HEALTH: Stress your way to eternal youth!

It is an unlikely solution, but here is the key to stay young: have short bursts of stress!

This is a new revelation suggested by researchers at an anti-ageing conference in London.

According to The Telgraph, Dr Marios Kyriazis, who led the conference, said this exposure to stress will prolong life and help prevent chronic illnesses, like arthritis, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

Kyriazis, the medical director of the British Longevity Society, argued that moderate stress increases the production of proteins that help repair the body's cells, including brain cells, enabling them to work at peak capacity.

"Research shows that cells subjected to stress repair themselves, allowing us to live longer. As the body ages, this self-repair mechanism starts to slow down. The best way to keep the process working efficiently is to 'exercise it', in the same way that you would exercise your muscles to keep them strong," he added.

Other stressful activities: giving a best man's speech, following the instruction manual for a new DVD recorder, volunteering to help at a youth club and redecorating a room over a weekend.

Excellent question!

As a member of the academic profession, let me shed some light. Most academic researchers spend a fair portion of their time writing 'proposals' for "grants" or "contracts" to federal agencies. A "grant" usually indicates more freedom to spend the money whichever way the research leads, while a "contract" usually requires you to follow your original research plan fairly closely.

The main federal agencies which fund fundamental academic research are the National Institute of Health (medicine, health and biological sciences), National Science Foundation (engineering & physical sciences), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. NIH has a budget that is several times bigger than NSF, which both have multi-billion dollar budgets. The NEH and NEA have tiny budgets by comparison, though still in the hundreds of millsions of dollars. The Department of Defense also funds academic research, mostly in science & engineering, through the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). These are the agencies which do fundamental research and accept competitive proposals. Many other federal agencies fund some university research, but it usually is more like applied consulting, and often is determined through congressional earmark or through the university ties of whoever happens to head the agency at the moment. When your congressman says that the federal research budget is increasing, he means that pork-barrel congressional earmarks and NIH funding are increasing. The DoD and NSF research budgets have been flat or descreasing for about 20 years.

The process of applying for research goes something like this: A professor or group of professors write a proposal to the funding agency to research some topic. The proposal itself is usually about 15 pages long, explains why the topic is important, what research has been done before, why the proposed research is new, and what the expected impact of the proposed research is. There is a lot of supplemental paperwork like the resumes of professors (professors have very long resumes called 'Curriculum Vitae' because every time we drink a cup of coffee with some friends we call it a 'colloquium' and put it on our resume). The proposal contains a budget which typically pays for about 20% of the professor's salary, one or two graduate student salaries for each professor, a few new computers, and a couple of conference trips per year. Adding in a university overhead charge of about 50%, a typical research budget might be $100-150K per professor per year.

The proposals are sent to the funding agencies which then send them out for 'peer-review', which means they send them to professors from other universities. Each proposal is typically reviewed by three other professors. There are many problems with the peer review process. First, the best professors are usually busy, so the reviewers tend to be professors with time on their hands because their services are not in demand. Second, while 3/4 of the reviewers are scrupulous about disqualifying themselves when they have conflicts of interest (they have a feud with the author of a proposal or they are best friends with the author of a proposal), the remaining 1/4 who act unethically while technically violating no rules can badly skew the whole process. Third, since there are many more proposals than grants available, the whole review process tends to promote orthodoxy. A single bad review takes a proposal out of the running, so the only research which gets funded is that research the everyone which the field already agrees on.

As you might expect, the formula of "Write 15 pages and get several hundred thousand dollars" induces faculty to write lots of proposals. Only about 15% actually get funded, which gives academics plenty of fodder for grumbling about how stingy those taxpayers are for inadequately supporting their research. The real picture is not nearly so bleak (for academics that is, it's even bleaker for taxpayers). There is no upper limit on how many proposals a professor can write to various funding agencies. So if a professor writes 6 or 8 proposals per year, the odds of having a couple of federally funded three year reserach grants active at any given time are pretty good.

You are probably now wondering just how many university professors one federal government can afford, but the real damage done by this system extends far beyond the billions drained from the federal budget for "research". The real damage is the effect that the whole system has on higher eduction. As you can imagine, university professors who pay for a significant share of their own salary, computers, travel and graduate students are the ones who are retained through the tenure system. Universities vary based on how much they are willing to sell their souls by rationalizing that it is more important for faculty to be good 'researchers' rather than good 'teachers'; however, given two equal teachers, a university will always pick the one who is also a good researcher. The result is that university faculties are populated by people who have done well in the system of peer-reviewed proposals. The general characteristics of such people are:

They have orthodox ideas which are approved by their colleagues in the peer-review system.
They are willing/eager to take enough time away from the teaching of your sons and daughters so they can maximize the number of proposals (lottery tickets) they write each year.
They are willing to overlook ethical dilemnas like "Is it really fair to send an almost identical proposal to a different funding agency?" and "Should I grade the mid-term exam that my students have been waiting three weeks for, or should I go to dinner and schmooze the NSF program manager I saw at the conference?"

Things to ponder. I have to go write some research proposals now.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.