Why the NIH is a broken funding system

welcome back to the channel this week the Trump Administration has put a pause on all federal grants to organizations to groups to institutions like universities and this includes the NIH it's a one-month pause so that institutions can look to see if their grants are in violation with other federal policy particularly around Dei gender identity and climate things that the Trump Administration not going to want to fund I've seen a lot of scientists Express consternation that this is going to set back science that we're going to stop cures and there's a lot of hand ringing about

it I think a lot of that is just overblown hysteria the pause one month not going to mean a lot in the grand scheme of things also there was no grant that was magically going to get funded in the next week and that Trump's put a halt on and also the American people have voted and they' decided these are not their priorities I was talking about it with my research team and I had Ben nudson who is a student at GW University ask me some questions about what I think is wrong with the NIH the

study section the problems in the NIH and he's agreed to join me in this video where he's going to talk about the NIH study sections why I think it's such a broken process and what I think people are not missing which is the pause is not the problem the the problem is the status quo every year the NIH is giving out billions of dollars in Grants in a cumbersome bureaucratic process that encourages mediocrity that doesn't fund the most trailblazing science that is extremely bureaucratic that is a you scratch my back I'll scratch yours mentality it's

pretty much the worst way we can give out the money and we've never studied it properly but let me introduce Ben and we'll have a little bit discussion here so Ben it's good to see you good to see you I thanks for having me so I appreciate the questions you asking me and I thought we could go through some of them you you forced me to clarify what I meant by modified Lottery and all these things so why don't you get started let's let's kick it off where Where Do We Begin so I think first

it would be helpful just to have like a foundation for how the NIH fund studies right now and what the current system looks like yeah so the current system of NIH funding has two parts to it there's intramural and extramural intramural is really a group of scientists based at NIH in Bethesda who the NIH guarantees a certain amount of funding to if you're an inter mural investigator you might get a million dollars a year for your lab and all you have to do is show you're doing something and that funding will be renewed at infinitum

uh your salaries are a little bit lower than what you'd probably make at a university but you get the guarantee of funding that's why people like the job I think a criticism about the intral branch they're not going to like this and I full disclosure I used to work there CU I did my fellowship there but the criticism is that they are they are not the best scientists it's not the hungriest people doing science it's the people who are more complacent they publish fewer papers there's less impact to their Publications and those kinds of metrics

and people have always questioned which should we spend so much money in intramural Branch then there's extramural funding where we fund universities and researchers doing their work and here typically what happens is it goes through study section you you write a grant for say the National Cancer Institute the grant has to be typically voluminous pages and Pages perhaps a 100 Pages where you detail what you're going to do you have a budget you got all the people on your team they bios it has to be formatted perfectly you submit it to a study section and

there's an officer that initially gives it a score to see if they're going to send it out for review and be discussed um and then it goes through a multi-step process where it's reviewed by study section members who are faculty from other universities kind of volunteering their time to give it a score and it gets a percentile score where low percentile good like third percentile you're like almost the best first percentile almost the best and like 20th percentile you know you're not the best and then there's a funding cut off and for some of these

agencies like sth percentile or fifth percentile is pretty stringent that's typically how it works it takes months maybe even a year um there's no guarantee of funding most people are rejected they don't get the money um there can be renewals on contracts and there can like initial grants given and the thing about NIH money the reason universities are so addicted to it is that if you get a $200,000 Grant there's often $200,000 in indirect funds which means the university gets $200,000 to host you and they get to do whatever they want with that and then

that's how universities have built up these huge amounts of funds and that's why they love to brag you know uh we're number one in NIH research funding and things like that so that's a rough overview of it I think so it seems like if I'm at a university I submit a proposal it goes to a group of people who have maybe applied for the job to be a study section coordinator and they review the grant um is there do they these people have any biases or do they choose research based on a certain metric or

how do they choose what what to approve yeah so there's you know not a great deal of transparency in how study section members are picked and how they choose research and they have all of their biases so one thing that we do know is a nice paper by John yonis where what he did was he took people who are scient who were first or last author on one paper with 1,000 or more citations and John had a very interesting point by picking these people he said look there are lots of people doing science there are

very few people who have led as first author or run the laboratory running a single paper that was cited 1,000 or more times and he picked 1,000 kind of arbitrarily but what he really means is did you do even one thing in your career that really is influential and I'm lucky you I've done 530 papers but only one of my papers was 1,000 more citations my estimate of immunotherapy uptake with Allison which has been very widely cited maybe 1,200 but most people haven't haven't made this Mark so he asked but these are the people doing

