Posted on 04/14/2005 11:31:08 AM PDT by AntiGuv
"during the past 10 to 15 years, much of that increase has gone to the National Institutes of Health at the expense of the physical sciences and engineering, notes Tobin Smith, senior federal-relations officer for the Association of American Universities"
The hidden costs of AIDS....just a speculative statement as I fully expect it to be shot down!
Parents need to be encouraging our children's interest in science and engineering. This is a matter of national security. Don't blame the schools. If you are engaged with your child then real learning in science and math can occur outside the school. We need to have something like the boy/girl scouts of America - maybe call them the science scouts of America. There is an organization I am currently looking into called FSEA (future scientists and engineers of America.) This organization might be an interesting way for some of us "nerds" to get involved in working with kids and their scientific interests. There needs to be a new focus on science education because we are indeed losing our edge and anybody who has spent any time at major research universities knows this.
Semiconductors.
It's not the soil the research is done on. It's our ability to do it at all.
Most Americans at this point aren't aware at all of how much basic research it has taken to get to household computers, innumerable treatments for diseases that were common and fatal in my youth, microwave ovens, ..I have to leave for work in 3 minutes... some of the science folk help me out with a good list, please.
Frankly I think this is worse than the crevo stuff. It was the post sputnik spending that got us here.
Since the World Wide Web was developed at CERN, I don't see support for it to be much of a waste of money, no?
D
Surely you must know that the early post-war development of semiconductors and transistors were heavily funded by the Department of Defense.
I agree with you. Both sides are to blame.
Development is not science. The SuperConductingSuperCollider, that was science, Big Science, but Science none the less. The Space Shuttle does very little science, but some.
Canceling the monitoring of the Voyager spacecraft is just plain criminal. It's done mostly by grad students, and can't cost all that much, and the money spent to pay those students also helps create new scientists. (possibly for India and China, but that's another story) The time on the Deep Space Network probably is the most significant cost.
And yet, America still does not know Socialism is Slavery by Government..
And the Nobel nominating committee(s) are socialists..
And democracy is the social disease that causes socialism..
Maybe a re-thinking on all this, is in order.. The ONLY thing lacking from Americas academic scientific community is a valid conservative thought.. If Jimmah Carter and Yasser got one, getting a Nobel Peace Prize just might be a "dis"...
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a totally separate group than the one that awards the science Nobels.
Buckle your seatbelts, America. It's going to be a bumpy ride!
This article is more than 10 years late. The decline in basic research began right around the time we first started to hear the words "peace dividend".
In my book SCIENCE FUNDING: POLITICS AND PORKBARREL, I examine the effects of government funding of science in the US. I conclude that it has done more harm than good, and has corupted the American scientific enterprise.
A classic example is the Department of Agriculture. Most of its research goes to benefit specific industries, which ought to be funding the research themselves. Several Congressional investigations have reached the same conclusion: Dept. of Ag. laboratories are a disaster area, full of incompetents who never publish anything. They continue to get funded on what amoutns to a pork-barrel basis. I recall testifying at a Congressional hearing, at which Sen. Sarbanes from Maryland was defending funds for a Dept. of Ag. lab in his state, despite the poor rating the lab had received from outside evaluators. He was simply interested in more money spent in his constituency, not in good science.
Note the quote from the article: It doesn't take a lot to start to dismantle scientific capability.... The most creative people are the ones who leave early," because they are the most highly prized and can find work elsewhere.. If the first-rate people from a government lab find work elsewhere, why should we be funding the second-rate people who stay because no one else wants them? In fact, why should we be funding them anyway, even if the first-rate people stay?Fire the second-raters and raise the pay of the first-raters.
Secondly, half of U.S. university research in science and engineering is done by foreign grad students. Nothing wrong with that except that there are fewer and fewer American students going into those fields. From my limited experience in academic politics, most university adminstrations are from the liberal arts side of things and don't see value in science and engineering becasue they aren't the political correct indoctrination centers like ethnic studies given as an example in a previous post.
Also, the U.S. is importing a lot of her science and technology experts from around the globe because of the lack of U.S. researchers.
From a purely political point of view, big ticket items like the space shuttle or AIDS research gets more public attention than some of the basic research done at universities whose titles sound like foreign languages to lay people. If the public can't get excited about basic research, how is the Administration and Congress going to support it strongly? Also, political tensions between certain research areas and the Bush administration have resulted in strained science relationships across the board. Global Warming is one such example, but all of basic science gets kicked by the administration because the most vocal opposition to the Administration comes from such politically motivated science.
