6 ms·

Bloodbath for Science

28 points by swedegeek 16y ago

kiba 16y ago
Maybe this will encourage scientists to interact with the public more and ask for funding from them instead. I don't even know why they're so important other than a vague "moar knowledge mean moar technology!"
- possibilistic 16y ago
  How about a cure for cancer? Vaccines against HIV, influenza, etc? Tissue bioreactors that grow organs? Postpone aging? Sure, there is a lot of esoteric stuff being done. Catfish genomics, characterizing motor proteins of archaea, etc. I can't speak for every research team or every goal. Yes, we could better coordinate and collectively strive for greater human societal objectives. But then a lot of feet would get stepped on. Who knows if some "pointless" research project may wind up saving us?
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    Don't worry, though, there will be drugs that you can take for life for things like cancer, HIV, etc.
  - kevbin 16y ago
    The apollo/manhattan approach that government tends toward doesn't seem a very good way to do research. In 1971 Nixon started a "war" on cancer, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. That's mis-allocated money because of the centralized, targeted management of aims. I'd prefer to see hundreds of thousands---or millions---of small, subsistence grants for esoteric stuff than few big-ass, centrally administered "wars". The same dollars directed by a substantially larger group of recipients would better cover problem & solution spaces.
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago
  Governments fund cures and vaccines for disease. Private companies don't work on cures, which is why the last things we've cured is polio, which was developed by an NIH-funded university researcher; and widespread famine through much of the developing world, by crop breeding and fertilizer research led by Norman Borlaug and the US and Mexican government.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    For the record, we haven't cured Polio. We do have a vaccine for it though. :-)
  - waterlesscloud 16y ago
    If the last thing we cured was polio, how does that justify the money the government spent of research in the decades since?
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      The past few decades have been dedicated to things that haven't been solved yet.
  - dnautics 16y ago
    your flawed assumption is that private companies are the only funding source. What about non-profit researcher foundations, such as HHMI? What you haven't seen is that in the past decade or two these foundations have been whittled away by the growing government behemoth. It used to be that every other graduate student was on some private grant or another, but now they are all written on RO1 NIH grants. With inflation eroding away at research endowments and faster-than-inflation growth in most laboratory equipment prices, a private research grant supplies maybe $100k a year, which is now insufficient to pay for even a research associate $50k + benefits, plus equipment. Plus, NIH gives research institutes "overhead" which is negotiated on a per-unit basis with each institute. So greedy-ass research institutes are not inclined to even allow their researchers to apply for grants which don't permit overhead. When you have a line to an apparently unlimited line of credit, the practices are going to be wasteful because of perverse incentives (at the NIH they have glassware-breaking parties at the end of spending cycles to use up their budget because if they come underbudget they are at risk of having it reduced) and you are going squeeze out private (non-profit) competition.
- kiba 16y ago
  I was merely suggesting that scientists get out more and make the public aware of the important research going on.
  - ars 16y ago
    You need to work on how you say it, so that you don't come across as a trolling 14 year old. Especially the "moar" misspelling was over the top. Considering your karma and how long you've been here I'm surprised I need to tell you this.
peregrine 16y ago
Can't we find $1.5 billion floating around in the military budget to cut instead of the funds that fuels science and innovation? Sure companies do a fine job of innovating but they don't do things like Fermilab, which have long term potential to change our world. Long term being far longer then stock holders in public companies would allow for.
- j_baker 16y ago
  "You're letting the terrorists win! You scientists need to just go back to your ivory towers while the rest of us real Americans stand up for freedom!"
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Of course, when you discover nuclear fission, they then come knocking on your ivory door with apologies and pretty words.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Nothing lets the terrorists win more than spending ourselves into a stupor chasing non-existent boogy men.
- foob 16y ago
  The other thing to keep in mind is that many of the graduate students being trained under this funding and working at places like Fermilab actually end up going into industry and making much more tangible changes in the short term. If funding drops and it has an effect on either the number of PhDs that are be granted or their quality then that will in turn have a real impact on the innovation that we see from companies. I sat in on DOE funding talks a few months ago and this idea came up over and over.
  - Maro 16y ago
    You are right, many Phds do get a job in industry, but that does not mean that this is an efficient process.
jerf 16y ago