like really Innovative paper at least one Innovative paper they've had one Innovative idea how often are they on study sections and how often are study section people you know the authors of these these sort of elite papers and he found you know there's a graph you can that I posted on my Twitter very poor overlap the study section members are typically not those doing this high impact work and if you look at them across many metrics um and you talk to people who worked in the space everyone will concede that they are mediocre scientists they're

not the best of the best scientists those scientists have little incentive to donate their time they're often too senior they don't care they're often fledgling scientists they're early career scientists and then I must say even though people may not like it but all the Dei values have pervaded this group there's been a huge focus on improving racial uptake and gender uptake and critics of that process have said that's come at the expense of Merit and so that there's a debate on who should be on study sections then once you're on a study section they get

to give out scores a couple like one or two bad scores can really tank you but one or two positive scores can't really Elevate you by the way in which the metrics are constructed and so people who have all sorts of biases personal biases against the authors biases against the work people who have their head up their ass as we've seen with covid-19 policy they can tank really important work that goes against the grain and so what I will say is that it selects for people to write very tepid milk toast uh oatmeal kind of

granola kind of stuff if you really have any spice to your project you're much more likely to be rejected and so that to me is one of the big problems it it's mediocre scientists funding mediocre science that's mainstream and plotting and incremental and not the best scientists taking gambles and funding really interesting things which is what the American public wants hey two questions off of that um do they hold I know it's not an a point pointed position but do they hold their role as a study section evaluator forever or how do how do they

get switched out I think there's three to five year cycles and this is something beyond my expertise I've been in study section but I think there's some there's some rotation to it they don't hold this power forever and are they autonomous in their decision-making or do you think like there's a higher um I don't know like regulation on them where they're kind of pushed to approve certain things or and just just prove other things I think that you know one of the criticisms of them is that they're Petty you know they're Petty people who focus

on minutia um uh and I think that comes from them I don't think they have an external pressure from like I don't think anyone's leaning on them to choose things um or to like or dislike things I think it's all of our own idiosyncratic pettiness that comes out you know and as we were talking yester you said sometimes that uh research proposals don't even get scored uh can you talk about that a little bit yeah and the initial screening process if they are deemed to be of not sufficient quality um they're they're not scored at

all you know maybe I'll read you a a Twitter thread that has gone viral in the last day um by someone who has done this a lot and this is somebody who I think she takes the wrong conclusion away from her own work so let me read you what she said and then we can discuss I need people to understand how difficult it is to get an NH Grand true you spend months writing a proposal following strict guidelines that include a multi-year budget bios of everyone on your team plans for patient safety then you send

it off if you didn't make any mistakes it goes on to peer review three outside researchers with deep expertise in your research area write critiques covering multiple facets of your research whether your topic is important your method sound your team is qualified okay problem number one they don't always pick people who have expertise in your research area because like if you do kind the kind of research we do there's nobody who has expertise and this is a very unique type of research so they pick people who are tangentially related if at best and also the

person who assigns the people picking doesn't know anything about science typically they're the person who work at NIH then back to her thread they score your proposal based on their critiques if you're lucky and your proposal scores in the top half then you get discussed at study section meeting who pick apart every limitation but if you're unlucky and your proposal does not score well you're not even discussed and then often you get an email saying this has not been discussed um I have been in study sections it amazes me that anyone ever gets funded at

all because the critiques can be so harsh after discussion everyone's your proposal again and only a certain percentage of proposals are recommended for funding so this is the key thing she's confusing harsh as if it's a measure of Merit but it's often harsh as if it's a measure of pettiness they are very Petty and idiosyncratically Petty and they've never tested whether or not their harshness or pettiness predicts better quality studies down the road okay back to her post at which point they get another layer review depending on the specific agency you're submitting your payline the

percent of proposals funded might be as low as 7% which means you have to be better than 93% to get funding obviously so that's typically like NCI is one of the lowest Cancer Institute she says you can design an amazing important research project and write it up perfectly but maybe your proposal only scores in the top 15% you're out of luck and you have to do it all over again blah blah blah blah blah and then she writes suspending all grant funding overnight is a huge waste of taxpayer money and a completely inefficient use of

federal resources blah blah blah so she's against Trump's action but here's what she's missing she concedes that the existing process is bureaucratic timec consuming painful and uh and and and harsh and she never asks do we need it is it better than just literally randomly picking winners have somebody screen these for spelling and grammar mistakes and then just randomly pick the winners and then follow these two groups out so this is what I call the modified Lottery proposal you take $200 million 100 million you give out this convoluted way that makes a lot of people

Strokes their ego um and the other 100 million you give out in a modified Lottery you screen the initial proposals to make sure there's no gross spelling errors no grammatical errors and there's no fraud about who the authors are and then you randomly pick the winners literally randomly pick them and then you'll probably be able to pick one more winner because you able to fire the medical officer who works at NIH and use their salary to add it to one winner okay then you follow these proposals out five years 10 years into the future and

you measure things like how many papers did they publish you know people will be surprised we're giving out a three4 million do R1 NIH Grant and then the research teams published two papers what if you're doing with all the money okay you're not even doing any work with it so one is you look at the number of papers published I know that's a surrogate but if there's no difference it's a question then you look at how many citations you've accured You' looked at how many tail papers how many papers have a lot of citations you

look at HS index you look at the journals they published in and then you even have you can blind people reviewers to the projects and say do you think this was picked randomly or funded by study section and if they can't tell the difference then youve really knocked out this incredibly bureaucratic and timec consuming process and then the point I want to make is the NIH claims that it is a science based agency but they have never ever used science to decide if the way they're giving out billions of dollars in Public Funding actually improves

outcomes yeah so I guess two questions based off of that um what metrics do they use now when they're looking at outcomes in the future based off you know the studies they're proving I mean you can first of all it's entirely opaque somebody asked me that they're like you should do the study the analysis yourself there have been a number of um intra uh investigations uh run by what's his name I think Mike lner from nhlbi he was a a guy who was very interested in this uh Michael low low or lower Mike Low one

of the things he did was look at you know among and it's observational research so like among researchers with one or two ro1s what's the marginal benefit of adding the third ro1 like how much more papers do they publish in those kinds of things and I think a few years ago he analyzed that question and he found that um that that Beyond on three r1s there's very little marginal utility of one more R1 and there was a proposal to cap the number of r1s but then the scientists started crying whining about it and they didn't

do it let me that's one side point the reason you can't reform NIH is that people cry they cry on TV and they say they lie and say cures won't come if they do any Reformation because people who are living fat on the hog don't want anything to come to change their living fat on the hog I mean it's a broken system but the people benefiting are these people who know how to play the game and don't want anyone to take away their money one side note you sometimes you hear about a university that didn't

follow up on a sexual harassment or an like a a case of abuse almost always the reason they didn't is that that person has a lot of NIH money because they don't want to jeopardize their cut of the take so I mean it's also a way in which to entrench people who are problematic people uh in laboratory positions I think it's one of the worst systems okay hopefully that answered your question what was the other question question um so obviously research spans multiple different domains in there's bench research epidemiology clinical research and so how would

how would like in your system how would you divvy up funds in between these and maybe it comes down to your opinion but are there some areas that we should be placing more importance on than others yeah well I mean obviously I'm biased because I think meta research is an untapped thing and asking whether or not our research dollars are spent which is kind of the portfolio of of the research I do uh is the most important qu thing so I would fund that more but to answer your question I think you would do a

number of different sort of randomized studies in NIH I mean modified Lottery is one proposal but there have been many other proposals for how to give out the money that's between these two things one proposal is you know to have a pathway for people um who are have achieved a certain Benchmark you know I'm a I'm a 50- year old investigator and I published 200 or more papers and my her index is above 40 maybe that person should just be literally they don't have to write anything you know they're going to do research so there

should be a pathway for them to be randomly chosen to do research and compare them to people who aren't randomly chosen versus a pathway where there's some sort of merit-based screening so giving giving money based on who the person is and not the project that's been proposed so there are all sorts of studies what I would do is within NCI within nhlbi let's do some randomized studies but then at the NIH Office of the director which was run by Francis Collins they typically have a budget I think of200 to $400 million to give out their

own grants that is not in the institutes and those projects are often things like the NIH um early Independence award the new Pioneer award these are projects that are given to people of different fields from psychology to epidemiology to Ortho to uh neurologic diseases and I would say in those you can have a randomized process looking at you know whatever any topic is allowed to be submitted to that so I imagine a panoply of randomized studies not one study but many studies um that test this I want to make one story that you might like

