Scientists are increasingly turning to artificial-intelligence systems for help drafting the grant proposals that fund their careers, but preliminary data indicate that these tools might be pulling the focus of research towards safe, less-innovative ideas. These data provide evidence that AI-assisted proposals submitted to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are consistently less distinct from previous research than ones written without the use of AI - and are also slightly more likely to be funded.
But, as the agency that touts itself as the world's largest public funder of biomedical research marches forward with full funding this year, it lacks permanent directors to lead it. Fifteen directors of the 27 institutes and centers that comprise the agency are in an acting capacity. Directors have departed for multiple reasons, including terminations by the Trump administration and resignations.
Trump in an August executive order said federal grants had been insufficiently vetted, and some propagated absurd ideologies. Hastings, whose South San Francisco firm Nkarta engineers killer cells to fight disease, said biotechnology companies across the board are cutting staff and product-development projects as uncertainty over what comes next rattles investors.
Staff members at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) seem to have done the impossible. Despite US President Donald Trump's administration laying off thousands of the agency's workers, delaying meetings to review research grants and terminating funding for some projects, the NIH seems like it will dole out its entire US$48-billion budget on deadline - by the end of the fiscal year on 30 September.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr held a press conference about rising diagnoses of autism, saying he would soon announce a study to identify the responsible agent and asserting that environmental factors are the main cause of autism, a claim that drew attention amid broader debate over drivers of the increase and calls for robust, transparent research to substantiate causal links between environmental exposures and developmental outcomes.
The first part of this past summer, I was preoccupied with preparing three different grant applications. Writing grants is a normal part of my job. Heck, sometimes it feels like it is the majority of my job as an academic scientist. So, those couple of months were not out of the ordinary; I often spend those early summer months preparing for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) summer cycle.
Of the 20 labor markets that saw the biggest increases in NIH funding between 2004 and 2023, many were well-known college towns, including Tallahassee, Fla.; Athens, Ga.; and State College, Pa. And according to the report's calculations, the local economies that saw a substantial increase in NIH funding during that period also had lower rates of employment decline than those with small increases, no increases or no NIH funding.
Measures of health care quality are essential for understanding the impact of interventions in real-world systems. They assess treatment effectiveness, access to care, and patient satisfaction.
"Young, a 1985 Reagan appointee, said at the hearing that he has 'never seen government racial discrimination like this' in his 40-year career, calling the funding cuts 'arbitrary and capricious, and unlawful' in his ruling."},{
