Thanks. Thank you David for those kind remarks and thanks for everybody for coming out here. It is an absolute honor to be here and to see the success of the Journal of Public Health. The Journal of Public Health has just been... I frankly, I'm jealous I've not got to participate more directly in it. I mean, I was... but it's... I wanted to talk today about a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and that is about the future of public health and with the theme of how open science, free inquiry, and scientific humility, I think are... or let me just put it in a hopeful way. I think are the future of public health. A less hopeful way is that that's an aspirational goal. But I'll say that if we are to have a future public health that is successful, it has to embrace those three ideas of open science, free inquiry, and scientific humility.
I want to start with just some observations first about science and public trust. And you know, as the director of the NIH, I have to say it's frankly an awe-inspiring job because the history of the NIH is incredible, right? A century of investment in research that has fundamentally transformed our understanding of biology and is at the core of almost every single technology, every single idea in public health has at its basis some role that NIH or NIH-funded research has played. And I believe fundamentally in that power to solve problems for people, or else it wouldn't have taken this job. The mission of the NIH is to support science and biomedical sciences that improves health and longevity. And frankly, you listen to that mission, you think, 'This is going to be... Jay, you got to have the easiest job in all of DC.' I'm looking here at Bob Redfield who had one of the hardest jobs in DC, the head of the CDC during the COVID pandemic. And I'm like, yeah, this should be much easier. But it strangely hasn't been such an easy job the last couple of years.
Because, you know, I could go out and brag about the incredible progress we've made. We now have two cures for sickle cell anemia, both at their base funded by research that the NIH supported. We have advances in treatment for cystic fibrosis that has turned the disease from something that was a death sentence for people in their teens to now where people with cystic fibrosis will live a long, healthy life. You have huge advances in cancer, heart disease. And you know, you could point to those and say, well, look, these are tangible evidence that NIH investments are worth it, that they actually do achieve the goal of improving health and longevity for people. Yet at the same time, we all know and we all sense that there is in some ways a real crisis happening in the relationship between people and science. That in some ways, during the pandemic and maybe even before, the way that people think about science has changed from something where it's a source of incredible awe that has a chance of improving our lives to something different.
And you could point to real things. You could point to, for instance, the flattening of life expectancy for the last decade. Since 2010, there have been no improvement in life expectancy in this country. A huge collapse during COVID, and only recently you started to see a turnaround. I'm not going to get into COVID much more than this other than just to note that it was very divisive. Understatement of the world, right? So it was... and you know, I think that... I'm now looking at Andrew Nomer here who's a good friend of mine now. But like, you know, we had a debate during COVID and that's how we got to be good friends. And I think that I would love for science to be like that. But it turned into something much more bitter. And I think what happened is that in the aftermath of the pandemic, we face a real problem where the close trust that people have for science and the kinds of structures that allowed open scientific conversation and debate and discussion in good faith in some sense are on the verge of being broken, if not they're already broken.
And what I wanted to talk about today is four principles that I think have the potential to heal that distrust, connect that divide, and deliver the real promises that science has for advancing the real well-being of people. If we can actually do it. And I'm delighted to be here celebrating this journal because I believe that the journal has these four principles at heart. And they are: one, open science. Research has to be accessible, reproducible, and transparent. Research has to be... I'm going to defend all of these in a bit but I just figure, you know, preview them up front. Two, you have to have open scientific discussion. Scientific disagreement deserves pride of place in scientific institutions. And there should be no devastating takedowns by scientific leadership. Rather, we should be fostering goodwill where people of good faith can disagree about scientific matters in ways that generate ideas to resolve those disagreements productively.
