Posted on 03/16/2014 5:22:19 AM PDT by reaganaut1
...
American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.
In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research.
...
Fundamentally at stake, the critics say, is the social contract that cultivates science for the common good. They worry that the philanthropic billions tend to enrich elite universities at the expense of poor ones, while undermining political support for federally sponsored research and its efforts to foster a greater diversity of opportunity — geographic, economic, racial — among the nation’s scientific investigators.
Historically, disease research has been particularly prone to unequal attention along racial and economic lines. A look at major initiatives suggests that the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The poor should kick in and help.
“American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.”
Drivel.
The problem as I see it is that university and government scientists are driven to seek funding, not solutions. I’m convinced that if cancer research had no government grants it would have gone the way of Polio. Maybe private sponsorship will give us better results.
Well, I recall a campaign to eliminate sickle cell anemia...
We obviously need more money for research for HIV/AIDS and sickle cell anemia.
There are a lot of rich black people. Let them throw some money in. How about Oprah?
richest black people in america
http://www.therichest.com/tag/richest-black-people-in-america/
What? You didn’t know that Eli Whitney, Robert Fulton, Samuel Colt, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were government employees?
Would you willingly put all of the funding for our scientific studies into the hands of people like Nancy Pelosi, Sheila Jackson Lee and Hank Johnson? It is not as though these private donors all conspire to fund some things and not others. They fund those things that the, as individuals, find interesting.
This is a basic Darwinian process........ survival of the fittest.
Being a minority with special needs means those needs can not be met because limited resources are expended for the greater good.
The whole point of the Obama presidency was to destroy the natural order.
There are plenty of rich people who are not white. Maybe they would choose to fund research into diseases which do not affect whites.
After the garbage about kids eating lead-based paint, sickle cell anemia, etc., maybe the majority race in this country should try to cure diseases which affect them. After all, unless someone is trying to kill off the majority ethnic group, it would be cost-effective to eliminate the diseases which may affect the majority of the people.
Otherwise, move to a locale where the demographics are different.
Next thing you know, we'll all be required to shoot ourselves in the foot because someone else has a limp--all in the name of "equality".
Good !
Sans whitey, this world devolves to North Korea in a hurry .. and stays there.
In a word, you nailed it.
I think this article is meant to fan the fires of racism, and is not a real commentary on the state of research. Scientific research has always been funded by a mixture of public and private financing.
In my experience, private donors tend to give for specific disease research. But no one forces scientists to take money for a specific kind of research—they look for the donors funding the research they like to do, and ask for the money from them.
And everything is about breast cancer, rather than prostate cancer. I’ve never seen a blue ribbon for a prostate cancer awareness run...
It is the job of news outlets to not merely report the news, but give it an angle that makes it interesting. It’s what the NYT is doing here. They are attempting to create a story with the race baiting and culture war. But the real story is a paragraph’s worth. It’s not really controversial and won’t sell papers.
That's because lot of people with untreated prostate cancer die of old age.
I actually learned, in PUBLIC SCHOOL, back in the sixties in grade school how to use my brain to interpret news stories.
I remember the example to this day from third grade. They gave the same story in two versions.
Version one:
Man breaks in to struggling family owned bakery, doing $150 (a lot of money back then, btw) damage to the shop window and stealing a loaf of bread. Police have the man in custody. The owner of the shop is distraught at the damage to his shop and hopes customers will be patient as the damage is repaired.
Version 2:
A man who had been unable to find work, and in a desperate need to feed his family, broke a window in a local bakery to gain access to a single loaf of bread needed to feed his starving family. The police have taken him from his family and put him in custody.
Both stories were biased. One for the owner and one for the thief.
With the lesson and discussion that followed, I learned in GRADE SCHOOL how to separate the wheat from the chaff (opinion and bias) in news stories and get to the core.
We decided that the story is that a man, for whatever reason, broke the law and was in jail for his crime. Everything else was a reporter foisting his personal opinion on us. That was information for the jury.
The only logical result will be billionaires figuring out how to get better care...for billionaires.
That’s because lot of people with untreated prostate cancer die of old age.
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