A retreat in the right direction...

h/t DrugmonkeyThe word on the street is that the NIH is thinking of trimming some of those Big Science pet projects. Choice quote:But many of the structures produced by the PSI, which were based on theoretical models, turned out to be irrelevant to biological functions, counters Gregory Petsko, a crystallographer at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. If the PSI’s budget had instead funded a few hundred individual investigators, each competing to work on specific structures, they probably would have come up with more relevant proteins, he says. He is thrilled that the programme is shutting down. “Put a stake through its heart, bury it in a coffin filled with its native soil — do whatever you can do to keep it from rising again” he says. I feel the same way about the BRAIN Initiative, which is not being trimmed unfortunately. I'm not against Big Idea Initiatives entirely. Ones with clear and tangible goals, perhaps relating to chasing down and marginalizing a specific disease, can benefit a lot from a no-nonsense top-down command approach.  But the goals of the BRAIN Initiative are as vague as the goals of the Human Genome Project and the Protein Structure Project before it (neither of which have lived up to the hubris, imho).As George Whitesides eloquently, and perhaps too politely, understated when commenting on the BRAIN Initiative"You have to have a puzzle or problem..."Right. This is not Popperian pedantry, this is basic stuff that i...
Source: Across the Bilayer - Category: Medical Scientists Tags: Science Source Type: blogs