Three, we need free speech and free inquiry. We need to encourage scientific engagement with the public rather than suppressing it. It's not a threat to have non-scientists weigh in on scientific matters, and we shouldn't view that as a threat to science but rather as something that is part of the scientific enterprise, which is direct engagement with non-scientists on matters of scientific importance. And then fourth, there needs to be... we need scientific humility. Researchers should embrace uncertainty and the limitations of available evidence wholeheartedly. Okay. Any disagreements about any of this? I'm talking to a friendly audience. It's totally unfair. Okay. So first, that's the outline. Let me just go into some of the... I apologize. I had a lot of thoughts for you guys. So I'm just going to go into them.
So first, let me just make a high-level observation about how science functions even at its best. Right? So when I was a medical student a very long time ago, you can tell from my gray hair, one of my very favorite professors, he handed me a textbook and he said, 'Jay, you need to read this textbook.' It was Harrison's Internal Medicine. Tony Fauci was one of the editors. I'm like, 'Wow, this is cool. I'm going to learn medicine.' And he said to me, 'Jay, but while you're reading this textbook, you should know that half of what's in here is wrong.' Anyone in the room have this experience in medical school? So like you all both did exactly what I did. I'm looking at Joe Marine here and I know he did exactly the same thing. He's like looking at this going, 'Prof, which half is wrong?' And he said very reasonably, 'I don't know.' [laughter] That's how science works, right? Fundamentally, there are a range of ideas that we have in science, some of which we know for certain, much more certainly, right? So we know that the theory of special relativity is right because it's repeatedly been confirmed by rigorous scientific evaluation and test. Others which we hold much more provisionally, and others which we just sort of guess at. And it is perfectly normal that even our most cherished beliefs in science may get overturned later by future advances. So every scientific idea then is held with some degree of humility.
Right? These are not religious truths. These are truths that are held provisionally, and the extent to which we should believe them is based on the level of rigorous scientific scrutiny to which they've been subjected. The problem of the first scientific revolution was that you had high ecclesiastical authority getting to decide matters of physical truth for all of society. Right? That was the fundamental problem. You have essentially a high ecclesiastical apparatus that could tell... well, do the moons of Jupiter move or not? Rather than a whole bunch of clever people with telescopes. And the key to the first scientific revolution was an epistemological inversion, a social epistemological inversion where rather than authority deciding what was true or false about physical matters, it's people with telescopes getting to decide truth. It was a democratization of the power to decide what was true or false as a matter for whole society rooted in scientific experimentation.
Right. So that's the first scientific revolution. My diagnosis for what is a problem I think with science today, and I think this was the basis for the philosophy for the journal that you all lead and are supporting and are honoring, is that we face a similar problem today but it's not high ecclesiastical authority. It's high scientific authority. Right? You have a few people, maybe they're the head of the NIH or something. God forbid that I would be able to do this. In fact, I can't. But I, you know, I should not get to decide what is true or false for society on matters of physical reality, right? Does a drug work or does it not work? Is this some scientific mechanism the right mechanism for thinking about some scientific phenomenon? I should not get to decide that. Like, I can help set up systems that support scientific investigation on those matters, but I can't decide those facts for myself. Instead, it's scientists conducting experiments that should decide that.
What I'm seeking at the NIH is a second scientific revolution, an inversion of that epistemological problem that I think we have in society where a few... and this is true not just in one field but in field after field after field. You see top journal editors get to decide what's true. Very powerful scientists get to decide what's true and people fall in line because they want their careers to advance. They want to be able to get the promotions that they want. And as a result, the power to decide what's true lies in the hands of relatively few people. Even brilliant people, it's not good to place that kind of power. So you've heard me talk about replication over and over and over again. The reason I am emphasizing replication is because I think that is the key to solving this problem and inducing the second scientific revolution. Displacing the power of relatively few people to decide what was true or false on scientific matters for society and instead democratizing it. Letting other scientists look at your beliefs, put them to the test and see if they agree with you.
