Question for scientists 🧪: There’s been a lot of criticism of NIH from rightwing hacks, often about how NIH doesn’t support high-risk work. What are some examples of high-risk work NIH has supported recently? Please reply here, DM, or msg on Signal. - ThreadSky

altnih4science.bsky.social • 9 days ago

Question for scientists 🧪:

There’s been a lot of criticism of NIH from rightwing hacks, often about how NIH doesn’t support high-risk work.

What are some examples of high-risk work NIH has supported recently? Please reply here, DM, or msg on Signal.

Comments

datdemlady.bsky.social•9 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/datdemlady.bsky.social/post/3lmgcujvwyk25

datdemlady.bsky.social•9 days ago

#FireKennedy

He is handing America’s leadership in medical science over to China.

https://bsky.app/profile/megtirrell.bsky.social/post/3lmfriawprk2j

dnarich.bsky.social•9 days ago

Here is some more groundbreaking research supported by the NIH:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08790-w

dnarich.bsky.social•9 days ago

I'd say that "back in the day", supporting CAR-T cell research for cancer therapy was considered "high-risk" - but also high reward research. A breakthrough because of NIH funding.

mRNA vaccines were also "high-risk", taking decades to fully develop. Impacted millions of lives. (No exaggeration!)

breakliquid.bsky.social•9 days ago

Billions

dnarich.bsky.social•9 days ago

Impacted billions...but certainly millions of lives were saved. Billions were able to return to work with confidence far more quickly because of the vaccines. (I worked for 3 yrs down the hall from Jonas Salk, whose team created the 1st polio vaccine. I strongly support vaccines!).

baylinklab.bsky.social•9 days ago

It is a good question. But I would say we need to know the rate of funding high risk high reward projects. Otherwise it is cherry picking examples. Relatedly, a lot of what the NIH calls “high risk high reward” is debatable. Look at the DP2s.

johnemcd.bsky.social•9 days ago

but you know the 'high-risk' work they are talking about involves injecting bleach to cure viral infections, treating covid with Ivermectin, or water memory stuff.

v0rath.bsky.social•9 days ago

talk about how ozempic was born out of high risk research of looking into venom of repitiles

altnih4science.bsky.social•9 days ago

Yep we have that one! Looking for some others, both with public impact but also even nerdy science NIH grant programs that moved a field forward.

dorianbae.bsky.social•9 days ago

There's SBIR and STTR, and many of the phased grants are meant to fund high risk work (if the work doesn't pan out in phase 1, phase 2 isn't funded). Iirc, ARPA-H was also intended to fund a lot of high risk high reward type research.

altnih4science.bsky.social•9 days ago

Every US scientist probably has an example in mind of a grant they submitted to NIH that they felt was awesome and would be high-return, but it got dinged because the reviewers wanted more pilot data. It’s tough, yes.

But NIH has made efforts to support more

altnih4science.bsky.social•9 days ago

high-risk work in recent years, through many different programs.

What are your favorite examples of how this has paid off?

/end

sbpe.bsky.social•8 days ago

A lot of the minority health and disparities research is very high reward. Unfortunately, the right does not value the impacts on these population groups

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