Follow up work has shown that result is a statistical artifact/does not replicate [1,2,3].

[1]https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article-abstract/229/1/iya...

[2]https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/2/msaf041/8005733

[3]https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.25.586640v1

Are there two proposed bottlenecks, one at 900 kya and another at 70 kya? I'd only really heard about the latter.

The paper linked in that post proposes a bottleneck at 900Kya in the ancestors of all modern humans. There is a bottleneck associated with the migration out of Africa and the peopling of the world that many populations have, but not all. Based on genetic data the timing is between 100-50Kya, with a lot of the uncertainty coming from converting generation times to years (i.e. how many years on average between parents and offspring). This is a nice reference: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature213...

Hello, I submitted this. Thanks for your concern. I've been lurking on Hacker News since ~2014 when I was in college. I made an account and started posting because people on the board have something of an interest in biology and genetics (for example this story on cancer detection from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035147 ) and I wanted to contribute. I posted this because the NIH funds a lot of research related to that and this story reports on a massive change to the NIH, which seemed worthy of discussion.

The data are public! Why don't you show it?

This was old news decades ago[0] but people don’t want to hear it.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intell... an editorial written to tell the public that this is not some shocking, fringe claim. You can follow links from the page for the full text.

Thanks for that link. The Wikipedia article you referenced says "This view is now considered discredited by mainstream science."

There are still papers being written about how those analyses were flawed: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2319496121

Why do you think that research universities should go bankrupt? What do you think should replace their function in society?

People doing research funded by grants, rather than having 50% of their grant leeched off by a bloated administrative complex coasting on pedigree.

"Having 50% of their grant leeched off" is not how indirects work.

You know what's a much bigger problem for people doing research? That the budget for a non-modular R01 from the NIH hasn't changed since the Clinton administration.

When the government hires a consultant, the rate charged is usually 2-3x the salary of that consultant; 50% is well below the 100-200+% rates you see all the time in business.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about: the percentage of indirects that goes to admin costs has been capped by the feds to 26% for _ages_.

Where will these people conduct their research?

bloated administrative complex aka the shared mass spec. people can simply buy all the expensive lab equipment as needed instead of sharing it!

This is a huge cut. Back of the envelope calculations for UCLA (a big research university with public finance information): $200M cut in operating revenue.

In 2023, UCLA had $270M in indirect costs [1] and they negotiated a rate of 57% with the NIH [2]. So, they had about $473M in direct costs. The new rate would be 15%, which is ~$71M. $270M-$71M = $200M.

[1] Page 24: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-22-23 [2] https://ocga.research.ucla.edu/facilities-and-administrative...

(Reposting from a less popular posting)

This is a huge cut. Back of the envelope calculations for UCLA (a big research university with public finance information): $200M cut in operating revenue.

In 2023, UCLA had $270M in indirect costs [1] and they negotiated a rate of 57% with the NIH [2]. So, they had about $473M in direct costs. The new rate would be 15%, which is ~$71M. $270M-$71M = $200M.

[1] Page 24: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-22-23 [2] https://ocga.research.ucla.edu/facilities-and-administrative...