yesterday I was reading on stat somebody wrote an article that said I'm a cancer researcher I'm really scared about what's going to happen to cancer research with and with Trump's Paws and then I was like okay who is this cancer research I click on the name the person works for Northwestern University and I was like oh what type of oncologist is this oh it's funny they're a psychologist I like wait a second so what what's cure are the psychologists gonna come up with I mean not to say what they do is not important of course

it's important but it's not in the Cure business okay so I look at psychologist research I look Pub Med this guy it's like 160 papers in 19 years an average of eight papers per year which in my opinion is actually not a lot unless what the what the hell are you doing the rest of your time you know our lab puts out 50 papers a year and I feel like if we were putting out eight papers a year what would we be doing with all our free time I don't know so eight papers a year

okay I picked the first paper at random it's a pilot study of a website it takes cancer survivors and they wants to assess their quality of life with proprietary website and they go to the website and they type in their quality of life stuff there's 12 people who do it and the primary end point is feasibility and acceptability in other words can people who are of cancer use the internet that's the question and the answer is all 12 of them could use the internet they say it's feasible and I say it's funded by the NIH

I said what the why is NIH funding this like what I mean did we even doubt that they could use the internet we don't they're not in a coma they have had cancer but they're not you know disabled in any way that they couldn't use the internet doesn't make any sense and then I looked even further that like the fourth author is the president of a company and it was in the disclosure and I like what does it matter that he's a president of a company then it was it's the company that makes the website

they're trying to sell this website and I'm like well why the hell didn't the company pay for this study and so to me again this was a random thing the people crying about the NIH are people who are doing exactly the kind of research that we need to defund we don't need to fund uncontrolled pilot studies of website use among cancer patients when the company is the co-sponsor and they don't want to pay any money for this and the Public's got to pay for this I mean you're taxing a plumber to pay for this that

to me is like literally the problem with NIH and I think that is the problem with NIH and you can't get funding to do really provocative and controversial stuff there funding is getting sucked up by people like this who are having a 20year career with a trickle of publications of very little value yeah yeah it's it's sad to see um the state of things right now but do you think I know there's other sources of funding outside of NIH that help researchers do you think the Field's moving toward uh the direction of using those funds

more than ni or what do you think is going to become the dominant form of funding in like the next 10 years or so yeah I think we've already passed the point where you know NIH is 47 billion and um pharmaceutical outlays are estimated to be $120 billion a year in pharmaceutical industry funding FDA is putting out $2 billion a year and the European Union is putting out you know maybe1 billion do into research funding but I think it's already the case the NIH is theity of research funding that the industries are putting in a

lot of research funding if you include things like open AI you know that number goes even higher so I think the answer is that the NIH is not the dominant uh fun of science globally the pharmaceutical industry is probably the dominant funer of biomedical basic bench science globally and what will change in the future the industry will grow I mean the industry is going to dominate more and more and the NIH is going to have a dwindling role but in my mind like you know in the in the grand scheme of the of healthcare spending

we're spending like $1.5 trillion dollar a year in like Federal Healthcare if you add up all the subsidies and things like that NIH is like it feels like a drop in the bucket $50 billion and I've said before if you're really in charge of the system you would take a huge chunk of healthcare spending and spend it on randomizing things we don't know whether or not they work or not in healthcare so my problem but but the flip side of that is the key issue is not exactly how much they're spending but whether or not

the money is well spent this is other people's money it's not their money these res scientists act like they're entitled to this money you're not entitled to this money it is public money we're taxing School teachers we're taxing school bus drivers we're taxing plumbers we're taxing people to get this money and the question is the people giving out the money have to know that they're giving it out in the most efficient way possible not just to their buddies or people they like and not just denying people they don't like but giving it out in the

most efficient way possible to have the most good come from it and they have never studied that they love to just sit there in their offices sipping their coffee and do nothing to study it and then anytime that anyone talks about reforming the NIH they cry cry cry the cures won't follow and that to me is so dishonest and you know we're doing I'm I I don't think I said this but I'll say nobody will do it nobody will scoop us we're going to take every every single article written by anybody who's lamenting the NIH

in this week and there's many many op ads and then I'm going to look at the characteristics of the people lamenting the NIH let's see are the people lamenting the NIH the best scientists or mediocre scientists I'm going to answer that question pretty objectively rather than cherry pick this one anecdote yeah I'd be interested in the answer um so I think we talked a lot about about um how the system is broken and you have a solution but do you see any like significant strides toward that solution and do you think that will ever happen