I've worked with researchers from around the globe. The U.S. does have the strongest research capabilities and excellent colleges in the sciences and engineering. I've worked with people from China and their college educations are intensly specialized. So much so I had to explain basic statistics to a chemist becasue they aren't taught as much multidisciplinary science material as here. The Europeans are very smart and well educated, but they have even less funding. From my experience, they are all trying to immigrate to the U.S. where the research soil is more fertile. Europe has major issues with academic research being coupled to industrial applications. The elitists there see such work as biased and should be discouraged lest you be labeled a corporate sellout.
My rambling point is that the U.S. is still strongly competitive science wise, but the trends, both demographically and politically are brewing to form a perfect storm that will inhibit basic research in the U.S. If other countries get their acts together, they will be seriousl rivals in the not too distant future.
I do not understand why the Euros always make these comments. Why don't they talk about Turning or Von Nuemann? They made real contributions to Computer Science. Could it be the reason they don't is that one was a Jew that did some of his best CS work in the USA and the other could hardly be described as a "European?"
In a few years the DARPA reordering of TCP/IP and the peer to peer technologies come come online, the current notion of the Internet will quickly fade.
That is an excellent question. I work in industrial R&D and the pressure can be intense to be productive. A return on R&D investment, in terms of new products and enhanced features, drives the competition in the marketplace and our company's success depends on constant innovation. In an academic setting, the pressure is different, and, with tenure, it is easy to rest on your laurels. In industry, the basic question is "what have you done lately?" The poor performers don't get much slack here, especially when our compensation is based upon reaching key milestones set up by management. Do you think some kind of milestone or goal specifics can be adapted in an academic setting, aside from the publish or perish paper mills some research groups have become?
Just wanted to point out that as a nation it's not enough for our science to be adequate, but rather it should remain superlative from a global perspective. Doesn't mean specific policies should not be subject to review and criticism, at times vigorous.
Do we want to be #1 or is #10 good enough?
Absolutely! Look at what is happening to the Hubble repair mision as well. :-(
I'm probably going to rub a few people the wrong way, but I've been in both the private and public sector of scientific research.
1. Much government money is wasted. In my field many millions flow to government labs that are generally staffed by mediocre people. There the money evaporates without productive research. I was once part of a DOE panel to recommend continuing funding of certain grants and contracts. We strongly told the regional DOE boss he was wasting the DOE's money on certain projects. He bluntly told us that those contracts would continue because Senator X from State Y wanted it that way. I have seen really bad work presented at conferences and it was almost all from government labs (primarily Oak Ridge and INEL). A young scientist that is not at a big name university can have the greatest ideas, can do the work for much less, and will work had to make his research success, is stuck. If his interests are not on the government "hit list" then he might as well not even submit the grant. So some good projests are ignored.
2. Big dollar stuff can only be done reasonably through the government since corporations cannot fund such projects (could a corporation fund and operate an accelerator or the Hubble Space Telescope?). I mean things like particle physics and such stuff. A friend of mine who is such a bird at a University tells me that the best of his lot are all at government labs. Maybe this area is indeed better run at the government level. But remember the recent successful space shots by a private group. If it's government, the bills are high, the overhead is high and the vested interests are all with continuing things that would be better left alone.
3. (I expect howls for this one) Most engineers don't know how to do research. It's actually not a part of their training. While a few are good most are mediocre, especially chemical engineers (BTW 9 out of 10 chemical engineers I have met, mostly at government installations, know squat about chemistry). These people are great for design and operations but fail miserably at the frontiers of science.
4. Since most grants come from the government, there is little reward for changing areas of interest. I would like to see 5 years of a process where grants are awarded without the committees knowing the authors of the grants and the schools from which they come. Based solely on merit, I bet the picture would be dramatically different five years from now. We probably all know someone that has been continuously funded year after year simply because of their name or their institution's name and hasn't done a piece of good science in 20 years.
Of course, my experience has been in Biology, Molecular Biology, Microbiology and Bioengineering. Other than the high cost basic physics stuff mentioned above most people I have talked to in other areas agree (at least generally) with me.
Personally the most ineresting stuff I have worked on has been inside small Biotech Companies. These companies move fast; respond to interesting discoveries rapidly and leave what's not productive behind without flinching. Where they fall down is not having the resources to bring new technologies to the market place. Large companies can do this but their research departments are often too cumbersome and too inefficient (I've been there too) to be really cutting edge.
I am very worried about the state of research in this country. On the positive side I am not worried about Europe or Japan or China (right now anyway) since their bureaucracies are worse than ours. But I do think we are sliding down to their level.
The obvious way out is to eliminate the government's role in R&D except for a few areas. But to get private money to flow into R&D will require basic changes in many systems and the inertia is all against this.
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