NIH Director Promotes New Scientific Revolution

Once attacked by the former NIH Director,
Jay Bhattacharya is working to overhaul
perverse incentives in the agency.

by David Coppedge, Editor

Everyone likes to point to the Scientific Revolution in Galileo’s Day as the triumph of reason over entrenched belief. Many who lionize Galileo’s courage, and that of many other early scientists, assume that everything has improved since the “scientific method” (whatever that is) became the standard for knowledge generation. We must not be naive. Humans, including scientists, have an unlimited capacity for laziness, habit, and groupthink.

In this address at Hillsdale College, Dr Jay Bhattacharya proposes changes he is making at the NIH to reduce those detrimental traits in today’s Big Science Cartel.

Launching a Second Scientific Revolution (Jay Bhattacharya, Hillsdale College Imprimis, May 2026). This address to the students at Hillsdale College, given 28 April 2026, was printed in the May issue of Imprimis and mailed out to subscribers in early June.

Dr Bhattacharya is not bitter against his predecessor at the NIH, Francis Collins (see SCT article). During the Biden administration, he and other signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, advocated focused prevention on the most vulnerable population during the Covid-19 pandemic and avoiding lockdowns and shutdowns. The signers were mercilessly and severely criticized by the Big Science and Big Media establishments.

The consensus preached by Dr Anthony Fauci was to lock down, shut down, wear masks everywhere, make untested vaccination universal, and isolate everyone indoors. This policy, shown in hindsight to be highly destructive to national economies and student mental health, was built on lies from entrenched bureaucrats in high places.

The current status quo is not entirely unlike the proverbial church authorities who persecuted Galileo and refused to look through his telescope (but see our Galileo biography). Dr Bhattacharya aims to change that. He begins with praise for the NIH:

But before I go on, I want to make a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health, which I now lead. The history of the NIH is incredible. Almost every modern advance in biomedicine has, at its root, an NIH investment. NIH is, by far, the single largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, providing 85 percent of funding in every single area of biomedicine.

He offers several examples of great successes emanating from the NIH. But for the bulk of his address, he points out three areas of concern in Big Science (our term, not his, referring to the power brokers in science like academic deans, journal editors and lobbyists). For each weakness, he offers new policies that will breathe fresh life into biomedical science—and, by extension, all science. His article is worth reading in full, but here is a summary of his three criticisms of the status quo:

1. The Replication Crisis

CEH has reported frequently on the Replication Crisis, sometimes called the Reproducibility Crisis (examples here and here). Bhattacharya differentiates between the two terms. Replication, he says, is following the original scientist’s methods and getting the same result. Reproducibility is using a different method and arriving at the same answer to a question. Both are desirable in science, but replication is at an all-time low. He intends to offer incentives for scientists to do the vital work of replicating and reproducing published research.

In passing, Bhattacharya has some choice words about the practices that led to the Replication Crisis, starting with these eye-opening statements:

How do we address this? We begin by recognizing the fact that most ideas hatched by scientists do not work or are not true. That is completely normal in science and always has been. John Ioannidis, a former colleague of mine at Stanford and one of the most frequently cited scientists in the world, wrote a paper in 2005 entitled, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” He was correct, and the reason for this is that science is hard. That is why it is frustrating to be a scientist—and why, to be a good scientist, an essential requirement is epistemic humility.

We also need to recognize that just because a study is published in a prestigious journal, it does not mean the study is true—not even if it is peer reviewed! Peer reviewers do not double check the data of a study. They just look at it and then accept or reject it. Peer review is not a measure of scientific truth; it is basically a measure of approval by an editor. It is not meaningless, because presumably the editor has some expertise in the subject. But it is in no way a confirmation of truth.

For more on John Ioannidis and his myth-busting paper, see our 29 October 2014 article.

2. Scientific Stagnation

This NIH Director laments the fact that modern biomedical research is stuck in a rut. Breakthroughs that actually improve people’s health are becoming fewer and farther between as opposed to trends in the 1940s. The reason, he argues, is that science incentivizes primarily senior scientists at prestigious labs. These scientists tend to be less open to new hypotheses. He intends to change the grant funding policy with incentives for younger scientists who tend to be open to new ideas, even if they come from smaller universities without expensive equipment. After all, breakthroughs should not be a function of habits and locations.

To address this problem, the NIH needs to adopt something like the Silicon Valley financing approach, in which young people attract investors and start their own firms. Even if those firms fail, they often do so in a productive way—a way that pays off when investors bank on those smart young people again based on a useful discovery made through the failure. Similarly, the NIH needs to start funding ideas on the bleeding edge of science—ideas that may not work but that offer the greatest chance of advancing science.

3. Funding Concentration

Another weakness in previous NIH policies was concentrating funding to big-name institutions. A third of grant funding, he says, went to only 20 leading universities or labs. His plan is to “sever the link in the NIH grants between the direct money for research and the indirect money for facilities.” He believes this new approach will create a “dynamic market” for science and will “supercharge science across the country because NIH seed money attracts other investments.”

By addressing these three weakness in current practice at the NIH, Dr Bhattacharya hopes to ignite a new Scientific Revolution.

We can solve the nation’s health problems if we establish gold standard science. When I say gold standard science, I mean science that is replicable, at the bleeding edge, and supports scientists with new and promising ideas wherever they are. Achieving these goals will amount to launching a second scientific revolution.

Time will tell if these new approaches will succeed as he believes they will.

What would the policy changes at the NIH mean to the Creation-Evolution Controversy?

Regarding #1, if the Darwinians had to replicate the Cambrian Explosion in the lab, or use realistic methods to watch life originate by chance that other scientists could reproduce, or make a meteor kill dinosaurs, evolution would wither and die for lack of evidence.

Remember how at the Kitzmiller trial in 2005, the lawyers pushed the idea that evolutionists had oodles more peer-reviewed papers than ID scientists did? Read that quote again under point 1. Peer Review is meaningless. It simply perpetuates the Darwin Party’s power. All the published literature on Darwinian evolution, cosmic evolution, and the whole gamut of evolutionary thought means nothing! Scientific hypotheses and theories should be assumed false unless proved by observation, experiment and replication. Even then, the conclusions are only tentative, subject to further revision or replacement.

Regarding #2, Darwinians are clearly returning to their own vomit. It’s time for young scientists to step up, especially those with degrees in engineering. They know the requirements for building complex systems. That helps make them immune to just-so storytelling.

Regarding #3, Absolutely: the power of funding to the Darwin Party censors must end. Help young ID scientists with good ideas have a chance at the public till.

Bring on the revolution.

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David Coppedge, B.S. Education, B.S. Physics, founded Creation-Evolution Headlines in late 2000 as a way to share science news he was encountering at NASA. It has grown into a highly-trusted source of news and commentary critical of the pro-Darwin consensus, providing analysis of breaking news of interest to creationists and evolutionists, without the Darwin spin. He has authored over 7,000 entries at CEH since its inception.