"Young, Brilliant and Underfunded"

“My point is not to bemoan lost opportunities. Rather, it is to call on my colleagues in Congress to push the N.I.H. to promote promising researchers who are in the prime of their careers. There is now a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives examining this and other questions; here are some suggestions for what to do… Congress should also mandate that the median age of first research awards to new investigators be under 40 within five years, and under 38 within 10 years.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/young-brilliant-and-underfunded.html?_r=1

I am very okay with that suggestion from a totally self-serving perspective J However, the author (an MD formerly with Johns Hopkins who is now a member of the House) calls out specific projects as things that shouldn’t be funded over Alzheimer’s research in a way that super, super over-simplifies how research works and how funding is prioritized and collapses the problem of not enough young investigators being able to get money with like the lack of a cure for Alzheimer’s.

The NIH response: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6206/150.full “NIH officials are hesitant. Sally Rockey, the agency's deputy director for extramural research, says Harris's mandate might not achieve much unless scientists' training can be shortened so that more are ready to compete for NIH grants at a younger age.”