Lab vacancies remain high despite a booming biotech market. The deeper issue is that biotech has outsourced its foundational research to the NIH-driven academic system. Companies are left doing routine work, and outsourcing and automation reduce how much experimental capacity they need for it. Specialized experiments essential to creative, exploratory science still need labs. Much of the work at a biotech company based on academic research doesn’t require its own lab. Outsourcing manufacturing overseas doesn’t explain empty scientific research labs. Biomanufacturing facilities are in different locations, such as the research triangle, and serve different purposes. Abundant, cheap lab space is an opportunity to restructure biomedical research. Small, lean, efficient research institutes could share equipment and talent and concentrate their resources on scientific questions that require specialized work. They could do this much more cheaply and efficiently than traditional decaying academic institutions like Harvard and without supporting an enormous administrative apparatus.

It is sad how many billionaires are still living in the philanthropic imagination of 1910. They accumulate fortunes then decide the highest use of billions of dollars is to pour it into the same sprawling bureaucracies that have been expanding with excess money for years. $3 billion could build something genuinely new. Instead this rich guy is giving it to an already enormous university to fund another major expansion. A hundred years ago, large philanthropic gifts to universities helped create institutions that did not yet exist. Those institutions are now old, and have been decaying for years. CMU’s recent response to its most recent controversy is just one example. Today many of these universities are already among the wealthiest institutions in the world and have enormous administrative structures. There are many things that could be built from scratch with $3 billion, including new scientific institutions, different models for education and training, and research organizations designed around the technology and problems of 2026. Instead, another enormous fortune is being used to make a wealthy university even larger.

Delicious MAHA lunch https://t.co/KskvcHiVGv

I enjoyed this talk from Bill Gurley. He identifies the central failure of the pandemic. Institutions and invidividuals with ego and legacy in mind reached conclusions without evidence, then attacked people who continued asking questions. COVID became so politicized and institutionalized that universities, NIH, scientific journals, and professional societies now have positions and reputations to defend. That makes them poor judges of their conduct. The Proximal Origin paper is a good example. It was rapidly published and publicly promoted by Fauci, even though the evidence was unclear and the authors had privately expressed far more uncertainty than appeared in the paper. We need independent commissions composed of smart people with no stake in the answer. People with Feynman’s independence during the Challenger investigation or David Baltimore’s willingness to raise the furin cleavage site when doing so was deeply unfashionable. One commission should examine the origin of COVID. Others should examine school closures, lockdowns, public-health messaging, and their long-term consequences. HHS/NIH could establish them, but the institutions being examined should not control their membership or access to evidence. Give serious people six months, access to the records, and freedom to follow the evidence. The purpose should be understanding and prevention rather than protecting institutions or settling political scores.

There is a persistent misconception that every major medical breakthrough comes from NIH. Followership is often reframed as leadership. The graphs below show academia arriving well after industry proved the therapies worked. Consider GLP-1 drugs. I regularly attended obesity conferences throughout the 2010s. GLP-1 was nowhere near the center of the academic conversation. It was a small blip in the NIH obesity portfolio. By 2020, less than 5% of the NIH obesity grants had GLP-1 in them. Instead, the obesity/CVD fields were dominated by blowhards peddling stories about branched-chain amino acids, ER stress, and whatever drug target fit their latest grant. Most or all of these theories produced nothing remotely helpful for people. Meanwhile, industry was doing the work academia now likes to describe as bench-to-bedside translation. Novo Nordisk scientists developed liraglutide and semaglutide. The company designed, funded, and oversaw the pivotal clinical programs that established what these drugs actually did in people. The clinical timeline is illuminating. The first GLP-1 drug reached patients in 2005. Liraglutide received an obesity indication in 2014. Semaglutide produced 14.9% mean weight loss in STEP 1 in 2021. SELECT later showed a 20% relative reduction in major cardiovascular events in overweight people. NIH’s role in producing these breakthroughs was small or inconsequential. Once industry made the clinical success impossible to ignore, academia flooded into the field. NIH-funded project records mentioning GLP-1 increased to 326 in provisional 2026 data.

It is encouraging to see alternative models of higher education begin to emerge. Higher education is a trillion-dollar industry waiting to be disrupted. This is one small beginning. Hopefully hundreds more alternatives will spring up, compete, and show that universities are not the only way to prepare talented young people for the future.

Turning a sick child into a human shield for a spending demand is political hackery at its most cynical. The published evidence involved one patient, short follow-up, and very early results. It also represents less than 0.1% of what NIH does. It does not prove that NIH was uniquely necessary or that the work could not have been funded and performed elsewhere. NIH stifles innovation by forcing scientists to spend enormous amounts of time writing and rewriting grants, rewards safe and predictable projects, and funnels money into bureaucratic programs and the same legacy institutions and boy's clubs. Too much funding supports paperwork, overhead, large bureacratic center grants, and other administrative structures instead of giving the best scientists the freedom to pursue their best ideas. A rough estimate is that less than 25% of what NIH funds is worthwhile. This is how NIH avoids accountability. Present one emotionally powerful case as a definitive NIH triumph, then use it to demand another $50 billion while brushing aside the vast majority of what the agency actually funds.

There was an audience of self-described contrarians largely composed of people in their 70s and perhaps even 80s. Many had legacies tied to universities and appeared to view those institutions through the lens of preserving what they had helped build. Several commented on how young I was. Some assumed I was a college student, although I am in my mid-40s. Apparently, that was not a major distinction to them. One participant whom the group widely regarded as a one of their heterodox leaders claimed that social media had distorted perceptions of scientific institutions by amplifying misinformed voices. There was no mention whether these dissenting voices had always existed but previously lacked the authority from MIT and Harvard that traditionally amplified people.

NIH grants are awarded to institutions, not individual investigators. That structure disappears from Science’s public framing. A dispute over funding awarded to institutions becomes a story about the personal speech rights of individual researchers. The institutions’ control over the grants, their exercise of authority over researchers, and their own speech policies and practices receive no examination. Instead, Science presents a newly filed complaint containing unproven allegations across its headline, subheadline, and social media promotion. The opposing views are completely absent. The government likely has established arguments supporting its authority to define federal programs, impose conditions on public funds, and decline to subsidize activities that conflict with other legal obligations. Science foregrounded the individual-rights theory, turning a dispute over institutional funding into an activist narrative.

I attended a meeting of people associated with groups like heterodox academy, FIRE and other organizations who describe themselves as contrarian thinkers committed to open inquiry and university reform. My impression was that they largely consider universities healthy institutions requiring modest changes. A revised mission statement, a tweak in a policy, or a university president who echoes a talking point they like is treated as if that is all that is needed. There was little willingness to consider that the problems may be much deeper. The people presenting themselves as reformers seem unwilling to consider how fundamentally broken these institutions have become. Interestingly, some of the people who spoke most often about civil discourse raised their voices and became flustered in reference to discussion suggesting that universities might require much larger structural changes. The commitment to open inquiry seemed to apply only within boundaries they had defined. Their heterodoxy had developed its own orthodoxy. These groups may criticize universities, but they remain deeply invested in their legitimacy. They propose limited or trivial changes while leaving the same leadership structures, incentives, bureaucracies, and concentrations of power intact.