WAIT, WHAT? You Can’t Cure Ebola With Money.

I support government spending on basic research. But I really do not support the wrongheaded idea that medical research is like ordering groceries from Peapod: Just dial up what you want, and if you’re willing to pay the cost, you can have the goodies. In fact, it’s more like a lottery: if you don’t play, you can’t win, but at best, you still lose an awful lot. An Ebola vaccine is entering trials right now, and if it succeeds, that will be incredible news. But it could fail in many ways, and acting as if it’s a guarantee is grossly irresponsible.

Francis Collins is smarter than I am, and he has dedicated his life to furthering the advancement of human knowledge, one of the noblest causes there is. He’s also a Washington bureaucrat, and while he’s wearing that hat, his job is to get more money for his agency. I suspect he let his good judgment get a bit carried away in the zealous pursuit of that mission. Raising unreasonable expectations very likely to be dashed is bad for public policy, and ultimately, bad for the scientific research that Collins has done so much to promote.

That’s putting it kindly.