Jay Bhattacharya

If someone comes to you and says, oh, Ross, I'm going to try to replicate your paper, you're going to view it as a threat because the culture is wrong.

If someone comes to a scientist and says, oh, I want to replicate your paper or your idea, that is actually an honor.

And we can put metrics around that so that people at the scientist level get credit for that.

I think the NIH can, under my leadership, we're working to try to do all three of those things.

Okay.

The primary reason why, there's many whys, but I think for me, the most important reason why is that that research has not improved the health of minority populations.

Minority populations have had flatline life expectancy.

They continue to have very, very high rates of chronic disease.

And none of that research has made any difference whatsoever in addressing those health needs.

And I think— What kind of research are you talking about?

I'm not going to give you a particular person's thing.

I'll just give you a prototypical kind of example.

A paper that says that—

You know, structural racism is the reason why African-Americans have higher death rates from heart attacks, right?

That's a hypothesis one might have.

The reason why that does not actually translate to a better health for African-Americans is because it's not science.

Think about the word structural racism, the idea of structural racism.

That means that it's pervasive.

That's the hypothesis, that every aspect of society is affected by this sort of like animus that people have against African-Americans, right?

And if every aspect of society is corrupted by this, including the medical care systems, then how can you have a control group in testing the hypothesis?