3 ms·
I too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....
by pmags 2y ago
I too would love to see a follow-up study. Unfortunately the research was done at Columbia University, which has suffered massive arbitrary grant freezes....
- pojzon 2y agoIt would be a disastrous blow to oil indystry if everyone agreed we have to move away from both plastic and oil. We produce more and more plastic each year, every new law reducing oil consumption is greated with doubling the amount of plastic we produce. Microplaatic is in our brain now, causing damage that is irreversable. Freezing grants is just one of many reasons why we need to put stop to that cancer which is oil industry.
- rowanG077 2y agoCould you send me some links for the irreversible damage that micro plastics cause in the brain.
- lazide 2y agoThat’s about as likely to happen as everyone deciding to stop doing illegal drugs because they’re bad for us.
- ycombinatrix 1y agoPlastic is a fantastical space age material and we never gave it the fear or respect it deserves. Its usage should have been regulated from the beginning. Disposable plastic shopping bags are kind of insane if you think about it.
- sawjet 2y agoArbitrary?
- ykonstant 2y agoYes.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf only Columbia was a private university with a 15 billion dollar endowment, then they wouldn't need the government's permission to poke at some plastic.
- etrautmann 2y agoThis is a ridiculous bad faith talking point. That's not how endowments work, nor would it be possible for universities to spend them down for very long. Scientific research is an engine of innovation in the US, and it's penny wise pound foolish to attempt to save money by cutting of NIH and NSF dollars.
- lupusreal 1y agoPrivate universities can, in fact, fund their own researchers.
- etrautmann 1y agoNo - these universities do not have the funds required to sustainably conduct research at the scale that it currently does.
- lupusreal 1y agoThey absolutely do have the funds required to sustain research. If they're spending their own money instead of the government's, then maybe they would have to be a bit selective and cut out the crap, but that wouldn't be such a bad thing anyway.
- etrautmann 1y agoThat's not how most basic science works. It's easy with hindsight to identified research that didn't work or seemed dumb at the outset, but some small percentage of exploratory projects turn out to be major advances. Studying algae ion channels was not intended to be applied research but ended up with the discovery of green fluorescent protein, which won a nobel prize and opened the door to immunohistochemistry, optogenetics, and other crucially important biomedical advances. There are countless examples like this. It's trivially easy to find failed research too... but that's the process. It's only expensive if you ignore all of the innovation that comes downstream of the initial grant process.
- docmechanic 2y agoYes, I read that 75% of scientists in the U.S. are considering leaving due to grant freezes and politicization.