Eh, most research is done privately by corporations. The fraction that happens at universities is not critical. There are more postdocs than will ever become researchers or professors; most will have to get jobs outside the industry anyway. And huge swathes of the public research is tainted by irreproducibility and scandal.
But most importantly there is no reason why that research has to be paid for by the government, out of taxpayer funds. The research will still be done, but more of the money will come from the corporations who benefit the most from it.
This is a major oversimplification and misses the difference between basic research and applied development. The university and public side is where most basic science happens. It's the high-risk, not-immediately-profitable work of figuring out the fundamental mechanics of why cancer happens. This is the foundation everything else is built on.
The private corporate side is where development happens. They take the foundational knowledge from basic science and use it to create specific, patentable, profitable drugs.
Corporations rarely fund the basic stuff because there's no immediate payoff. They won't spend a billion dollars on a 10-year project that might not lead to a product for their company.
So, if you kill public funding, you're not just pausing work; you're taking dynamite to the foundation of the entire pipeline. In 10-20 years, the private companies will have nothing new to develop. The fear of a "lost generation" of scientists and a long-term crisis is spot on.
Pharmaceutical companies do all kinds of foundational research all the time. Sure, they’ll start by reviewing the literature and reproducing it when it exists, but they can and will do the research themselves when it doesn’t.
Yes. Very, very roughly the NIH is 8% of all medical research funding in the US.
According to DiMasi et al¹ in 2013 a fully approved drug cost $2.870 billion USD, if you divide up the cost of all the failures to be paid for by the successes. They also say that this cost has been growing at 8.5% per year. If we take them at their word then that growth adds up to $7.639 billion USD per drug in 2013 dollars. There’s been 38% inflation since 2013, so that is actually $10.542 billion USD in 2025 dollars.
According to the FDA website² there have been an average of 48 approved drugs every year between 2021 and 2024. Drug development takes ages, probably over a decade, but I’m going to ignore that. 48 * $10.542 billion USD is $506 billion USD.
The NIH budget³ is $48 billion USD per year, of which they spend 92% on research. $44 billion USD is 8.0% of $550 billion USD. But actually that is apparently the 2023 budget amount, so maybe we should instead say that in 2023 it was 9.3% of the 2023 total. Either way it’s a small fraction of the research done in this country.
I know that there are other funding sources than just the NIH, but even so I really don’t think that the adjustment would need to be all that difficult.
¹ Joseph A. DiMasi, Henry G. Grabowski, Ronald W. Hansen,
Innovation in the pharmaceutical industry: New estimates of R&D costs,
Journal of Health Economics,
Volume 47,
2016,
Pages 20-33,
ISSN 0167-6296,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2016.01.012.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762961...)
Abstract: The research and development costs of 106 randomly selected new drugs were obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms. These data were used to estimate the average pre-tax cost of new drug and biologics development. The costs of compounds abandoned during testing were linked to the costs of compounds that obtained marketing approval. The estimated average out-of-pocket cost per approved new compound is $1395 million (2013 dollars). Capitalizing out-of-pocket costs to the point of marketing approval at a real discount rate of 10.5% yields a total pre-approval cost estimate of $2558 million (2013 dollars). When compared to the results of the previous study in this series, total capitalized costs were shown to have increased at an annual rate of 8.5% above general price inflation. Adding an estimate of post-approval R&D costs increases the cost estimate to $2870 million (2013 dollars).
Keywords: Innovation; R&D cost; Pharmaceutical industry; Discount rate; Technical success rates
I mean this in the best faith, but I feel this is still sidestepping the core issue: foundational science and applied development are just not fungible. The kind of research NIH funds: long-horizon, high-risk, mechanism-level discovery, is not something corporations will just pick up the tab on if public funding disappears and is very different from the also decades long drug pipeline. Not because they’re incapable or unwilling, but because it’s economically irrational within the incentive structure today. Of course big pharma companies have money, they will figure things out and maybe even spend more funding on basic science. But very few shareholder-driven companies are going to fund a 10-year exploration into, say, the epigenetic triggers of cancer with no guarantee of a product at the end. They might take safer steps and invest in foundational research tangential to existing targets, and yes, this does launch a whole other debate on efficiency of this vs NIH moonshot research.
Yes, they do some early-stage R&D work, but it’s almost almost always downstream of publicly funded breakthroughs. They build on what’s already been de-risked. NIH isn’t just 8% of the money, it’s the first 8%, the part no one else wants to touch because it’s too uncertain, too slow, and too unprofitable in the intermediate term. Trials are expensive, that's where 80% of R&D today goes.
> The kind of research NIH funds: long-horizon, high-risk, mechanism-level discovery, is not something corporations will just pick up the tab on…
Except that there are plenty of counterexamples to that idea. Bell Labs employed thousands of researchers and they made many foundational discoveries alongside the thousands of inventions that were merely development of the existing phone system. The list of foundational discoveries made there is so long that is hard to imagine. Just off the top of my head it includes the transistor, the integrated circuit, the operating system, lasers, fiber optics, CCDs, solar cells, etc, etc. Nyquist and Shannon worked there and discovered the mathematical foundations of information theory, including entropy, bits, communication channel capacity, etc, etc.