And if you have that open conversation, then what you have is a situation where you no longer have high scientific authority. You actually have a revolution in science that democratizes the ability to do that. There's two paths that I can see with this, one good and one bad. Okay. So let me start with the bad path and the thing I'm trying to avoid at the NIH. The bad path is... actually before I tell you about the bad path, let me just tell you about the pathology here. All right. So suppose I'm a top scientist, one can imagine, and I believe something I've published in a top scientific journal and my reputation is built on the publications of these top scientific journals. And you know, some other young punk scientist comes to me and says, 'Jay, I've looked at your data and I've collected data myself and I don't believe you. I don't agree with you. I've tried to replicate your work and I don't find the same thing you do. I want your papers retracted.' And so I'm going to view that young punk scientist as a threat to my career.
I'm going to view that act that is like fundamental to all of science, which is an act of other people examining my ideas and seeing if they agree with me based on their own data analysis, as somehow a challenge to my future. Right? You get a paper retracted, now you're a bad scientist. You get a challenge from somebody who says, 'No, no, I didn't find the same thing as you.' Now my reputation's destroyed. That's path one. And it's symptomatic. I think that's where we are currently, right? It's symptomatic of a situation where there's something wrong with science. Where the fundamental thing that we should be wanting as the basis for our epistemological understanding, like the basis for truth, which is other people looking at the same thing, finding the same thing as you, is somehow seen as problematic. We resist it. Path one. And so like when people talk about replication now, people talk about it as a policing action. Let's go find scientific fraud and end it.
Path two is a different path which is what I would love to see the NIH do and working toward, which is a path where replication is seen as an honor. When someone comes to me and says, 'Look Jay, I want to look at your idea and see if I agree with it. Can you share your data with me and see if I get the same answer?' Well, that should be seen as something as an active good, like it's good for me because my idea is now subject to replication and it should be seen as an active good for the scientists doing it because they're doing something that's really, really important for the scientific enterprise. So, you have sort of two paths to do. And I'll give you a touch point around this. There's a common fund proposal that I've been trying to get across the finish line called REPLICATES, which is essentially a mechanism for the NIH to encourage replication. And two times I've gone in front of the Council of Councils of the NIH which needs to say yes to it before I can move forward with it, and they've said no because they're afraid that we are on that first path, that the government will be in charge of which ideas to replicate.
And if the government's in charge of which ideas to replicate, well then I can use that power for political purposes. I can use that power to weaponize that power to take down my scientific enemies by siccing all the clever young people of the world on some scientific idea I don't like. Rather than the second path, which is let's encourage replication so that the culture of science changes in a healthier way. I think that's the challenge that I think we scientists now face. And this is why I just love the mission of the Journal of Public Health so much because it's firmly rooted in a desire to bring that second path, right? You allow people to publish openly. You have open peer review and there's just a conversation that happens. Andrew, you don't stomp stuff, right? Andrew's job isn't to stomp stuff that you... and Andrew, I know, publishes stuff he disagrees with. And that is a model for how we should be as scientific leaders.
Open science is part of the infrastructure of science, but it's also part of the infrastructure of public health. I wish I could stay for the conversation between Andrew and Bob that's going to come right after this, which would be fascinating, but I have a ridiculous job. So I have to... but let me justify the statement because public health and science are different, right? Public health is a practitioner's field that is rooted in science but is not purely scientific. It involves science communication. It involves real operational decisions. It's a very, very different thing. I now know from my terrible seven months at the CDC, which Bob was like, 'Why did they let him do that?' But it's a very, very different kind of job. So let me make a... I have to argue then for why I think science is not just important for... I'm sorry, replication and all the improvement of science and open inquiry is good not just for science but also for public health because it's a different beast.
So first, if you have open science as part of the infrastructure of public health, you expand the access to publicly funded research, right? So one of the things that I did very early on as NIH director is I sped up the open access policy where if the NIH funds research, anyone in the public should be able to get access to that immediately upon publication with no delay. Seems like an obvious thing. Taxpayers paid for the science, shouldn't taxpayers be able to get access to it? But for the longest time what you've had is scientific journals that have blocked access. Who's gone to a scientific journal and then seen that you have to pay $45 for like a five-page paper? Who's... you know, for... until I was... I mean it's just so frustrating. Like, the whole reason why the scientific journals are there are to foster discussion and access to scientific ideas and yet you have had these gatekeepers.
