NIH Director Gives More Details On New Government Medical Journal

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will start a new journal that will help change the culture of science, the agency’s director said in a newly released interview.

“The NIH can stand up and will stand up a journal where these replication results can be published and made searchable in an easy way,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a four-hour podcast interview with Andrew Huberman, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, released on June 9.

Bhattacharya said he envisions people being able to see summaries of similar papers that looked at the same questions.

“A scientific journal put out by the NIH, a high-profile journal will then make publishing replication work a high-profile scientific, high-prestige scientific activity,” he added later.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that federal scientists would likely be told to stop publishing in medical journals and, if that happened, the NIH would launch journals that would publish the scientists’ research.

Kennedy said that the existing journals have problems such as not publishing all of the data that underpins studies, while Bhattacharya said the journals will not publish replication research. Both officials have said they want the government to devote resources to replication, with Kennedy estimating that 20 percent of the NIH budget be designated for that purpose.

Replication is the process of taking a study, repeating it, and seeing if the results are the same.

While some scientists conduct meta-analyses, or studies that sum up existing literature on a topic—which could be considered a form of replication—“it’s really difficult to make a career out of doing replication work as a general matter,” Bhattacharya said in the podcast.

Scientists cannot at present earn large grants from the NIH for such work, which means the scientists cannot receive tenure at a top university, he said. That dissuades young scientists from focusing on replication work.

“We don’t reward it. The NIH doesn’t reward it,” Bhattacharya said. “That will change.”

The new journal will also publish negative results, or when scientists try to replicate a study and fail.

Emphasizing replication will make scientific literature more reliable, according to Bhattacharya, including for drug discovery and individual behavior, and will change the culture of science so that it “rewards truth … rather than influence,” he added later.

Huberman, a neuroscientist, said that he welcomed the new journal and the focus on replication. “Everything you’re saying is very reassuring, and should be reassuring to people,” he said. “It’s music to my ears, frankly.”

The interview was released the same day some NIH employees signed a declaration that called cuts to NIH grants harmful and urged Bhattacharya to restore them. The NIH has terminated more than 2,000 grants totaling some $9.5 billion, as well as $2.6 billion in contracts, the employees said. The Trump administration is also proposing a smaller budget for the NIH in the next fiscal year.

Huberman noted that some grants that were labeled as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were cut and questioned Bhattacharya on whether the cuts included grants with the word transgenic. Bhattacharya said that there’s been an appeal process set up and researchers whose grants should not have been cut can file with the government. Some grants that were cut have been restored.

The NIH director said that it’s important to carry out research on vulnerable populations, and there are legitimate scientific questions where race or sex matters, such as breast cancer.

“The NIH absolutely supports that kind of research still despite all of the changes,” he said.

Bhattacharya also said that DEI is centered on the idea that structural racism is primarily responsible for the health outcomes of minorities and that he could not think of a scientific experiment that would in principle falsify that idea. Researchers who want to conduct studies based on the idea will not receive funding, he indicated.

“Let’s focus on the mission,” Bhattacharya said. “The mission is how do we advance, how do we make investments in research that advance the health and longevity of the American people … I don’t believe there’s any place for this sort of race essentialism in it.”