Reply #11: One reason for the funding jockeying is [View All]

that, under our beloved :puke: leader, congress managed to slash increases in NIH funding (I think it was a paltry 3% increase, which doesn't even match inflation this year), which has in turn, due to inflation and increasing research costs, become basically a huge cut in available grant funds for research. This means that pilot studies (studies done with very small group to see if a new approach/idea is viable for increased study) are pretty much sitting dead in the water now unless they get piggy-backed on a larger established study, which is hard to do as they pretty much have to spell out everything they want to do, and the grant reviewers are very reluctant right now to give any sort of funds to unproven work. Also, there are researchers who have had established research who are now scrambling. I work in biomedical research at a university, and I've seen what a huge impact this has had on the research community.

Unfortunately for those in university settings, it is harder for them to use pharma funding due to a lot of issues. This just drives researchers to big pharma so that they can continue their research. Hmmmmmmm.