I haven't yet watched this but it better be FLYING FUCKING CARS.

The title is misleading, this is a funding speech.

True, true.

It's bizarre that he makes a point of not funding one field at the expense of another, but simultaneously claims that nowhere in medical diagnostic machines you see principles or designs which were discovered or invented by medical researchers.

This is an absurd claim, because even if a physicist discovers an elementary principle, it's completely unclear if this principle is applicable for a given medical purpose. And even if it is (which will probably be discovered by someone else, in another field), it is not at all clear if it is the best (most accurate, reliable, affordable and safe, according to some metric) principle for the application, over all techniques which are already available. This is something a medical researcher investigates.

I'm especially surprised that he mentioned the MRI machine. One of the biggest controversies in Nobel Prize history is the 2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine, which was awarded to a physicist and a chemist, but not to Raymond Damadian, the medical doctor who made leading contributions to the field.

So anyway, while Neil deGrasse is accurate in saying that one should not exclusively fund medical research at the expense of other fields, this video is completely misleading in the sense that it overemphasizes the contributions of physicists, and intentionally omits contributions made by researchers in other fields, as if a physicist's discovery of an elementary principle were the hard part in the process of developing medical equipment.

Disclaimer: I'm a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering.

His inner monologue while this video was being filmed: "Dude... I'm fucking stoooooned."

I'm convinced that if someone sifted a vid of Tyson and a cat just sitting looking at each other, it would overcome that ukulele vid in a single day.

Is he criticizing the NIH? It's hard to tell whether or not it's just commentary... I'd like to see the whole conversation/interview before judging. I see a good deal of collaboration between medical researchers, core scientists (physics, chemistry, biology), and engineers.

I'd also like to extend Neil's argument that all fields of science should be funded by saying that elementary though high-school mathematics curricula need a major overhaul.

The problem is that government agencies like to see short-term achievements (not as bad as corporations, but still pretty bad).

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Big, Think, Neil, deGrasse, Tyson, Science, Breakthrough' to 'Big Think, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Science, Breakthrough' - edited by xxovercastxx