The Ledger, every show

“The NIH had sent money to the Wuhan lab but we couldn't audit it.”

“You know, for kids who have this folate deficiency in their brains, that, it actually works. And 20% of the kids, I think, restore speech. Up to 60% of the kids, they get much better.”

“There will be, yeah. So that's something that Dr. McCary, the FDA commissioner is working on. And there'll be also you know, changes in, in like how Medicare pays, Medicare, CMS, Medicare, and Medicaid pay for Leucovorin. So it's a cross-agency collaboration f…”

“You remember the plexiglass that was everywhere? There's still, every time there's see a plexiglass, it makes me, fills me with rage, but that's another story. And there was no science behind that, right? There was the, there was like the, you wear a mask when…”

“Closing schools, where again, the science was so weak that it, that and now kids are like years behind in their education as a result, and they'll be paying the price for that for years.”

“The problem is that scientists conveyed certainty about things they had no business conveying certainty about, and then changed people's lives for the worse as a result of it during the pandemic.”

“So, the uptake of MMR in this country, the MMR vaccine is like, 95% of American parents vaccinate their kids with MMR. The evidence is, and, I think it's like, 13% of American parents vaccinated their kids for the COVID vaccine. I think that reflects the scien…”

“There's no return for it. Like, if I spend my career checking other people's work, I'm not going to get a professorship at a fancy university.”

“The fact that it's published in a journal doesn't mean it's right. It doesn't mean it's true.”

“Look, if you look at back in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties, the NIH was funding ideas that were like zero, one, two years old. The typical scientific project funded by the NIH in the 2000 teens, it was about 2002 thousand, early 2002 thousand teens was like …”

“I think that's what happened to the culture of biomedical science the last few decades. It's too focused on, like, incremental progress, not enough on enormous.”

“The early rise in HIV did not, was not met with a sufficient response by the NIH. We're talking very, very early in the early eighties of money going to research on this vital topic. And it was the political movement of HIV patients coming together saying, loo…”

“So what I've done is I've asked the institute directors. I've given them the authority essentially to expand what they can do in terms of the portfolio. I'm not going to judge them to make, just like within Silicon Valley, I'm not going to judge them to s on t…”

“And I'm gonna start to evaluate Long established investigators, because I think, I do believe they play a pretty fundamental role still but in the, in, in, in, like, how well do they advance the careers of the early career investigators that work with them, ri…”

“I think the RAID problem isn't that that support for the early, I think we have a lot of portfolios pretty good on that. We could do better, but that's pretty good. The problem is, like, after you've had this career in biomedicine, how do you, like, do you, of…”

“The Maha Movement is a, it's basically a cry for help from the American people, saying, look, all these crime and disease problems, all these problems with our kids, and we're sick, we're much, doing much worse than folks in, in Europe in terms of our health, …”

“I found out that a lot of folks at the internal investigators at the NIH, in order to publish their work, had to seek permission from their supervisors. I changed that. Like, no more permission. You, if you're an NIH researcher, you have a scientific paper, yo…”

“They want, they actually had a sort of a if you, a policy where if a regular person wanted to go find a scientific article they had to go, there was a paywall where they pay like 50, a hundred dollars. We got rid of that paywall for NIH-funded research.”

“I'm just to put a new policy in place where I'm limiting the number of new public applications you can have, like to, we can have, you know, six a year, six a cycle or something. We have people writing 60 applications. And very clearly AI-generated. And then w…”

“We should stop punishing scientists who fail. If they fail productively, let them publish in a journal to explain why they're, what they learned from it. Like that, Silicon Valley spirit I think needs to come to science a little bit more.”

“Fifty million new dollars. 250 teams applied for large research grants, and we're gonna announce today that 13 teams are going to be granted you know, these grants this, for this Autism Data Science Initiative.”

“Scientists, if you ask us, we're not actually good at predicting the future of the, of future in terms of, like, our will this investment result in productivity? I mean, actually, frankly, neither is Silicon Valley, right? You can't say, you can't promise me t…”

“The United States has seen no increase in life expectancy.”

“So, in the data out of the NIH is that from, in the 19 eighties, If you were 35, you actually had a chance of getting a large NIH grant. Like, that was the median age of the first large NIH grant, you were 35 years old. Now you're in your mid-forties.”

“I think we have to do better at that, and we have to reward universities that are better at that.”

“God forbid there's another pandemic during my watch, and then I'm asked, okay, how should we manage is, is it right to wear a mask or something, right? And I don't, there's no good scientific evidence. I'm gonna just say that.”

“A colleague of mine at Stanford did, has this like fantastic paper, he published, set of papers he published using an old shingles vaccine. Called Zostavax. He found that in excellent observational studies that it would, that if you had Zostavax, it reduces th…”

“I would love to, that the, to make that happen through the sort of the power of the NIH, to allow the Max Perutz of the world, the new ones who are now, ah, ah, sitting there with great ideas, to be able to ha, to, like, try them out and change the world with …”

“We had, we saw a reduction in average body weight in the, in this country the first time in, you know, decades last year.”

“When we talk to them in ways where we show respect for their intelligence with data, allow people to disagree, but then have the evidence right there in front of people, I think people, people will respond with trust where the evidence actually leads.”

“Like, we have worse outcomes in the United States than Europe does.”

“The standard for truth in science ought to be replication.”

“So I did a study a few years back where I looked at it turns out that the age of the ideas in your published work ages by every, by one year for every year of chronological age. So my ideas get one year older every year that I age. The very best scientists fig…”

“40,000 people got HIV last year.”