The problem with the logic in this post is that it implies an unbounded amount of money funneled into research. In the real world, there's a bound on the amount of money that should be funneled into research. That bound should probably less than the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country. Any argument that doesn't even consider this question fails to impress me right out of the gate. There isn't a government expenditure that can't be supported the exact same way and with virtually the same arguments, but the sum total of all these wonderful programs is that none of them are going to be funded at all in a few years when the funding entity is bankrupt and the dollars it can give you are worthless. Take a 20% cut now (and probably another cut soon) or a 100% cut not all that many more proposal cycles from now. At some point the answer has to be no.
- bendmorris 16y ago
  The point is, we can and should take the money from somewhere else. Instead of a 20% DOE cut now, how about a 0.1% cut to defense, or another cut somewhere else, and a 0% cut to the DOE. Politicians refuse to cut defense spending because it's not politically viable and they're more worried about getting reelected than making a difference. "Elite" research scientists make an easy scapegoat.
  - jerf 16y ago
    There is no "somewhere else". This was borrowed money to begin with. Look at the list: http://appropriations.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=259&Month=2&Year=2011 http://appropriations.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRe... How many impassioned pleas based on a context-free analysis can you make from that list? And it's not enough cutting. After all this we're still immensely in the hole. Immensely. We're not in a situation where the household making $100,000/year has $10,000 of discretionary spending last year, and they're being jerks and not giving some of it to a good charity. We're in a situation where the $100,000/year household has spent $149,200 dollars last year[1], and has been doing this for a while. Government debt isn't quite the same as household debt, but it still isn't magic. You're complaining about a $74 reduction in spending! We can't cut from defense "instead", we need to cut defense in addition to. Which has been seriously proposed in a way that may actually politically happen, it just isn't happening all at once. Stop thinking about government spending as if there's a magic money fountain and start thinking about it like it's your own money. Yes, it would be great to spend twice your income on a better car, but the mere fact that it would be a great car, a really great car, man nobody should have to live without this car car does not make it a good idea. Nothing that science research is going to feasibly produce is better than having a country that is still fiscally sound, and that goes for a great deal of other things that need to be cut. What is a bankrupt society supposed to do with the results of this research, anyhow? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg... : 2010 Revenue, 2.381 trillion, 2010 expenditures: 3.552 trillion, 3.552 / 2.381 = 1.49181...
richcollins 16y ago
And how does cutting $100 billion in government spending “help our economy grow and create jobs”? The immediate result will be the loss of something like a million jobs. Those people will finally get to move on helping "make things that people want" instead of squandering stolen money.
kingkawn 16y ago
This is what we get as a nation for encouraging a political culture that doesn't value the work of government.
juiceandjuice 16y ago
Dear NSF and DOE, Thanks for the internet, google, fusion and fission research, alternative energy research, quarks, thousands of PhD students, supercomputers, etc... Given your general success with things, we no longer think it's viable to fund you. You see, we intend to buy 2,443 F-35 fighter planes over the next decade or so. It's unfortunate, but given that each one of those planes cost close to $130 million a pop (not including maintenance), we can't really justify science anymore. Yours truly, The American Public (specifically the red ones)
Tichy 16y ago
While I don't trust the government to pick the right things to slash, I am pretty sure there is a lot of bullshit research going on that could easily be slashed. It's probably not effective to not put any constraints on science research at all - there has to be some correcting factor like competition.
- dnautics 16y ago
  Unfortunately, that's not the case, Study after study shows that individuals in creative endeavours perform more poorly when they are incentivized by performance results (versus mechanical or rote tasks). However, that's not to say that we aren't overinvested in science. We are. I say that as a 2nd year "postdoc" in the biological sciences. The scare quotes are there because I got my job off of craigslist and because we spent the last 10 years creating too many junk PhDs who are just jamming up the hiring pipeline and keeping PhDs who care about intellectual pursuits away. And, yes, my job is really put in danger by this, but I don't care. I'm seeking 100% private, charitable funding for my next scientific endeavor.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    I don't really know what system could work. The current "max out publications" approach apparently doesn't work, as it only leads to mass production with low substance. I guess it is unfortunate that the people with the money (politicians) are not in a position to really judge the science they are supposed to fund. So superficial judging criteria are bound to happen.
teyc 16y ago
Actually, scientists aren't paid well. There are a lot of talented PhDs who were willing to work for very little money ($30k), and these people will reluctantly leave. The US is getting a more than its money worth. Cutting back will hurt the US more in the long run. Many of them will be from overseas, who are doing important work that is impossible to get done in their own country, and this work is important not only to science itself but to humanity.
- dnautics 16y ago
  There are a lot of <strike>talented</strike> PhDs who were willing to work for very little money ($30k), and these people will reluctantly leave. There, fixed that for you.

