Since beginning his career as an engineer for Douglas Aircraft, Frederick Sachs has been a research fellow at NIH's biophysics laboratory, and served as both an NIH physiology reviewer and NSF consultant. His most recent work, as professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Buffalo, pinpointed a protein in tarantula venom as a potential drug candidate to treat atrial fibrillation. In a provocative Opinion, Sachs proffers that funneling more money into the NIH budget has not yielded a proportionate amount of scientific progress. "The money is getting wasted," says Sachs. "I don't know where it's going, but where it's not going is to produce more scientific information and papers."
As a reporter in Long Island, New York, for more than 20 years, Julia C. Mead covered crime, the arts, and politics for local publications and as a stringer for The New York Times. In May of this year ...