in the future yeah I think that that's the beauty of picking someone like Jay you know people uh Jay bachara who will be the new NIH director and I suspect he will be confirmed but I think some one of his criticisms is well Jay has is not a pipetting based scientist I was like well Jay is an MD PhD Healthcare researcher multiply funded NIH winner and also been I suspect I think I'm confident he's been funded from non-nih sources too and he has the skill set that these other people don't have which is the economist

had like when you're running this company you don't need somebody who's an expert in um you know uh some cell cycle checkpoint you need somebody who's an expert in the like how do you give out money that putting the Hat on of like are we getting efficiency from this and that's his Economist hat and I think Jay like a smart Economist the first thing he's going to do is try to look at the existing data and see are there any natural experiments we can leverage for instance this has been done before can you compare people

at the fifth percentile to the ninth percentile if the cutline is 7% you would assume that fifth and nth are pretty comparable but what is the implication for the funding so what did the funding do you know so like those kinds of questions those but Jay can ask that for all sorts of things um and what could happen in a year where they happen to get a little extra funding and they change the payline those kinds of things are are the extra projects funded on the cusp better you know the fifth percentile better than the

first percentile you can look at those kinds of questions to see is the ranking objective so that's I think that's the first thing he would probably do there are lots of things I think would be interesting to do which is just to see what's the yield of an R1 like for average R1 how many papers do they American public get what's the impact factor what's the Hersh index I just want to make one side note I talk about these metrics I'm the first to concede to you those are imperfect metrics but my point is that

an imperfect metric you would still expect a difference between first and fifth percentile and first and 20th percentile even if the metric's imperfect um because there's if if you really think that that that ranking is makes sense so that's the first thing Jay would do but then I think Jay if since he is smart I think he will do the thing that no one has had the guts to do which is you have to prospectively EXP experiment you have to change the system randomize some pot of money and see what happens and that's the only

way to learn that's ironically the cardinal rule of science is to experiment and you know they're not doing that with this process they think it's sacrosanct and somehow sacred um and that to me is I think yes I think it's it's the single time where we're getting the best probability of change and Francis Collins as you know he was sitting in that chair for quite a long time Trump didn't fire him as he should have uh when Trump had the power the first time he's been there since Obama so it's good to see him gone

and it's good to see some fresh blood okay so what about if the system completely changes what do you what will happen to researchers that are in the middle of their grants right now I mean I don't think the money would be withdrawn completely but do you think they would have major changes with their experiments and could the results be affected just to play Devil's Advocate a little bit Yeah I said that's a good point so I would say that probably NIH um a lot of these Trump doctrines say in so far as permissible under

law for all promised grant money that's been made for 5year contracts and things like that um that money will be paid out into the future that's also why turning the NIH is like turning a battleship not like turning a sailboat it has a very big it's hard to turn this thing because this money has been outlaid so I think all those grants should have to be completed because there's are legal contracts they can't be broken and we made a promise we have to keep um however for new grants I think they should be given out

in a more meritocratic way without nods to diversity which is what Trump run on and will that change things it will blow up universities universities have completely transformed from places of Merit to places that are singularly focused on equity and diversity it's going to really cause them a lot of problems there will be a lot of people who retire let me put it differently every year there are people who quit the university to go to private sector because they can't succeed at the NIH Rat Race in this new system it will be the least meritorious

people rather than random people who are unlucky it will be the least meritorious people so there'll still be a system where there's a lot of turnover but yes a lot of people doing low credibility observational uncontrolled research like that person is doing the thing I always talk about that CT screening for homeless people project you know like that kind of research um screening test for somebody who doesn't have a house like doesn't make any sense that kind of research will be defunded and those people have to do other things but hopefully the people who were

actually pursuing Innovative science who in the past were quitting those people will be able to stick around and so I think it'll be a massive upheaval okay so maybe just a more philosophical question I know you just talked about different types of research that that may be better at coming to certain answers than others certain other types of research have other biases but I guess why over time are we still funding research that isn't um the highest rigor and isn't going to produce results that are the most reliable why do you think people are still

