Within the academic community, many people do important research in things like medicine, technology, etc that require a lot of money up-front but can pay back very well/ do a lot of good in the long term.
However, a general issue with research is that there is small monetary incentive to reproduce research. This is a huge issue because it undermines one of the axioms of why science is so important: repeatability.
For example, in 2022, a fundamental study for the theory of where Alzheimer's comes from (from 16 years prior) was found to have been forged. Prior to awareness of the forgery, the FDA approved a drug that, based on this research, should significantly decrease intensity or even completely cure Alzheimer’s. In that same fiscal year, the NIH even spent $1.6 billion on research that mentions the results of the study, representing about half of overall Alzheimer’s funding (see the article attached).
Therefore, I propose that money ought to be raised to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen again by incentivizing academics to repeat studies.
Comment below additional events similar to the Alzheimer’s one below or any criticisms to this point
A related problem is that researchers who cite other published research sometimes misinterpret that research or take findings out of context, and this can be hard for readers of the new paper to detect. I've learned to be suspicious of meta-analyses for this reason. On numerous occasions in my work (mostly in infectious disease research), I've gone to check underlying references and found that they were either misquoted or missing important context that affects the interpretation.
A five-sentence letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, which appeared in 1980, was cited hundreds of times during the early years of the opioid crisis in the 1990s, usually to support claims that opioid addiction is very rare when opioids are medically prescribed. This letter may have played a significant role in fueling the crisis. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc1700150 The letter did in fact report on hospitalized patients prescribed opioids, and the authors did find that it was very rare for opioid addiction to develop during the closely monitored hospital stay. However, the study was not peer reviewed, included a single hospital, did not follow the patients to see if they were addicted after they went home, and did not include any data on patients prescribed opioids for use at home.