NIH Funding Isn’t a “Gold Standard”
Claims that all NIH-funded research is legit fall short when you look at the data
One of the most notorious wastes of money, time, and attention in science in the past decade was a 2016 preprint claiming that cell phones caused brain cancer. A New York Times physician and reporter had to break the spell many succumbed to at the time, writing memorably:
Recently, I lost a day at work when my . . . colleague Austin Frakt emailed me first thing in the morning to tell me that headlines were appearing declaring that an “explosive new cellphone-cancer” study was making the rounds. As I have long been interested in this topic, I started to read the headlines and news.
“Cellphone-Cancer Link Seen in Rat Study,” said Time. “Cellphone Radiation Linked to Cancer in Major Rat Study,” said IEEE Spectrum, a magazine for engineers. I was dismayed to say the least. “Game-changing,” as a quotation in a Mother Jones headline put it, seemed like a bit of an overreach.
So I went ahead and read the paper. Despite what some outlets reported [Wall Street Journal], this was a not-yet-published study of rats that had been shopped for “review,” but had not been accepted by any editors.
Preprints were misleading people left and right at the time, did so throughout the pandemic while igniting many conspiracies we see dominating today’s MAHA movement, and continue to mislead today.
The NIH has steered clear of embracing preprints fully, but has been flirting with them with the PubMed pilot of preprint indexing. Current NIH leadership has claimed publishing should be free, and with their sketchy allies using preprint platforms to plant pseudoscience to drive distrust or false claims, it seems inevitable preprints will come to the fore, likely with claims we’ve already heard along the lines of, “If a scientist receives NIH funding, they are already vetted.”
The data say otherwise, but we’ll get to that . . .
Leave it to a castoff of the brief Alondra Nelson interim era, Christopher Steven Marcum, to put his head right into the preprint propeller with an unnecessary, misinformed, and unresearched assertion in his personal response to the NIH RFI about spending caps: