Funding

With Obama's desire to freeze federal pay for two years, it's worth reminding people that federal workers actually do important stuff. Like ground-breaking research: Remarkably, more than 50 current or former federal employees have received Nobel Prizes. In fact, about one in four American Nobel laureates have been federal workers. Their contributions have included the eradication of polio, the mapping of the human genome and the harnessing of atomic energy. Federal employees protect our food and drug supplies, manage airline traffic, foil terrorist attacks, care for our wounded veterans,…
You might have heard how Obama has called for a three year salary freeze for all non-military federal employees. Let's leave aside the notion that we need every drop of fiscal stimulus we can get our hands on. Instead, I would like to know how this will not make things worse for research in the U.S. As it is, program officers are overworked and understaffed with support personnel. I can't see morale increasing with this move. This won't make retaining people any easier--and probably will make it harder, since the good people will have other options (despite many academics' dislike of…
Brad DeLong, Scott Lemieux, and Felix Salmon all take Stanley Fish's absurd discussion of Why Does College Cost So Much by Robert Archibald and David Feldman to task--and are right in doing so. It's a shame because Archibald and Feldman actually do have some key insights into where the money goes. The arguments they make aren't Fish's arguments either. How one can claim that college costs haven't risen faster than inflation boggles my mind: it simply involves division (college costs have risen much faster than the median household income). Of course, this is Stanley Fish, so numerical…
Or something. By way of Howie Klein, we discover that Blue America PAC, which supports candidates, who among other things, are not global warming denialists, is faced with a nuisance lawsuit. This attack is led by 'Let Freedom Ring, Inc.', a conservative faith-tank. And who funds Let Freedom Ring? Well (italics mine): 'Let Freedom Ring, Inc.' is a Conservative think-tank that was set up in 2004 in the USA thanks to a $1 million donation from Dr John Templeton, Jr., President of the John Templeton Foundation. The organization seeks to promote the neo-conservative agenda led by President…
I realize most people probably don't care very much about science funding, but I'll go out on a limb and assume that many readers here do care about science funding (I think many, in the public as a whole, don't even realize how science is paid for). The Republican platform, Pledge to America, boldly declares that all non-military discretionary spending will be reduced to 2008 levels. Here's what this would mean for science funding: Under that plan, research and development at nonmilitary agencies -- including those that sponsor science and health research -- would fall 12.3 percent, to $57…
We read that a conservative Texas faith tank has convinced the Texas Legislature to force universities to release a "profit-and-loss" statement for every professor: A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained. Ms. Johnson came out very much in the black; in the period analyzed--fiscal year 2009--she netted the public university $279,617. Some of her colleagues weren't nearly so…
Despite The Boston Phoenix's running articles that occasionally contain the word fuck, as well as having an 'adult section' complete with ads for 'massage' (why one has to wear a bikini to give a massage escapes me; also, prostitution isn't exactly feminist), their politics are about as alternative or radical as a wet noodle. This is best shown by their unrelenting and irrational assault on teachers, although the continual brushback by their readers seems to have had a slight effect. Well, now the Phoenix editors have decided how to fix the Boston schools--even as these same schools have…
Bob Herbert echoes the frustration many have felt with Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie's decision to scuttle the plan to build a much-needed tunnel connecting New Jersey to New York City: The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It's losing its soul. It's speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough. The railroad tunnel was the kind of infrastructure project that used to get done in the United States almost as a matter of routine. It was a big and expensive project, but the payoff would have been…
A while ago, I wrote, "Someday, a science reporter is going to hybridize with an economics reporter and then the topic of how science is funded will actually be covered accurately. Until then, you're stuck with the Mad Biologist." Well, I don't know if the hybridization experiment has been successful, but a Nature news article by Kendall Powell describes the grant selection process very accurately. Before I get to the article, it's not anything shocking or especially revealing to most scientists, but my hope is that journalists (and members of the chattering class) will read it and realize…
David Dobbs asks a really good question about the effect of scientific (scholastic) publishing on communication of science to the public: I want to consider another problem with the paper's overvaluation: it discourages scientists from engaging the public. How so? Because many seem to think that when they've finished the paper, they've finished their work. .....A scientist in the audience said something that always gets said during such discussions: "What if you want to just do the work?" What if you want, in other words, to do the experiment or observation, analyse the data, write and…
Every so often, we hear or read someone who asks, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do X?" But it's not so clear that we could still do it if we wanted to: The Apollo and Gemini programs aren't truly lost. There are still one or two Saturn V rockets lying around, and there are plenty of parts from the spacecraft capsules still available. But just because modern scientists have the parts doesn't mean they have the knowledge to understand how or why they worked the way they did. In fact, very few schematics or records from the original programs are still around. This lack of…
There's something that has puzzled me about the recent stem cell decision that led to an injunction that prevents the NIH from spending any funds on research involving human embryonic stem cells. I've read the decision (pdf), and it appears to be incredibly broad and damaging to NIH funding in general. I could understand an injunction based on a finding that the policy violated federal law: I think that's stupid, but I get it. What I don't understand is the finding that NIH policy causes harm to the plaintiffs (the researchers who brought the suit): Plaintiffs are researchers who work…
Well, someone at ScienceBlogs had to draw down on Scientopia, and it might as well be the Mad Biologist. I was going to respond to this post by proflikesubstance about genomics and data release in a calm, serious, and respectful manner, and, then, I thought, "Fuck that. I'm the Mad Biologist. I have a reputation to uphold." Anyway, onto genomics and data release. Proflikesubstance writes: I learned something interesting that I didn't know the sharing of genomic data: almost all major genomics centers are going to a zero-embargo data release policy. Essentially, once the sequencing is…
Once again, some are making a big deal out of the second derivative, just as was done with unemployment numbers (Got Green Shoots?), when they shouldn't. Consider this from an NY Times article about defense spending increases: Mr. Gates is arguing that if the Pentagon budget is allowed to keep growing by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings in the department's bureaucracy to reinvest in the military -- and that will be sufficient money to meet national security needs. In one of the paradoxes of Washington budget battles, Mr. Gates, even as he tries to forestall…
I've read through the Washington Post article on our bloated, inefficient national security-surveillance apparatus--what Atrios characterizes as a system "to transfer money and power to elites while cementing the existence of a giant and extremely opaque patronage system. One with surveillance capabilities." This caught my eye as it sounds like a serious security risk (italics mine): Among the most important people inside the SCIFs [sensitive compartmented information facilities] are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-…
Last week, I wrote about a column by biologist Marc Lipsitch, who described a conflict of interest for scientists that has not been discussed: gag agreements for scientists who accept industry funding. In other words, if the corporate funder doesn't like the results, nobody will hear about them. These agreements also present other problems, such as reviewing grant proposals or receiving federal funding, as the scientist will have access to information that is unknown and undiscussed*. Well (pun intended), BP appears to have tried this strategy too (italics mine): BP has been trying to hire…
Someday, a science reporter is going to hybridize with an economics reporter and then the topic of how science is funded will actually be covered accurately. Until then, you're stuck with the Mad Biologist. By way of The Intersection, we come across this Chronicle of Higher Education commentary by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. I think the overall point, which is that colleges and universities have strayed from their core mission, which is education, is a good one. But like much commentary on this subject, it neglects the harsh, cold reality of revenue (Got Pepsi?). Here's their…
Thanks to Pepsigeddon, conflict of interest-related posts seem to be bouncing around the intertubes. Which brings us to this article by Marc Lipsitch* about another type of potential conflict of interest--gag agreements for faculty who receive industry support (and which are typically allowed by most universities): Recently, however, I received a request from a large pharmaceutical company to assist in the design of a clinical trial, and the proposed terms seemed to require that I sign away my right to criticize the product. One provision would prohibit me from entering into "any agreement…
Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF's "broader impact" requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it's hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky's post is well worth reading, and provides a good deal more detail on the anecdote reported in the article. While Leslie-Pelecky's concern is about whether the outreach programs falling under the "broader impact" section of grants are having the desired effect, I'd like to comment on a different aspect of the article, namely the whole…
As a group, scientists generally grasp the importance of good data collection systems - but federal-agency budgets rarely let scientists collect as much data as they'd like. Trimming funds for monitoring or surveillance programs may seem like the least painful budget choice when money's tight, but then sometimes it turns out that relatively small savings from such cuts have huge costs further down the line. That seems to be the case when it comes to data on currents in the Gulf of Mexico, as Paul Voosen reports for Greenwire: For more than a decade, scientists have called for federal funding…