Bhattacharya Appropriation Oversight Hearing NIH testifying to Congress on 03/17/2026 [YouTube Link] 20:18 – lauding NIH funded research for the latest highly promising HIV medications which have the potential for an eradication success…

Bhattacharya Appropriation Oversight Hearing drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/17/b...

Thanks Biden

Yes

Yeh but he gave me a free cell phone, so he's off the hook.

Thanks Biden

"My name may be forgotten when it comes, but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past. And it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear"

Happy birthday to John Snow! His name & his work is not forgotten.

Better than the MLS

The only thing we can control is submitting the best proposals we can and max out the 6 sub per year limit, and go in as Co-Investigator on as many other proposals as possible. Maximize the chances by maximizing submissions. Everything else is up to the fates and not worth spending mental energy on

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Some shit is about to go down with NIH study sections, friends. Keep your eyes peeled for change that may affect your grant submissions.

Most labs are always a single grant away from going under

NIH reports on ESI support in FY2025 I will be honest, I am somewhat amazed we are getting any funding data for FY2025 out of NIH. The databook has not yet been updated, so we’re not out of the woods yet. Still, there’s a …

Today in "everybody is firmly convinced that they and their type of science is at particular and specific disadvantage at the NIH no matter any evidence to the contrary"....

drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/n...

All of us

Screenshot from an NIH website reading: "Table 1 shows the number of principal investigators (PIs) applying for or receiving an R01-equivalent grant in FYs 2021 to 2025, disaggregated by career stage. NIH supported 1,423 and 1,144 ESIs in FYs 2024 and 2025, respectively. The decrease seen in FY 2025 may likely be due in part to NIH implementing a requirement to use 50% of its remaining competing Research Project Grant (RPG) funds (starting in June 2025) for full-year funded competing RPGs, which was expected to lead to fewer awards and support fewer researchers overall."

Check this out straight from the NIH website, acknowledging that multiyear funding was likely responsible for a 20% decrease in early stage investigators.

And that it was expected.

A strange approach for someone so committed to the next generation of scientists.

grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Oh yeh didn't think about doing that.

Don't you lose the official signature when you do that?

Yeh i actually kind of like it, but I wish we had the ability to make basic text edits (i.e. paragraph spacing). That's my only complaint.

So it was your fault??

They've solved science funding

I do think this is the major problem. While some night be able to get a decent package up front, the funding landscape in many of these countries, especially in Europe, is pretty grim and arguably worse than the US right now. It might be a decision one regrets in 5 years.

You might not if MYF continues for much longer

These are countries with relatively tiny research budgets. It's a lot....for them.

Other European countries are doing the same thing and investing a lot of money. Watch this space.

PaperBanana: Automating Academic Illustration for AI Scientists Despite rapid advances in autonomous AI scientists powered by language models, generating publication-ready illustrations remains a labor-intensive bottleneck in the research workflow. To lift this bu...

Well, there goes the entire business model for Biorender.

arxiv.org/abs/2601.23265

NIDA: 0

NIAAA: 0

The NIDDK has still only issued a total of 3 new R01s since October 1.

"no more multi-year funding"

What am I missing?

This is not true. MYF is capped at FY25 levels, where 39% of all awards were MYF.

We need to be very precise about this because the impact is enormous.

Solution? Hire more administrators.

See how this works?

I just added the link as a separate contributions section. Not sure if that's allowed or not, but screw it.