After working in a research institute for the past several years, traveling to numerous continents and meeting with Nobel Prize winners and scientists from all around the world, I’ve decided to dedicate this blog to The Secret.

Day after day, the same words have been whispered to me by those scientists who appear to be in the know. What is it? The dirty little secret seems to be that the academic research model, lovingly referred to as little science, is being acknowledged to have done more to hurt the progress of medical research than almost anything else imaginable.

According to the hundreds of scientists with whom I have spoken, the problems revolve around this little science concept and a very close knit club of friends who appear to guarantee the continuation of each other’s programs.

Although this depiction would definitely come under the heading of scathing indictment, you must realize that I’m just the writer, not a scientist and not a doctor. (I don’t even play one on TV.) I’m only repeating the recurring theme that has been communicated to me month after month, week after week, day after day for the past seven years.

From the NCI website:

Richard Nixon declared war on cancer when the American people made clear their desire for a cure for the second-leading cause of death in the United States. President Nixon responded during his January 1971 State of the Union address: “I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.”

Although this author was still a very young man in 1971, and Watergate had not become a national incident yet; we all hoped that Nixon would lead our country to the cure. Interestingly, since 1997 alone, approximately $45,000,000,000 has been budgeted for the NCI, the entire budget for the country of Greece, and no one believes we are close to the cure.

How can we have invested that much money in the past ten years alone and still be so far from conquering this iniquitous malady? Maybe that question is naive. The pundits blame it on the broken system, the making of individual grants to individual scientists to enable them to buy their equipment and hire their lab techs and keep their data on their personal computers equals small science.

If each scientist is rewarded for trying to find his or her secret sauce and discouraged from sharing that discovery by rewarding that secrecy over and over again, our efforts to find the elusive cure will continue to be stifled.

So, for all of you who do not believe that this is the way things are in science in these United States, please comment below . . . because I’m really very curious about this topic