Health Research can be needlessly expensive and poorly managed affair in which the goal is often more the pursuit of grant money than it is the pursuit of science. I have been working in this field for decades in Teaching Hospitals and HMOs and I was witness to waste, mismanagement and fraud. Sometimes, there was even some actual scientific research.
In one project I saw $50 million flitted away on meetings, travel, new hiring, web sites and administration in a project funded under HHS that produced virtually nothing of value. When the grant came up for renewal, they lied and won renewal.
A grant belongs to an investigator with little or no supervision and little or no oversight as to the management of an enterprise that the grant is funding. There is little coordination between various research projects and the infrastructure of research: software, research data resources and so on is created again and again by the instigators who are more interested in ownership of the process than what the process might produce.
You can't buy science by the pound and you can't expect novel ideas and solutions to arise from a system that is built to defend individual status and power. Pumping in more money won't fix a thing.
One Senior Research Scientist put it to me this way: "Research is all Politics".
The Director of a Health Research Center in a major HMO put it to me another way: "The business of this Center is to get as much grant money as possible."
I say that the business at hand is science. The grant money should be the means, not the end.
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