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Comment by onionisafruit | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for making a stand on this. My doctor has a "No Free Lunch" sign in his office saying he won't talk to pharmaceutical reps. Maybe the research side needs a similar pledge to avoid being corrupted by funding. I don't know what it would be though.

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The problem is rarely corruption by funding in the way you're thinking - Merck going "Hey, can you take another look at those numbers?"

The problem is the pressure to get funding by being productive. Negative results are wildly harder to get funded. Less productive labs are at a disadvantage for grants. Which means, like any metric upon which people's salaries rest, people are tempted to game it.

> NIH spent about $1.6 billion on projects that mention amyloids in this fiscal year, about half its overall Alzheimer’s funding

The funding for one year from this one agency amounting to 1.6 billion dollars is a stunning.

If what you say is true, promoters of the validity of the NIH should be a push for statutory changes that mandate NIH commit a percentage of the overall budget to confirming significant past research.

I think part of the challenge is no one wants to throw their hands up in the air and abandon amyloid after so many years and dollars spent on it. Instead, they say "well we just weren't doing an early enough intervention", which is how Aducanumab was forced through with weak evidence of effectiveness.

The big question is what do we do now? There's Tau, but that hasn't been a slam dunk either.

This is code that the price of entry at a minimum is an even more expensive dinner ;)

Timeless ;-). https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1986/08/10

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