I deleted my other post b/c of an inaccuracy, but ultimately acc to tax docs the school had a net inflow of $1.2b in ‘22 & $218m in ‘23, (most from tuition) so yes more accurately, I would like if the school adjusted the spending priorities of their pool for the year, and they have the $ to do so

Anecdotally, Yale has offered bridge funding for faculty who have grants stripped for this shenaniganery, so it is possible.

I don’t mean to be a stick in the mud about this, but they could be doing so much more than they are to support the research community.

Princeton’s admin, I agree, has been an exemplar on their handling of crises over the past 5 years. I’m quite impressed with them.

Apologies, but I don’t think that supporting a university means absolving them of their bad behavior.

CU has been monomaniacal about wringing every dollar from students/faculty/staff with very little support. Ex - defunded labs are apparently still being charged rent by CU for their floor space.

I think its possible to hold 2 ideas at the same time:
1) Universities and Academics should stand together against this absurd gov’t.
2) The largest private landowner in Manhattan should dip into its coffers to support the academic community instead of rescinding profships

This isn’t an or situ.

The school has been non-stop griping about how the endowment is not a slush fund and is fragmented etc etc

The tldr is they don’t want to let go of a penny from their dragon’s hoard. It makes clear that they don’t care about research beyond its ability to bring money/prestige into the university.

That’s all not to diminish the work that academics (such as myself) do, nor to excuse the horrendous pricing mechanisms that these companies exercise, but to point out the labor they add in refining these drugs and doing clinical trials.

And that’s with minimal care about a mouse’s quality of life where a lethal event is unfortunate but not terrible.

Human studies are much more strict about care/outcomes and involve many more participants and clinicians.

I mean yes and no. I agree that PoC is difficult to get to and involves significant time and energy.

That said, my most clinical facing work has stopped at testing compounds in a few dozen mice to show efficacy.

Academic research is almost all “proof of concept”, so not a lot of consideration to better binding efficiencies/ general side effects/rare and bad adverse effects.

Pharma companies turn the PoC into a drug that can pass the safety testing and will cause minimal harm vs benefit in people.

Across cancers not liked to environmental injury it seems like the highest lifetime risk for a cancer is ~1%. A quick geometric distribution shows that our vamp would have an ~80% chance of living 2 or more lifetimes before getting cancer with those odds. Sadly that is far from immortal.

I also wonder how much the indirect costs come from the university in hcol regions subsidizing the students stipends. I’m a student in NYC & and I’m paid over the NIH fellowship rates by the university as an employee (I have a W2)

Lastly big thanks to the authors - its an interesting model and has its own interesting conclusions.
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Ofc this is all back of the napkin math, and their really detailed model makes some assumptions that are not true (ie the only mutations are random), but even if we’re off by a factor of 10 this means our own machinery could help vamps dodge cancer for 2000 yrs (effectively immortal)

See fig 2 for way more detail: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Given that two of these schools are the largest landowners in NYC and have endowments larger than small nations, part of me would like if they were prevented from siphoning off NIH money for overhead. But the impact to less well funded schools is terrible