the main driver of bioscience innovation for more than 80 years. Without the hundreds of billions of dollars that the NIH has allocated to U.S. scientists, the world, perhaps, would not have CRISPR gene-editing technologies or modern CAR-T therapies to treat cancer. But the NIH, like all giant bureaucracies, suffers from structural problems that hinder its efficiency and leads to considerable, wasteful spending. The agency is risk-averse and excessively funds an aging cadre of scientists, likely at the cost of losing young scientists and missing out on ambitious, transformative ideas.

Just ten U.S. universities receive 22% of the NIH’s total extramural grant budget. Still, the agency is revered; almost every scientist that we spoke with agreed its budget should be expanded. If the NIH is the fundamental driver of American bioscience, then hopefully the organization can be induced from within, or from without, to more actively seek improvements.

It might be that those ten universities (yes, including most of the usual suspects) have the people who are best capable of doing the work.  It might also be that when large numbers of similar proposals come in from people who are responding to the calls for proposals, the institutional affiliation of the principal investigators is the tie-breaking margin.  A rent-seeking prisoners' dilemma ensues, with researchers devoting what might be inefficiently many resources to writing those very similar proposals.  Many are called, few are funded.

The NIH’s extramural research is systematically biased in favor of conservative research. This conservatism is a result of both institutional inertia, concerns by the NIH leadership that the organization could lose the support of Congress, and efforts by NIH beneficiaries to maintain the status quo.

The extramural grant distribution process, which is run through peer review “study sections,” is badly in need of reform. Though there is considerable variability among study sections, many are beset by groupthink, arbitrary evaluation factors, and political gamesmanship. The NIH may be hamstringing bioscience progress, despite the huge amount of funds it distributes, because its sheer hegemony steers the entire industry by setting standards for scientific work and priorities.

In an environment where the only thing worse than losing a competition for a grant might be having an unorthodox idea that doesn't even get published, it's dangerous to challenge entrenched interests.

Multiple interviewees noted that universities de facto require the attainment of multiple NIH or comparable federal grants to become professors and attain tenure.

This trend is driven more by economics than anything else. NIH grants are more numerous, pay higher amounts, and last longer periods of time than any other bioscience grants given by the public or private sector. Or, rather, NIH grants have the combination of all three of these qualities, whereas other top institutions only have one or two of them. For instance, there are grants that provide equivalent amounts of money and (often more) time, like from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), but these are far less numerous and therefore harder to get. While most extramural NIH grants have above a 20% chance of acceptance (including multiple submissions), the HHMI approves fewer than 1% of grant applications.

Thus, if a biomedical researcher was, for some reason, highly motivated to get adequate funding for a major project without NIH help, he would probably have to cobble together numerous grants from other foundations, which would likely require even more work than the NIH’s notoriously bureaucratic application process. And even if this could be accomplished, many interviewees noted it would come with significant career penalties.

I'm pulling a few excerpts from a long article, even by conventional academic journal standards, and encourage readers to study it in full. One point keeps coming up. "At least one interviewee, for instance, said they believed that the vast majority of NIH-funded research is worthless, at least compared to optimized, alternative research funding methods. However, the more moderate position, expressed by a vast majority of interviewees, is that current scientific progress is slower than it could be due to NIH research conservatism."

It's a different sort of intellectual challenge to come up with a "Shark Tank" or some other sort of venture capital arrangement by which new scholars could present those more useful research projects.  That's easier to write down than to implement, as a quest for more successful therapy might involve unreasonable risks to patients.

One interviewee said that they had a graduate school professor whose final assignment was to write an R01-type grant proposal (the standard NIH grant). After everyone had turned in their projects, the professor told the class that their proposals were excellent, innovative, and he would love to see many of them come to fruition… but the NIH would never actually fund these proposals. They were too high-risk.

In practice, there is a lot of grant-kiting, which the article describes as a "benevolent Ponzi scheme," going on.  The article explains the dynamic.

Researchers often start with moderately open-ended research goals, then secretly (i.e. outside grant boundaries) conduct experiments to get preliminary data. As the data comes in, they narrow the scope and goals of the research to a more marginal goal with clearer “deliverables.” Then, they apply for a basic research NIH grant with this narrow, marginal goal.

In practice, this means that most NIH grants, even basic research ones, are quite narrowly focused. Even if an exciting and open-ended research path has dozens of grant applicants working within it, each one is aimed at a highly-likely result, which will yield incremental advancements in the field. Open-ended, innovative projects that could either make great breakthroughs or yield null results are largely ignored by grant review panels. The most innovative projects are secretly pursued outside of grant boundaries, but are usually abandoned for safer, narrower scopes as time and funding wind down and the lab needs to apply for a fresh grant.

It is possible to achieve some breakthroughs in this way, as long as the audit teams don't ask too many questions.  The benevolent Ponzi scheme, however, works best for people who have established a track record of solid performance with the agencies, which is to say, it favors people with the institutional affiliations that broke the tie on the grants in the first place.

I repeat, it's a long article.  I'll leave you, dear reader, with this.  "This is not to say that a researcher can’t be both a great scientist and a skilled player of the game. But there are certainly researchers who are uncomfortable with the system, and who wish they could spend more of their time on the science and less on figuring out how to get to do the science."