The Man They Tried to Silence Now Runs the NIH — And He Just Declared a Second Scientific Revolution
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya's May Imprimis essay isn't a victory lap. It's a blueprint for dismantling scientific authority — from inside the building that once tried to destroy him.
Five years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was a Stanford professor whose name landed on a federal blacklist. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, argued that we could protect the vulnerable without locking down the healthy, and was rewarded with a smear campaign run out of the director’s office at the very agency he now leads. Francis Collins called him and his colleagues “fringe epidemiologists.” Emails later showed the NIH’s own leadership wanted “a quick and devastating published takedown.”
That is the man who now sits as Director of the National Institutes of Health. And in the May issue of Imprimis, he laid out exactly what he intends to do with the chair they once used against him.
This is the blueprint.
The Sentence That Frames Everything
Bhattacharya opens not with grievance but with history:
“At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority.”
Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole argument in one line. For centuries, a handful of ecclesiastical powers decided what was true — whether the moons of Jupiter actually moved. The scientific revolution took that power away from the authorities and handed it to anyone with a telescope and an honest method.
Then he delivers the indictment we lived through:
“Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people... have the power to say what is true or false in science.”
Agency directors. WHO officials. Journal editors. A new priesthood, issuing rulings, excommunicating heretics. Everyone reading Rational Ground already knows this in their bones, because we were the heretics. What’s new is that the person saying it out loud is no longer shouting from the outside. He is holding the keys.
He Defends the Institution Before He Reforms It
Here’s where Bhattacharya proves he is a builder and not a wrecker. Before he lists a single problem, he makes “a historical defense of the National Institutes of Health.”
And it’s a real one. Heart attack prevention. Nearly every cancer treatment we have. Therapies for rheumatoid arthritis that were science fiction when he was a med student in the 1990s. A livable future for cystic fibrosis patients who used to die in their teens. Two cures for sickle cell anemia. The NIH funds 85 percent of biomedical research in this country, and the return on that bet has been staggering.
This matters. The easy move for a man treated the way he was treated is to burn the house down. Bhattacharya’s move is the harder, more conservative one: the institution is worth saving. It has simply stopped doing its job.
His proof is brutal in its simplicity. Since 2010, despite historic sums poured into medical research, American life expectancy has flatlined while Sweden’s kept climbing. We are spending more and getting less. “Make America Healthy Again,” he writes, “can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people.”
Then he names the three diseases eating science from the inside.
Problem One: The Replication Crisis
Were eggs trying to kill you, or are they a superfood? Depends which decade you ask. Bhattacharya didn’t eat an egg until he was 19, and when he finally did it was a tasteless egg-white omelet, because the 1990s had decided yolks were poison.
That whiplash isn’t a quirk. It’s the replication crisis. Scientists publish, the TV repeats it, your doctor adopts it — and then someone runs the same experiment and gets a different answer. Which means a lot of what we “know” simply isn’t true.
His former Stanford colleague John Ioannidis put it in a 2005 title that has aged into prophecy: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Bhattacharya’s diagnosis of why is bracing for anyone who treats “peer-reviewed” as a synonym for “true”:
“Peer reviewers do not double check the data of a study. They just look at it and then accept or reject it. Peer review is not a measure of scientific truth; it is basically a measure of approval by an editor.”
How many times during Covid were we told to sit down and shut up because something was “peer-reviewed”? The Director of the NIH just told you that phrase is a measure of editorial approval, not fact.
The fix is refreshingly concrete. Fund replication directly. Treat someone replicating your work as an honor, not a threat. The Autism Data Science Initiative already builds in replication teams. And in a move so obvious it’s maddening nobody did it sooner, PubMed is getting a replication button — click a paper and see whether anyone ever reproduced it.
Problem Two: Scientific Stagnation
The second disease is that we get less and less discovery per research dollar than we did fifty years ago. In the 1960s, each breast-cancer paper bought real gains in survival. Today, per paper, the gains are a fraction of that.
Why? Because the system rewards safe, derivative work. Bhattacharya ran a fascinating study tracing every new word and phrase in biomedicine year by year, and found that NIH support for genuinely new ideas collapsed after 2000. Meanwhile the average age of a scientist’s first NIH grant climbed from the mid-30s in 1980 to the mid-40s today — even though the young are where new ideas live. He quotes Max Planck’s grim line that new truths win only because “their opponents eventually die,” and then says the quiet part: our job is to make sure that stops being how progress happens.
His solution borrows from Silicon Valley. Fund bold bets that might fail, because a productive failure teaches you something and the next swing pays off. The old “payline” system scored grants mostly on methodological safety and quietly strangled innovation. The new Unified Funding Strategy empowers reviewers to greenlight bleeding-edge work that might not pan out but would be a genuine breakthrough if it did. Judge the portfolio by whether Americans get healthier — not by how many tidy projects cleared the bar.
Problem Three: Funding Concentration
The third disease is a cartel. About one-third of all NIH grant money flows to roughly 20 institutions. Not because the only good scientists are at those 20 schools, but because of how the money is structured. Grants cover direct research costs and indirect “facilities” costs, so the dollars pool wherever the electron microscopes already are — and inside those elite labs, the senior people get first crack while the young and hungry wait their turn.
Bhattacharya’s fix is to sever the link between research money and facilities money, forcing a real market where institutions outside the top 20 can compete. Spread the seed, and you spread the science — because NIH money is the magnet that pulls in everything else.
Why This One Lands Differently
You could read all of this as dry administrative reform. Paylines and indirect-cost formulas don’t exactly trend. But step back and look at what’s actually being proposed.
Every one of the three fixes attacks the same enemy: concentrated authority. Replication takes truth back from the editors and hands it to anyone willing to redo the work. Funding new ideas takes the future back from the gatekeepers who only bet on the safe and the senior. Breaking up the funding cartel takes opportunity back from the 20 anointed institutions. The man who opened by declaring that science should have no authority is methodically dismantling the machinery of authority, one lever at a time, from inside the building that once tried to destroy him.
That is the story here. Not revenge. Reform that follows directly from the principle they punished him for defending.
We spent the Covid years being told that “trust the science” meant trust the people who held the offices. Bhattacharya is offering the opposite definition, and he’s offering it as policy: gold-standard science is science that is replicable, that lives at the bleeding edge, and that backs promising scientists wherever they happen to be — not whoever happens to hold the microphone.
He calls it a second scientific revolution. After the last five years, we’ll take it. And we’ll be watching to see that the levers actually move.
Read Jay Bhattacharya’s full essay, “Launching a Second Scientific Revolution,” in Imprimis (Hillsdale College), May 2026.
Other articles in Rational Ground
This is all very well but a little humility would not go amiss. Science is vastly broader than medical research. There’s no replication problem in mathematics. There’s also no diminishing return on investment either as far as I can see. One branch of physics has been spinning its wheels with string theory but another has launched a new era of astronomical observation through gravitational wave detection. I will let the chemists and biologists speak for themselves but I am very tired of hearing the notable problems of medical research presented as a crisis of science. That’s simply absurd.