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Explain why these universities need a billion dollars for overhead?

$800M divided by 400 postdocs is $2 million dollars PER POSTDOC.

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Those were my first thoughts, Merrill. Less basic research (that industry feeds on). Also, less clinical research without a pot of gold at the end. E.g. repurposing drugs no longer under patent. (Hence pitiful funding of promising long Covid treatments.) But as far as I know, most of the NIH's clinical research funding flows into industry studies of their patented substances. Citizens pay twice--as taxpayers--and then for monopoly pricing.

If pharmaceutical companies pick up the slack, that just solidifies the medical-academic-industrial complex.

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I used to be a clinical investigator on a bunch of industry-sponsored trials. I caught them massaging data several times. It only came out after the FDA forced trials to close that Vioxx was killing some of our patients. Independent, not-for-profit research is a critical safety measure.

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