Bill Maher

30% of the indirect money, meaning the additional funds that come from NIH, go to a very small subset of universities across the country for big facilities, genomics facilities, proteomic facilities, which means that the laboratories there have what many people view as a bit of an unfair advantage.

So if we really wanted to equally distribute intellectual growth and we want to equally distribute scientific growth, we would distribute that money more equally across the country.

Now, my colleagues at Stanford are going to hate me for saying this, but it's kind of weird, right?

I mean, if you're at the University of Colorado Boulder and you're a graduate student, shouldn't you have the opportunity to do the most cutting-edge experiments there?

And just because you're not at Stanford, you shouldn't be hindered.

Yeah, and I think the redistribution of some of these funds would be good.

Very liberal.

Great place, great science.

Yeah, I mean, they had some unfortunate incidents there.

I think it was like some sort of...

a pseudo-terrorist attack?

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail or something at some protester.

I mean, Boulder seems like a nice little peaceful town.

That's right.

I know what you're referring to.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm thinking of a separate incident, a more recent incident that was related to a public protest.

Yeah, redistribution of resources across the country would be great.

And so I talked to Jay about this today, and he said that one of the initiatives is to start creating national centers that get a large percentage of funding so that

scientists and people running clinical studies from anywhere in the country can go there and use the state-of-the-art tools to be able to do their experiments anywhere.