28 points by swedegeek 16y ago

kiba 16y ago

Maybe this will encourage scientists to interact with the public more and ask for funding from them instead. I don't even know why they're so important other than a vague "moar knowledge mean moar technology!"

possibilistic 16y ago
How about a cure for cancer? Vaccines against HIV, influenza, etc? Tissue bioreactors that grow organs? Postpone aging? Sure, there is a lot of esoteric stuff being done. Catfish genomics, characterizing motor proteins of archaea, etc. I can't speak for every research team or every goal. Yes, we could better coordinate and collectively strive for greater human societal objectives. But then a lot of feet would get stepped on. Who knows if some "pointless" research project may wind up saving us?
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  Don't worry, though, there will be drugs that you can take for life for things like cancer, HIV, etc.
- kevbin 16y ago
  The apollo/manhattan approach that government tends toward doesn't seem a very good way to do research. In 1971 Nixon started a "war" on cancer, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. That's mis-allocated money because of the centralized, targeted management of aims. I'd prefer to see hundreds of thousands---or millions---of small, subsistence grants for esoteric stuff than few big-ass, centrally administered "wars". The same dollars directed by a substantially larger group of recipients would better cover problem & solution spaces.
muhfuhkuh 16y ago
Governments fund cures and vaccines for disease. Private companies don't work on cures, which is why the last things we've cured is polio, which was developed by an NIH-funded university researcher; and widespread famine through much of the developing world, by crop breeding and fertilizer research led by Norman Borlaug and the US and Mexican government.
- j_baker 16y ago
  For the record, we haven't cured Polio. We do have a vaccine for it though. :-)
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  If the last thing we cured was polio, how does that justify the money the government spent of research in the decades since?
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    The past few decades have been dedicated to things that haven't been solved yet.
- dnautics 16y ago
  your flawed assumption is that private companies are the only funding source. What about non-profit researcher foundations, such as HHMI? What you haven't seen is that in the past decade or two these foundations have been whittled away by the growing government behemoth. It used to be that every other graduate student was on some private grant or another, but now they are all written on RO1 NIH grants. With inflation eroding away at research endowments and faster-than-inflation growth in most laboratory equipment prices, a private research grant supplies maybe $100k a year, which is now insufficient to pay for even a research associate $50k + benefits, plus equipment. Plus, NIH gives research institutes "overhead" which is negotiated on a per-unit basis with each institute. So greedy-ass research institutes are not inclined to even allow their researchers to apply for grants which don't permit overhead. When you have a line to an apparently unlimited line of credit, the practices are going to be wasteful because of perverse incentives (at the NIH they have glassware-breaking parties at the end of spending cycles to use up their budget because if they come underbudget they are at risk of having it reduced) and you are going squeeze out private (non-profit) competition.
kiba 16y ago
I was merely suggesting that scientists get out more and make the public aware of the important research going on.
- ars 16y ago
  You need to work on how you say it, so that you don't come across as a trolling 14 year old. Especially the "moar" misspelling was over the top. Considering your karma and how long you've been here I'm surprised I need to tell you this.

peregrine 16y ago

Can't we find $1.5 billion floating around in the military budget to cut instead of the funds that fuels science and innovation? Sure companies do a fine job of innovating but they don't do things like Fermilab, which have long term potential to change our world. Long term being far longer then stock holders in public companies would allow for.

j_baker 16y ago
"You're letting the terrorists win! You scientists need to just go back to your ivory towers while the rest of us real Americans stand up for freedom!"
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Of course, when you discover nuclear fission, they then come knocking on your ivory door with apologies and pretty words.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Nothing lets the terrorists win more than spending ourselves into a stupor chasing non-existent boogy men.
foob 16y ago
The other thing to keep in mind is that many of the graduate students being trained under this funding and working at places like Fermilab actually end up going into industry and making much more tangible changes in the short term. If funding drops and it has an effect on either the number of PhDs that are be granted or their quality then that will in turn have a real impact on the innovation that we see from companies. I sat in on DOE funding talks a few months ago and this idea came up over and over.
- Maro 16y ago
  You are right, many Phds do get a job in industry, but that does not mean that this is an efficient process.

jerf 16y ago

The problem with the logic in this post is that it implies an unbounded amount of money funneled into research. In the real world, there's a bound on the amount of money that should be funneled into research. That bound should probably less than the amount of money it would take to bankrupt the supporting country. Any argument that doesn't even consider this question fails to impress me right out of the gate. There isn't a government expenditure that can't be supported the exact same way and with virtually the same arguments, but the sum total of all these wonderful programs is that none of them are going to be funded at all in a few years when the funding entity is bankrupt and the dollars it can give you are worthless. Take a 20% cut now (and probably another cut soon) or a 100% cut not all that many more proposal cycles from now. At some point the answer has to be no.

