Jay Bhattacharya

something that I should invest in.

Those kinds of drug repurposing possibilities, I think, are a really, really important potential tool for addressing the health problems of the country while simultaneously doing it in a way that doesn't break the bank.

The biggest power really is to point to a problem and get everyone to agree that it is a problem and then inspire people to bring their ingenuity to solve the problem.

I can put out...

guide notices, priority statements that say, look, this is a priority for the NIH.

And if I'm sufficiently convincing that this should be a priority, that I can get the various institute directors and scientific directors, many, many brilliant people all across the NIH to agree that this should be a priority, then they'll start to make decisions about their grant portfolios to align with that.

One thing I've done

I think is a really important change is I've given the scientific directors of the NIH more leeway in crafting their portfolios to meet the strategic aims of the institutes and of the country.

In the old days of how the NIH, many parts of the NIH decided what grants to fund, you have the scientific review.

So like you have 100,000 applications, tens of thousands of scientists around the country sit around the table deciding what to score each application.

The scoring, and I sat on scientific reviews for decades before I became an ice director, it really strongly emphasized the methods.

Like they would tend to score highly projects that looked like they were likely to work, but underemphasized innovation.

I saw so many grant proposals where new ideas, I didn't know if they work or not, would get killed by the group because they didn't know it would work.

I've given the folks who run the institutes now the capacity to craft a portfolio where they take innovative ideas with the goal of, I'm not going to judge them if, like say you have a portfolio of 50 projects, 49 of them fail, and the 50th cure is type 2 diabetes.

I'm going to view that as a successful portfolio.

I mean, of course, there's like the chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes and obesity, if you want to call it a chronic illness, certainly a chronic condition that can have all kinds of effects that make people's lives worse.

But also, I'd like to take chronic Lyme.

We've underinvested, frankly, in the science in ways that could actually help patients get good answers.

You go to the doctor and the doctor doesn't know what to say because the science isn't there and they just don't believe you.

And then the next step from that is because I don't know a physical thing that causes it,