If you want a better way to undermine trust in science and in public health, then you... I can't think of one, right? So that necessity that scientific ideas that are... that should be openly out there for people to see, especially government-funded ones, is fundamental I think to starting to build trust in public health. The greater access accelerates research because you don't have to sneak around trying to get around the paywall. It allows independent replication because now you can actually see what people actually say. So you can actually have a chance of replicating them, find their protocols and so on. It helps clinicians evaluate evidence and it gives access to journals to smaller institutions. As a standard professor, I lost count of times of my friends at smaller institutions that didn't have access to some journal write to me and say, 'Jay, can you go get access to some paper?' And I shared it with them, right? That should never be... like everyone should have access to those papers. It's part of the common endowment of all humanity to have access to those scientific ideas, especially publicly funded science.
Okay. Second, you have to have access to things that are not just the papers themselves. We come to think of papers as the sort of unit of productivity of science. Right? This is how we decide how science advances, one paper at a time. Not one obituary at a time as Max Planck once said, but it's one paper at a time. And the problem is that the papers are... if you think of this philosophy of replication as the matter of truth in science, are actually only part of the... it's an articulation, hopefully a clean articulation of the idea that you're saying in science, but actually all the other things that went into it, the data, the code, the study protocols, all of that should also be as easily accessible as possible while still protecting human rights and human privacy protections, right? All of that should also be part of what's available for scientists. And if you have that, what you have is a public health apparatus that is subject to check by people who are interested, right? And so those kinds of strategies, they allow the building of trust by outside people who are not directly in charge of public health to check on public health.
Okay. The public health experts in the room are looking at me and I can tell you I felt this myself when I was acting director of the CDC for a while. 'Oh my god, I'm getting criticized by people outside on decisions that I'm making.' Right? And so that's... so in a sense there's like this tension between open science and public health, especially when there's matters that are real crises. The desire is to say just to take people and say, 'Look, you really do need to do this thing. Don't... if you're exposed to Ebola, you should be wearing the space suit, right? You should be doing these things carefully.' I mean I know that for a fact. And yet there are people out there saying things that I know are not untrue and I'm letting them say that as if I have some choice. And if I have open access to public... open access science including data and code and all that, they're going to have the tools to say that to support their point of view because they're reading it wrong.
Right. That's the danger in public health. I want to say that when we think about public health though, that in my view is a false dichotomy because we don't really have a choice, right? We live in a free society which is a good thing and that means that even if I have high authority on matters of public health, there are going to be people that disagree with me as the acting director of the CDC for many reasons, including that they disagree with me about my scientific interpretations. And they're going to be able to say that one way or the other despite all kinds of efforts. You can do censorship all you like, but there's going to be the Samizdat Prize. There's going to be open access journals. There's going to be all kinds of... there's going to be, you know, Great Barrington Declarations. Some horrible people will say things that drive the public health leaders mad. And that's just good. That's a normal part of how... in fact it's part of the genius of American society that we embrace that or allow that to happen.
So the choice isn't are those ideas going to be out there criticizing me as a public health leader. The choice is what information are they going to have when they're doing that criticism? Are they going to have access to the data, the code, all the information on which I make my scientific choices or my scientific decisions? Or are they going to think that we're hiding that from them? Those are the two possible alternatives. And so the argument I make for public health, free inquiry, free speech in public health is that if you want public health to work, you can't adopt a utopian authoritarian idea where I get to decide what you all think scientifically. Either we have this authoritarian thing where if you don't agree with me, you're going to distrust me and think all kinds of bad things about me and then you're not going to listen to me, or we'll have this... you disagree with me but we now have this basis, this data, protocols, open access journals from which we can start to have a constructive conversation. Those are the two choices. And to me, it's a no-brainer. A public health that works in a free society has to have that common basis for scientific discussion.
