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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Vanderbilt apparently iced its entire incoming biochemistry PhD headcount? My kid got a reject, and found out later that everybody else did too.

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There are going to be a lot of repercussions in the future given how many potential future scientists won’t get trained.

What's going to happen is another pandemic. Millions will die, and this is what opportunity cost looks like. We recovered from the last one due to mRNA research from NIH grants (NIAID, one of my clients) and DARPA blue sky funding, almost certain to be cut. These people are literally cutting the funding that saved millions of lives from the last pandemic. Full stop. They don't wanna hear about your facts.

One day on HN I read a thread about how academia is (credibly) inundated with fraudulent research/publication practices, the next day I read a comment about how Western academia is (vaguely) the last vanguard against civilizational collapse. There seems to be a disconnect here.

Disclaimer: I work in academia

Academic misconduct is an idee fixe on HN, because (1) there is about two orders of magnitude more research occurring than the median HN commenter would guess, (2) misconduct is generally newsworthy, and (3) even a minuscule portion of fraudulent research is enough to keep a steady drumbeat of misconduct stories to vote and comment on.

And (4) just as everyone likes to think they could have made it as a pro athlete, everyone likes to think they could have made it as an academic, but had better things to do.

But how do you explain those results?

- Brian Nosek's team examined 100 studies from high-ranking psychology journals in 2015, and could only reproduce 1/3 of them.

- Tim Errington did the same for cancer papers, and could not reproduce most of them either (he spent 8 years for this efforts btw)

- When you aggregate the reported p-value in scientific publications, it often reveals a "funny" distribution (Leggett 2013, Ookubo 2016)

They are not picking up rare misconducts by low-profile researchers. Fraudant research (from p-hacking to data rigging) is very common and a very serious issue.

I don't have much to say about psychology. But Tim Errington himself pushes back on the notion you're trying to sell, that his failure to reproduce research in his own replication projects creates a "yes this research is real" and "no this research isn't" result. Reproduction is hard, effect sizes can be small, reproduction studies can themselves be flawed (that's just how science goes).

The biggest thing though is just this idea that a non-reproducing paper is a failure of science. Journal articles are the beginnings of conversation in a discipline, not the last word on it.

You can see what I mean, though: people who probably couldn't name 3 important researchers in a field see people working on replications in those fields (Nosek, Errington) as celebrities. Because reported failures to replicate are newsworthy, and the day-by-day grind of incremental findings and negative results aren't.

I'm sure you can find evidence for both pretty easily. But that doesn't change the facts in this case - we would not have had any Covid-19 vaccines at all without the NIH funding that is presently being cut. And just because we have non-reproducible studies in psychology does not mean there's an issue in biology or chemistry. Your flippant answer doesn't change the facts of the case.

Many other countries produced effective vaccines without a whiff of NIH funding. And the mRNA tech was mainly funded through DARPA, IIRC.

Which is likely to also be cut. But much mRNA funding was through NIAID grants. And are you talking about Sputnik? 28% effectiveness? Get a clue.

Oh never mind, they are explicitly going after and outlawing mRNA research. Goodbye, cancer cure. I guess all of you will never get it. WTAF.

They were released at the same time and were found to be just as effective? Which ones?

Where's the pharma lobby? Pharma is the only industrial science left in the country!

They're weighing the impact on their future workforce pipeline (and probably hoping this this only represents a ~4-8 year hiccup) against whatever other benefits they can get from cozying up with the administration (whacky regulation land).

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pharma-ceos-speaki...

And who knows, with the right wacky regulatory scheme enacted, the workforce impact will be mitigated away. Probably also banking on the size and power of the American domestic economy to still allow them to siphon talent from across the western world to help make up some short falls.

I was just talking to my buddy who works in big pharma and internally it sounds like they have zero concerns about the current administration impacting them.

Actually the opposite, apparently Trump rolled back the Medicare drug cost caps so they're expecting profits to go up.

Pharmacy are drug marketing companies. They have essentially outsourced drug R&D to universities

They are currently on their way to Mar a Lago to ask Trump to roll back the drug price negotiation provisions that were instated by the Inflation Reduction Act

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/phrma-prepares-meet-trum...

If they are protected from competition they will end up like the US auto industry in the 1970's. They can try and do generics but Teva, Ranbaxy and Ratiopharm will eat them once patent protection runs out.

Of course, that'll last until Ranbaxy kills off all of their patients.

Maybe they can start bringing in folks trained in the EU, Canada and China.

The US graduates too many PHDs, not too few

It’s better to graduate too many than too few because it helps ensure that the US workforce of scientists and engineers is cost competitive.

Yeah, we gotta make sure that the Pharmaceutical companies have a great source of cheap PhD labor. /s

I wonder how all the PhD’s that spent 10 years of their life and can’t find a job feel about that?

do you care to elaborate? what is too many and what are the repercussions of this?

One of the repercussions is that young people get a PhD, then cannot get an appropriate job.

Also, the taxpayers are paying most of the cost of these PhDs.

yes, that's the general idea, no? Further studies funded by the government. Pushing the boundaries of knowledge is expensive but critical for any country that wants to remain influential in the world.

Regarding employment rates, I can't speak too broadly on that as I'm more focused on the econ field, which does not have employment issues. But I would be interested in hearing the base for you numbers.

On the condition that boundaries are pushed.

I say this with partial ignorance though. I don't know that particular field. Generally, the number of drop outs at grad school is notoriously quite high across the entire spectrum. How much has the needle moved given what feels like a coin flip shot of completing an advanced study in all respective fields?

There's more graduates than ever before too. It will trend sharply down over the next few years, not necessarily because of the loss grants from the US government, but because of the birth glut that has been looming since 2008.

in the case of a humanities PhD, yeah. It's probably easier to become a pro-athlete than find the handful of jobs that require a history PhD. But a chemistry PhD? Engineering PhD... agricultural sciences... geology... the job search is still a search, but these aren't degrees that have no demand. You certainly are more likely to find industry jobs vs. academic jobs with many hard science degrees. The return on taxpayer investment is sensible compared to other taxpayer funded schemes (in my view, if we're going to be a country that also funds primary and high school). and this investment is not a direct funding of PhD students, but funding projects they carry out, which in most cases is in national interest. The select number of students working on completely useless projects that are ideological dogma are definitely making the rest of higher education look useless.

Too many PhDs... in biochemistry...?

I’ve heard from colleagues that numerous biostats programs also did this. Zero PhD admits for the 2025 cohorts. If the department has bio in the title there’s a good chance almost all of its operating budget comes/came from NIH.

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