is currently heavily weighted to academic centers and funding panels are academically focused with the subsequent recurrent funding relationships that are often funding useless projects. Professional, apolitical specialty medical organizations should appoint non-academic judges to these panels and recurrent funding should be tracked against actual clinical value and production.
A result of the current methods is that the academic, government funded researchers parrot the party line in order to survive.
It is really difficult to know beforehand if a project will result in practically useful information. For example CRISPR, the famous gene editing system, was discovered during research on the immune systems of bacteria.
The nature of research means that a lot of projects are not going to produce anything immediately applicable- that’s why we separate science into basic research, applied research, and development. I’m sympathetic to arguments that there need to be government institutes that do applied research, but that’s different than suggesting we cut basic research.
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