That is at the heart of the open science movement and of the journal that you all are supporting. I think it's fundamentally good for public health, as uncomfortable as it is for leaders of public health to have that... just to say that. Bob, I'm going to call you afterwards to see what you think about that. So just so you know. So free speech norms serve public health. Free speech norms subserve public health and they also serve science. Right? So it's impossible to know in advance what challenges there are going to be to scientific orthodoxy. This is why I was so unhappy with the... this idea that we should be censoring social media during the pandemic. Because I think scientific orthodoxy by its very nature thinks that whatever it believes is of the same epistemological standard as general relativity. It's not. And it defends those ideas it believes in with the same kind of vigor as general relativity, even though some of the scientific ideas it holds are not necessarily right.
In fact, if you think about all the heroes of science in the past, it's people who have toppled solid scientific orthodoxies. If you don't allow free speech, then there's no possibility of that kind of toppling, right? You have to allow that. Scientific institutions then should have enough confidence in its methods to allow conclusions to be questioned. Misinformation. I've addressed it to some degree. There's a very famous... you guys know about XKCD? All the geeks are nodding in the room. It's this comic strip by this guy Randall Munroe. He has one of my very famous comic strips. If I had a slide deck, I'd show you it. It's a single, very simple comic, one-panel comic where there's a man sitting at a computer at a desk. It's clearly late at night. And from back behind him there's, 'Honey, it's time to come to sleep,' his wife is telling him and he's like hunched over the computer and he's like yelling back, 'I can't, honey. Someone on the internet is wrong.' [laughter]
I mean, that's just normal. That 'someone on the internet is wrong' is funny but if the government gets that syndrome, it's a danger to society. Right? Because the science topics in science and public health are often very complicated. The scientists are going to misinterpret data, of course, the public will sometimes. But out of that process... I mean, you have poor interpretation of preliminary data, that's one reason for misinformation spreading. The scientific topics are complicated, that's another reason. Another is because there may be financial incentives to spread misinformation, that's all true. There could also be political bias, like there's some political pressure to think scientifically one way or another. And so you have all of that. The thing I'd say is that the idea that somehow governments and people in government are somehow immune to that and are therefore able to tell the difference fairly between misinformation and actual information is equally ridiculous. We are all subject to all of those biases.
And so to set up a Ministry of Truth who's able to tell the difference routinely between misinformation and truth and thereby enforce that we only have publicly disseminated the truth is a recipe for scientific and public health disaster because inevitably the people that run the Ministry of Truth, who are subject to the same biases that I just talked about, are going to latch on to bad things but then they have the power to stop other people from talking. It's bad for science and public health. And so the restrictions on information sharing inevitably undermine trust. You know, when I was little, I remember there were these campaigns about banned books. You remember this? Like libraries would have lists of banned books and inevitably the libraries that would have lists of banned books would have them. And of course, I would go seek out the banned books because that's what we all did. That's the American spirit. So I would go read them. If you say to the public you're not supposed to think this idea, I guarantee you there are people who that's the exact idea that they're going to want to go read and see.
Public health institutions then earn confidence by making the strongest case they can, showing the evidence behind it, and then allowing the case to be challenged. Right. There was an incident when I was acting CDC director having to do with a method... this is, I'm sorry to go deep in the weeds of this geekiness but I can sense with this audience you guys are all into the geekiness so I'll just do it. There's a statistical methodology called test-negative design that is commonly used to try to measure efficacy of certain vaccines. As an epidemiologist and as a health economist, I have statistical problems with the methodology because in particular there are assumptions about the methodology about the control groups that are used that I think are not actually accurate. Right? That's my scientific view. I'm just my honest scientific view. I know there are people who disagree with me about that, but that's my honest scientific view. And I said to the CDC scientists, I don't agree with this methodology. That ended up in the Washington Post and that was fine. I mean, I expected that. It's supposed to end up in these kinds of fights are supposed to end up somewhere.