bendmorris 16y ago
The point is, we can and should take the money from somewhere else. Instead of a 20% DOE cut now, how about a 0.1% cut to defense, or another cut somewhere else, and a 0% cut to the DOE. Politicians refuse to cut defense spending because it's not politically viable and they're more worried about getting reelected than making a difference. "Elite" research scientists make an easy scapegoat.
- jerf 16y ago
  There is no "somewhere else". This was borrowed money to begin with. Look at the list: http://appropriations.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=259&Month=2&Year=2011 http://appropriations.house.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRe... How many impassioned pleas based on a context-free analysis can you make from that list? And it's not enough cutting. After all this we're still immensely in the hole. Immensely. We're not in a situation where the household making $100,000/year has $10,000 of discretionary spending last year, and they're being jerks and not giving some of it to a good charity. We're in a situation where the $100,000/year household has spent $149,200 dollars last year[1], and has been doing this for a while. Government debt isn't quite the same as household debt, but it still isn't magic. You're complaining about a $74 reduction in spending! We can't cut from defense "instead", we need to cut defense in addition to. Which has been seriously proposed in a way that may actually politically happen, it just isn't happening all at once. Stop thinking about government spending as if there's a magic money fountain and start thinking about it like it's your own money. Yes, it would be great to spend twice your income on a better car, but the mere fact that it would be a great car, a really great car, man nobody should have to live without this car car does not make it a good idea. Nothing that science research is going to feasibly produce is better than having a country that is still fiscally sound, and that goes for a great deal of other things that need to be cut. What is a bankrupt society supposed to do with the results of this research, anyhow? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg... : 2010 Revenue, 2.381 trillion, 2010 expenditures: 3.552 trillion, 3.552 / 2.381 = 1.49181...

richcollins 16y ago

And how does cutting $100 billion in government spending “help our economy grow and create jobs”? The immediate result will be the loss of something like a million jobs. Those people will finally get to move on helping "make things that people want" instead of squandering stolen money.

kingkawn 16y ago

This is what we get as a nation for encouraging a political culture that doesn't value the work of government.

juiceandjuice 16y ago

Dear NSF and DOE, Thanks for the internet, google, fusion and fission research, alternative energy research, quarks, thousands of PhD students, supercomputers, etc... Given your general success with things, we no longer think it's viable to fund you. You see, we intend to buy 2,443 F-35 fighter planes over the next decade or so. It's unfortunate, but given that each one of those planes cost close to $130 million a pop (not including maintenance), we can't really justify science anymore. Yours truly, The American Public (specifically the red ones)

Tichy 16y ago

While I don't trust the government to pick the right things to slash, I am pretty sure there is a lot of bullshit research going on that could easily be slashed. It's probably not effective to not put any constraints on science research at all - there has to be some correcting factor like competition.

dnautics 16y ago
Unfortunately, that's not the case, Study after study shows that individuals in creative endeavours perform more poorly when they are incentivized by performance results (versus mechanical or rote tasks). However, that's not to say that we aren't overinvested in science. We are. I say that as a 2nd year "postdoc" in the biological sciences. The scare quotes are there because I got my job off of craigslist and because we spent the last 10 years creating too many junk PhDs who are just jamming up the hiring pipeline and keeping PhDs who care about intellectual pursuits away. And, yes, my job is really put in danger by this, but I don't care. I'm seeking 100% private, charitable funding for my next scientific endeavor.
- Tichy 16y ago
  I don't really know what system could work. The current "max out publications" approach apparently doesn't work, as it only leads to mass production with low substance. I guess it is unfortunate that the people with the money (politicians) are not in a position to really judge the science they are supposed to fund. So superficial judging criteria are bound to happen.

teyc 16y ago

Actually, scientists aren't paid well. There are a lot of talented PhDs who were willing to work for very little money ($30k), and these people will reluctantly leave. The US is getting a more than its money worth. Cutting back will hurt the US more in the long run. Many of them will be from overseas, who are doing important work that is impossible to get done in their own country, and this work is important not only to science itself but to humanity.

dnautics 16y ago
There are a lot of <strike>talented</strike> PhDs who were willing to work for very little money ($30k), and these people will reluctantly leave. There, fixed that for you.