They were ridiculously productive and fantastically profitable, but these days with taxpayers funding research most corporations don’t bother any more.
The articles you link to have much to say about how research is currently done, but do not even purport to say that this is the only way it could ever be done.
Agree, and I have no idea what's the optimal way for research to be done. My claim is that the way research is done today works for fairly small impact on taxpayer burden, and without natural experiments with other countries with spending of a similar scale to the US, it will be difficult to see which mode is best.
Bell Labs was amazing, but it also was funded in large by profits from an emboldened AT&T with monopoly power. Is monopolistic profit funding more efficient than taxpayer funding? No idea.
Regardless of inflation, AT&T made way less money in the 20s than any pharmaceutical company does today. If they could afford the research budget back then, then the pharmaceutical companies of today can too. It had nothing to do with them being a monopoly.
I can not recall seeing a HN comment more wrong than this, every factual assertion is incorrect and the subjective judgements are completely out of line.
> …and the subjective judgements are completely out of line.
This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever said, that’s for sure. I can have any opinions I want. I’m not limited to thinking thoughts you approve of, or that toe some imaginary line that you think exists.
If there was a decent chance that private investment by corporations in cancer research would turn a profit then they'd be doing it already, and paying researchers far more than universities can afford in order to recruit the best people.
The fact that isn't happening should tell you that profiting from fundamental cancer research is too high risk for the market to bare. Consequently government or charity are the only available options.
For the applied (not fundamental) research that ultimately goes toward supporting clinical trials where on average 90% of the R&D costs lie. I'm not saying the balance has to be this way or even should be this way, but you don't lop off a leg and expect the remaining one to carry the burden.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...
Sure we can, because these are not actually legs. Legs are a bad analogy They are groups of people, and people can adapt. If we get rid of taxpayer–funded research today, then companies that do research will suddenly have plenty of people to hire to expand their operations.
This reads like post-hoc justification for what's going on, based on a tangled web of misconceptions about publicly funded medical research. The therapies in the article originated from government funded research that took decades to mature. "Huge swathes" of this kind of research are not plagued by reproducibility issues.
When anyone realizes that they’re spending too much money it is natural to go down the list of expenses and see which ones they can eliminate. That’s not a post–hoc justification, that’s avoiding bankruptcy.
Sure, as you say a lot of therapies had their origin in taxpayer–funded research. But that doesn’t mean that there is a _need_ for the taxpayer to fund research. It’s a luxury at best and a subsidy for companies that already earn billions at worst. The corporations that earn those gigantic profits don’t need taxpayer money to do the job when they have the billions they earn from their customers every year.
> When anyone realizes that they’re spending too much money it is natural to go down the list of expenses and see which ones they can eliminate.
No such realization happened. All that happened is that conservatives are lashing out against their perceived enemies and against those they see as easy target.
Also, the proposed budget bill represents will cause biggest deficit in a long time - and for years to come. If they were worried about affordability or deficit, that would not be happening.
> That’s not a post–hoc justification, that’s avoiding bankruptcy.
Let's be clear. Cutting NSF, NIH, and higher education funding has nothing to do with bankruptcy and everything to do with the gutting and dumbing down of the US with some retribution sprinkled in. In fact, these types of cuts will likely lead to increase costs in the medium/long term as the population ages with worse preventative medicine.
If avoiding bankruptcy was really the goal as you say, Trump would not be proposing to increase defense spending by 13% and further cutting taxes. So just stop with this bankrupt the country angle because it's BS.
And lets also go ahead and use some real numbers. The increase in defense spending is ~113B to over 1T while the cuts to NIH/NSF have totaled ~23B. In 2024 the total NSF/NIH budget was ~60B.
Forgive me, I was obviously not clear enough. knowaveragejoe said that my reasons for cutting this funding were a post–hoc rationalization. I tried to clarify that because our debt has been growing faster than our economy for a while now, _I_ am willing to put luxuries and subsidies on the chopping block. I don't know Trump’s motivations, or Congress’s. They are completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Personally I have no problem with Trump withdrawing funding from institutions that clearly, by their own actions and words, support antisemitism. I’d prefer he went further though.
Except NIH/NSF are not luxuries. They're investments with positives returns. If the goal is to address the debt, they are the wrong things to cut. First they are relatively small and second they generate positive economic output. In fact, the government should be adding investment into NIH/NSF.
That’s just the broken window fallacy writ large. The positive economic output of the research is counterbalanced by the negative economic output of the taxes paid. There are certainly worse things to spend tax money on, since there are things that generate no economic output at all, but that alone doesn’t justify it.
The fact is that taxpayer–funded medical research is just a subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical companies rake in billions in income from their successful products and don’t really need any subsidies.
And you’re right, the NIH is relatively small. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that ending the NIH entirely would raise the cost of developing medicines by less than 10%. There’s no way that’s a crisis. That’s just a slightly different way of doing business.
But most importantly there is no reason why that research has to be paid for by the government, out of taxpayer funds. The research will still be done, but more of the money will come from the corporations who benefit the most from it.