But what actually hurt me was this idea that I was censoring the science behind this disagreement. Because I wasn't, right? Those scientists were free to publish their paper wherever they wanted to. In fact, they ended up publishing in JAMA Network. I disagree with the editors that said there was good science, but that's a different matter, right? They were free to publish the science and now you can have the... and I brought in Martin Kulldorff to give a grand rounds at the CDC to discuss his view of test-negative design which is closer to mine and then there were also other scientists there who disagreed with him who had a discussion about the validity of test-negative design as applied. I've put you all to sleep, but you can see that what my point... the leaning into this scientific discussion is the right thing to do in this context, I believe. Right? And you know, if it puts people to sleep, then we've probably done the right thing because like now we're in the scientific weeds and the fight that we're supposed to have.
And so I think, you know, things like the Disinformation Governance Board which the Biden administration had. I mean, what they essentially do, the effect that they have, rather than this approach of trying to open up scientific discussion, is that they warn scientists away from criticizing orthodoxy. They say this idea is too important for you to criticize. Don't touch it. Don't talk about it. One of the reasons I love Andrew so much is he was at a time when I was politically toxic on talking about ideas, he was willing to actually come and debate me. And for that Andrew, I'll forever be grateful. It's really, really important that we don't send signals to the scientific community, especially as leaders of scientific institutions, that there are, you know, the places on the scientific map where there be dragons, don't go there.
Okay, next, humility during public health crisis. I had the opportunity during... as well as CDC director, and Bob, I felt... so now I understand your job so much better and I feel for you so much. When there's an outbreak, like there was during when I was acting CDC director, there was a hantavirus outbreak and then there was an outbreak of measles and then there was an outbreak of Ebola. Actually, I felt like it was kind of... then there was like the new world screwworm, you know, you played that board game Pandemic, this cooperative game and it's crazy fiction. So where like the CDC is the central hero of the board game and you send out your agents from all around the world managing four simultaneous pandemics and you're trying to find cures for all of them. Complete fiction. There were only three in my case. So it's all... the question is like how do I talk to the public about these things, right? And again Bob, I kept thinking of you as I was put in front of the public over and over again.
So for instance, I believe very strongly in the importance of the measles vaccination as a way to control measles spread. That is something I can say based on my reading of the scientific evidence. There are people both in this administration and elsewhere who think that I'm wrong about that. I know that they think that, or they think that maybe they agree with that you can use it to control measles spread but maybe there's side effects that they don't like or whatnot. How do I as acting CDC director talk about that? Right? Do I tell you, you must... if you don't get measles... no pediatrician should see you. You're a bad parent. Should I imply... and of course no CDC director would say that directly but I might strongly hint at that there might be a subtext to what I'm talking, right? How do you... and that's in the situation where I believe that there's a lot of good evidence already in place. What about in situations where there isn't great evidence in place? You know, the COVID crisis is a good example of this. Like very early on there was a lot that wasn't known fundamentally.
I think a couple of things that I believe still fundamentally even after doing the CDC job. We have to communicate in ways that avoid the... I call it the guru problem or the third-year medical student problem, right? So third-year medical students, those of you in medical school, you know this. What happens is you put on a white coat and you go out and you are seeing patients for the first time. Now the last two years of med school and the last four years before that you were in the library reading biology, not to the level of Simon Wain-Thompson, but like, you know, you were learning biochemistry, you were learning microbiology, you were learning all kinds of stuff. And then you sit there in front of a patient and they're saying, 'Doc,' and you have a white coat, so they think you're an actual doctor and not just a third-year med student. And they look at you and they say, 'I got a pain in my toe. Can you fix it?' And you know, you look at the toe, you're like... and you sweat and you have this almost... it's almost inevitable desire to say, 'I know the answer,' when you don't know the answer.
