![]() ![]() For comparison, the entire state of Kentucky received less than half a percent, Kansas received 0.3 percent, Mississippi received 0.15 percent, and institutions in Alaska, Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia, North Dakota, and South Dakota each received less than 0.1 percent of NIH funds. This revenue model was so lucrative that in 2018, Boston-based institutions received around 6 percent of the NIH’s $37.3 billion budget. Harvard faculty and students successfully disseminated their crony capitalist model to other Boston-based institutions by acquiring positions at other universities and starting companies to acquire more government grants. The NIH funds alone are enough to pay for the tuition, room, board, and books of every undergraduate student at Harvard. In 2018, Harvard scientists received more than $420 million from the NIH and another $150 million from other federal agencies. Despite being a private institution, a significant portion of its wealth is due to public funding via its research-based crony capitalist business model. Harvard University is the wealthiest institution of higher learning in the world. This mindless quest of taxpayer funding led directly to scientifically illiterate research methods, meaningless data, and futile diet-centric obesity policies. Critical thinking and scientific rigor, if taught at all, were afterthoughts. My experiences at four top-tier research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that training in academic “science” is synonymous with learning how to acquire money from hard-working Americans via federal grants. As taxpayer funding for public health research increased 700 percent from 1970 to 2010, the relentless pursuit of government grants slashed intellectual curiosity and scientific discovery in many fields. He feared that while American universities were a “fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,” the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become “a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”Įisenhower’s fears were well-founded and prescient. Eisenhower spoke of government grants corrupting science. ![]() In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Taxpayer Funding Is A Substitute For Scientific Rigor research establishment is incompetent and corrupt, existing largely to transfer wealth from hard-working Americans to elite academics. Nevertheless, federal agencies impeding scientific progress is merely the tip of the iceberg. As a result the USDA, HHS, National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continue to use meaningless dietary data to tell Americans what to eat and drink while promoting futile “diet-centric” public health policies such as menu-labeling mandates and banning large sodas. Yet despite our rigorous analyses plus scathing critiques from scientists around the world, federal public health agencies repeatedly refused to address contrary evidence and re-examine their demonstrably invalid methods. We further showed that these pseudo-scientific methods and meaningless data generated a fictional diet-centric discourse on obesity and chronic disease, with significant consequences for public health policy. ![]() To be precise, we demonstrated that the methods used by researchers at public health agencies produced data that were physiologically implausible and inadmissible as scientific evidence. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) used to create the dietary guidelines for Americans. Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have published analyses in top medical and scientific journals showing that no human could survive on the diets the U.S. ![]()
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