Hi everyone,
Still no new post, but a few quick updates.
First, I have new research paper out in Science called “What if the NIH had been 40% smaller?”, coauthored with the great Pierre Azoulay, Danielle Li, and Bhaven Sampat. Here’s an abstract:
Calls to reduce the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget by 40% have surfaced amid broader federal spending debates. To gauge the potential effect of such a policy, we analyze 27 years of NIH extramural awards and their peer review scores to identify the bottom 40% of grants that would have been eliminated from 1980 to 2007, had this policy been implemented historically. We then identify new molecular entity drugs, approved in the 21st century, that are linked to these at-risk grants. Fourteen drugs have patents that directly acknowledge research support from at-risk grants, and more than 50% cite at least one research publication funded by at-risk grants. We find no evidence that grants which are linked to at-risk grants are of lower quality than grants that are not linked. These findings illustrate the foundational role of NIH support in enabling the science that underpins most drug discoveries.
Check it out. It’s only a few pages and I think it reads pretty easy! One reason I was excited about this project is that it’s very transparent. A non-specialist can very easily understand what we’re doing.
Second, for the last two years I have been doing an annual roundup of innovation job market papers. I would like to do this again. Please help me out by sending me any and all innovation-related PhD job market papers. Send me your paper. Send me your student’s paper. Send me your friend’s paper. Send me a cool paper you saw online or at a seminar. Later this Fall I’ll compile them into a post. Email me at matt@newthingsunderthesun.com.
Third and finally, posting has been light (almost non-existent) since I took on leading the Abundance and Growth Fund at Open Philanthropy, but we are nearly done hiring people to join the team, and I hope to have more time to write once everyone has started. In the meantime, I have been using lynkmi for awhile now to keep track of interesting research. It’s a website for sharing and tagging links. If you want to see links to research I think might be good fodder for New Things Under the Sun, go here.
Thanks everyone,
Matt