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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

> gatekeepers directly or indirectly control research funding.

Perhaps funding like public grants could be controlled by few? Should not the case for private money?

Relatively common health issues older people tend to get fair amount of private funding after all.

Rich people tend to be older and they are lot more likely to see amongst their friends and family Alzheimer's and Parkison's or even cancer and so forth and be worried about it and thus donate money to them.

In somewhat related (i.e. old people health concerns) life extension research gets all kinds of wacky non traditional research lines get funded all the time, I don't understand why would Alzheimer's would be any different.

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If you're a wealthy person lacking a neurobiology background, how do you decide which research efforts are the most promising? Which labs do you back?

Generally, you rely on experts.

Who typically became experts by adhering to the conventional wisdom set by gatekeepers.

"Science advances one funeral at a time" feels apt.

Sadly, the problem isn't confined to Alzheimer's.

Whenever only a few people decide what is "right," the same pattern of stifled innovation will generally manifest itself not by design or from malice, but because it's hard for a small group to be 100% right on what works and what doesn't -- especially on matters as inscrutable as neuroimmune diseases.

I don't think the problem is nearly as big as people claim. Experts are often right!

While there are counter examples and inefficiencies in the system (and there are idea of addressing this, by distributing some part of the money in other ways), we have far bigger societal issues because people do not believe in science, especially where there is an industry lobby sowing doubts.

So I really want to push back against the the idea that the scientific system is broken. While there are real issues, this is still very misleading.

What also happens is these gatekeepers end up being those requested to review papers. When a paper comes up for review that challenges the status quo these gatekeepers nit-pick the paper and recommend it not be published. This happened to my wife on numerous occasions. She has a few unpublished papers because of this. What she found in her research has since become the common accepted knowledge in her field after a few funerals.

Life extension seems like the kind of thing that can get private funding with relative ease specifically because they aren't trying to compete with the government. There are a lot of private foundations that give out grants too though.

Life extension in the private sector is dominated by hocus-pocus and unwarranted optimism. The genetics of mortality is amazingly complex. See this open access monster paper that came out in Nature this week—admittedly “in mice” on mortality and genetic of longevity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10407-9

(I’m an author)

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