That's the problem in public health, right? When there's stuff that's happening fast and you don't have all the great perfect science behind it, you have to at that moment say, 'I don't know.' You have to say, 'I don't know.' You have to learn how to say and then follow up with, 'Here's what I'm doing to find out and give you the best advice I can.' It's especially important in scientific leadership to have that capacity to say I don't know. We have responsibilities beyond our technical expertise. We shape the habits and institutions of the institutions we oversee and so we have to model that kind of humility in the face of even things where I hold very, very strong scientific ideas. I do my level best to avoid making definitive proclamations. Even where I have really, really strong feelings, I try to do my level best to leave open the possibility that there are people in the institution I lead and the scientific community who disagree with me.
I got two minutes left, so I have a whole bit about traditional standards still matter. Expertise still matters. Peer review still matters. Scientific rigor still matters. I don't mean in any of these things I'm saying to get away from any of that, but I'm saying we should do that in the open, in public, in ways that invite people in, even people who don't necessarily have that same level of scientific expertise, into the conversation. And at the NIH, we've been... I got a minute now. I was going to like brag about stuff I've done at the NIH. Can I go for a couple minutes? Just a couple. We've done... let me just brag about just end with a brag about a few things I've tried to do at the NIH to try to get at this. And one is, David, where I'm working on a new journal, a Journal of Replication, NIH Journal of Replication, where you can publish... we got to compete with you guys just so you know. Just the point is that we're going to allow replication studies to get funded. Sorry David, we got to... you know, I have a different institution I got to lead. But it's good, we're all in this together.
We have a new journal where scientists can publish the replication work. We're going to start funding... we have started funding people to do replication work. So if the scientists in the room, you're interested in doing replication, and it's a bottom-up kind of thing where peer reviewers will decide what are the rate-limiting steps in science that ought to be replicated. So it's not top-down. I say this thing needs to be replicated. It's the scientific community decides together if this scientific idea is true then science will move one direction and if it's false it moves another direction or if it's complicated it will move yet another direction and pick those ideas that are most consequential for replication as the basis for deciding which ideas get replicated. And then we have metrics, new sets of metrics to encourage replication instead of just metrics that say you're a good scientist if you get a lot of citations. You will have metrics just like for baseball players will measure scientists by these numbers where if you share your data often then you're a good scientist. If your idea is subject to replication, well that's a good thing. That means you're... we'll have these metrics, a whole series of metrics that broadens the ideas of what is productive in science.
So the replication stuff is moving forward really, really fast. We have this unified funding strategy whose underlying ethos is to democratize science, to allow early career scientists to have a chance that they didn't otherwise have to get funding, to institutions that don't traditionally get funded in the middle of the country for instance, where great scientists, great scientific ideas are but they're not plugged in the way that someone from, you know, a fancy professor from Stanford might be. And we're going to fund this year, we're going to fund 1,300 new early career scientists for large grants, the most since 2008. And we're going to hire... over the next two years we're going to hire 100 new scientists into the intramural program at the NIH with a huge emphasis on early career scientists. We're calling it Generation Discovery. Going to have, you know, crazy acronyms, the sort of marketing for everything. Okay. So, let me just close first by thanking you all for being here. Thanking you all for the support for the journal and thanking you all for your support for open science and for open and humble scientific inquiry.
I think the coming decades will present public health challenges we can't possibly fully anticipate. It's vitally important we get this right. Coming out of the pandemic, we really have two paths and I've seen this one... path one is the path of dismantling our scientific infrastructure, dismantling our public health infrastructure because we no longer trust it. And frankly, people who most love the scientific infrastructure and love the public health infrastructure but don't want it to change are close allies with people who want to just destroy it. Right? The second path is the only real path forward, to use the lessons learned coming out of the COVID pandemic to open up our scientific enterprise, help it become something that can fulfill the promise of making the American people and the world healthier through a scientific enterprise that brings together people rather than rules over people. Thank you so much for your time.
