Is It Time to Restructure the National Institutes of Health or Research Mindsets?

ABSTRACT

[...]the NIH has major programs in (nonbiomedical) areas such as ethical, legal, and social implications of disease;implementation science;research communication and dissemination;and capacity development and research strengthening. [...]the apparent assumption that the NIH should be funding all types of research is confusing. [...]ifthere are in fact policy community frustrations, we would see declining funding to the NIH, but in fact funding has gone up, even in the most recent allocations.6 The discussion of trust in scientific knowledge, although based on a philosophical approach and theoretically tenable, ignores the current reality of how trust in science has broken down in practice in the contemporary era owing to what can be termed unfettered inclusion of raw opinions, ideology, and racism. The proposal for new institutes along two axes-determinants and processes-is a limited perspective from a multiepistemic view and suffers from some of the issues raised by the authors (e.g., misclassification of behavioral and social determinants, overlap and duplication between research focused on health systems, health services, populations, and communities). [...]it is unclear what a priori criteria (or principles) would be used to evaluate such a system, especially given that no existing research funding system (anywhere in the world) has been suggested as a model.