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Yet another advance brought to you by US tax dollars funding basic science for the public good. Please don't let them embezzle the future of scientific innovat

• userbinator 1y ago
  This is the science that needs to stay. The crap that pretends to be science can get gutted.
  • searine 1y ago
    What exactly is 'pretending' and what is 'real'? Are we to leave that up to the politicians to decide that rather than the scientists themselves? The 'deal' of basic science in the US is that the government funds broadly and without prejudice. Topics are decided by experts and overseen by experts. These experts are taking large pay-cuts (compared to their worth in industry) to have the freedom to investigate their own interests. In return the public gets a vast amount of R&D on the cheap, much of which doesn't seem to have immediate ROI, but as we well know, has tremendous long term ROI. When you have politicians deciding what is 'real' and 'pretend' then you break the fundamental deal by removing academic freedom. I certainly agree there is some useless science. But in this case, the demagogues are politicizing some science as an excuse to cut all science and embezzle the funds. Cancer, alzheimer's, infectious disease. It's all being cut right now, all because people are mad some grad student took 15K to study the relationship of smell to the gender identity of frogs.