caught up in funding uh sources of research that aren't going to produce the best results to help move medicine or science forward I think it's true in every system where it's easy money you know it's it become a welfare state so like for instance my understanding is that you know when when Mark Zuckerberg runs Facebook Facebook is so profitable when uh Sergey runs Google it's so profitable that if you're running a really hugely profitable company there's going to be huge pockets of people who work for you who just don't add value and why because you're

still making profits so you you can it's hard for you to have the incentive to trim the fat and these big companies are full of pockets of people not doing much and every once in a while meta fires 11% of the workforce Elon famously fired like 90% of Twitter and look it's just running the same it ever run you ask yourself why did 90% you know people like that the whole website will break it never broke and it's stronger than ever so that's of all bureaucracies now the federal government the federal government is that on

steroids money is easy come they can print money they make money up you look at the defense sector you know there's all these stories of a a toilet that cost $50,000 obviously doesn't cost $50,000 but it's easy cheap money so why does the NIH be unchanged because it's easy cheap money universities are addicted to this money they run on this money they it's the cheapest and easiest money they're fighting and vying for researchers with lots of NIH funds creating this perverse system where we're not rewarding the best science we're rewarding these NIH middle manager money

manager kind of people so it exists because you know like any system any feudalism system there's some people who are Kings and and and uh noblemen in this feudalism system and it's hard to reform but it is not a democratic system it's not a meritocratic system and so I'm happy to see a topple and honestly I think that I'm I it doesn't bother me that these people are crying some of them let's let's talk about them crying some of these people they didn't vote for Trump they're going to cry no matter what he does and

that to me is so dis I mean yes you you lost the election cry about that but then you cry about every little thing he does and that's kind of boring to me and some of these people are St to lose a fair bit of funding and so they're crying about their Futures and I think very few of these people are and and correct me if I'm wrong there's not a single news article on this topic that actually says they all say NIH the pause uncertainty cure is not coming not a single one says however

many scientists for years have wondered if the NIH is actually giving money out in the best way possible and there's massive waste in the current system and then one more point I think people have to acknowledge the other thing I talk about is how much human hours are lost from all these people writing grants that are unsuccessful in the current system Millions perhaps billions of human hours are lost in the modified Lottery system if you prove it's just as good or better the first thing you'll do is you trim the application from 60 pages to

two pages and you'll give people back Oodles of time which will lead to even more productivity so there's so many Downstream effects of modified Lottery that are even better which is that we don't have this bureaucratic process we don't need to jump through all these hoops you don't need to collect bios you know and the NH has their unique bios sketch form which is stupid you don't need to collect bios and all this other bureaucratic crap so give people back the time let researchers think about science not Grant application that's my thoughts think I have

one more question so I obviously am a trainee right now think of maybe going into some sort of academic medicine but as you know me um like I do care about doing I know people do care about doing good research but I I want to do that as well so what advice would you give to get involved with like different types of Grants and other things that will help me launch my career that's a good question I mean I guess I would say and you know we worked together for what three years and we published

a bunch of papers and I would say that you know I think what you're doing is is the best thing which is that um well Ben is about to go to be an internal medicine pgy1 you know hopefully in the summer and so he still got a ways probably three years plus maybe three more years six years before he starts his faculty position um I would say that the two things you can do as a trainee that are the best for you strategically One Is to learn what's good science and what's bad science so to

learn like the stuff that you learned when you did your systematic review of myocarditis studies and then like you did with your empo stuff um you know to learn what makes good science to read good science and think about good science and then the second thing to learn is to try to figure out what ideas you want to tackle like what are the ideas what's what's your research agenda and honestly I would say to think less about the grantsmanship that should come later then what happens is usually they most universities have if you have some

track record and some passion they will float you for three years or five years in the beginning of your career it's like your one opportunity and then I think life is short you should do what you're passionate about and and and go at it really hard and then see where you can get the funding on the back end and sometimes you know funding comes in serendipitous ways if you're writing things that strike a chord with somebody they may donate to you if you're writing stuff in a space a nonprofit May reach out to you and

offer to fund you and if you're writing stuff you may find collaborators you didn't know existed and apply to an NIH Grant and then hopefully by the time you get there NIH is not such a broken and busted system and you'll have better opportunity no okay yeah I appreciate the advice and I've of course enjoyed working with you these past years and I've learned a lot I appreciate everything um other thoughts no thank you for asking these questions and I hope that it made a better video because you know sometimes when you're doing the video

by yourself you just take for granted what the audience should know or not know so it's really nice to have someone to do it with so thanks Ben for doing this all right till next time