Posted on 07/22/2014 9:34:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
The legacy of Franklin Roosevelt is harming American science.
At the end of World War II, President Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, who oversaw the explosively successful Manhattan Project, if there was a way that the horde of scientists recruited to produce The Bomb could somehow be kept in government employment.
Within eight months, Bush sketched out a blueprint in which the Universities, not the government, would be the employers, but that the pay, either for faculty or for hired researchers, would actually originate from federal science agencies, cabinet departments, or the clandestines.
The consequences were obvious. Universities charge 50 percent overhead on federal grants, using these profitable science Department monies to pay for unprofitable Art and Music Departments. The seeds of political correctness—which requires big, expensive, expansive government—were planted as the schools became addicted to federal welfare.
Under unforgiving competition to secure funding for their institutions (and promotion for themselves) some scientists are behaving badly.
Last week, a technical publication, Journal of Vibration and Control, retracted sixty papers, after an internal investigation revealed a fraudulent “peer review and citation process” that greased the skids for a small number of authors to have an enormous number of citations in what is a prestigious engineering specialty. At least one of the authors even managed to review his own papers under an alias.
That’s symptomatic of a larger sickness raging in what should be our most sacrosanct of institutions. If we can no longer trust science, what do we have as the basis for knowledge?
It is a fact that the policy world—particularly the environmental policy world—claims to base policies on “science,” such as the reports of United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s periodical “National Assessments” of the impact of climate change on our country.
These influential documents are essentially large reviews of a voluminous scientific literature. The tragedy is that literature is being insidiously poisoned by the incentive structure for science itself.
The evidence is increasingly compelling. University of Montreal’s Danielle Fanelli has written several comprehensive reviews of the content of published science and he found, in the last twenty years, that the number of “positive” results is increasing dramatically. That’s when the data confirm a proposed hypothesis rather than suggesting rejection or modification.
In a real world where scientists are answering real questions, that would be impossible. People have not suddenly become smarter, except, perhaps at how to advance in academia. There, candidates for promotion in the sciences are basically asked two questions: What did you publish, and how much taxpayer money did you bring in to support your research?
If an Assistant Professor, up for tenure, answers either insufficiently, he’s likely to be looking for another job. It’s amazing how many of these wind up staffing Congressional Committees, or better yet, on programmatic committees for the big science agencies.
The money part is of paramount importance. At a tier-one University, to publish the requisite number of papers for promotion in, say, the Environmental Sciences, probably requires a minimum of $2.5 million. That’s a lot of overhead for the Germanic Languages Department.
Does anyone seriously think that a young researcher is going to get that kind of funding by going to federal agencies with a proposal that global warming’s amount and effects have been dramatically overblown (as they have)? The mere proposal threatens to derail everyone else’s gravy train. It won’t get funded, and the researcher soon won’t be paid.
Dr. John Ioannidis, now at Stanford, may have been the first person to detect the illness when he wrote, in 2005, a then-iconoclastic paper, “Why most Published Research Findings are False”. His thesis is the demands to publish and get funding are so strong that many studies are poorly designed in order to force a positive result and rapid publication.
Since then, the number of retracted papers has gone through the roof. The winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Randy Scheckman—on the eve of his award—wrote a Guardian op-ed, “How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science”, and he vowed to never send them another manuscript.
Scheckman noted that publishing in Nature and Science is a ticket to tenure and enhanced research funding, but that these two magazines—the most “impactful” science magazines on earth, gravitate towards “flashy” science to draw attention themselves (and thereby inflating their “impact factors”). This is done at the expense the day-to-day grind science that is perhaps more important, but won’t land you on CNN. Knowing this, people will gravitate towards flashy fields, like global warming, at the expense of others, and burning our scientific talent for a mess of pottage.
So the search for knowledge has become the search for funding, and funding agencies tend to frown upon negative results. Who is seriously going to get a federal grant that can ultimately diminish the power of the federal government? No, instead we read in the recent National Assessment, silly positive associations, like global warming is associated with more mental illness. This can only mean that people in Richmond are loonier than here in Washington DC, and that they must be crazy in Miami.
That makes about as much sense as compromising science to serve the federal funding behemoth.
double blind funding is the answer.
Insightful and true.
FDR was dead at the end of WWII. There is no way the opening sentence is valid.
The consequences were obvious. Universities charge 50 percent overhead on federal grants, using these profitable science Department monies to pay for unprofitable Art and Music Departments. The seeds of political correctness—which requires big, expensive, expansive government—were planted as the schools became addicted to federal welfare. Under unforgiving competition to secure funding for their institutions (and promotion for themselves) some scientists are behaving badly.
“Personally I like the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything.
You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”
Add the demise of the scientific method and skepticism to the “accomplishments” of a bloated FedGov.
Good article.
Back in the 80’s when I was in grad school the term used was “sexy”.
Now it is much more callous, corrupt and quid pro quo.
“double blind funding is the answer.”
How does that work?
I've known this for years based on common sense, but this explains the root of the problem.
Shocking conclusion - anything the government touches become distorted. Period. End of story.
Starve the beast.
It isn't actually all that new. Scientists, like artists, have to pay the rent and the mechanism of patronage serves to keep them in gear and grub. The government has decided to be the big patron, as it has with regard to healthcare, student loans, etc, etc. That tends to crowd out the other patrons.
It's a problem of big government, first and foremost, whose participation in the game was quite justifiably mandated by the demands of warfare but has grown beyond that. This is precisely what Eisenhower meant in his 1961 speech that references - in part - what he termed the "military-industrial complex" that has appeared to subsume both academia and popular culture in the form of celebrity scientists as well. Money, fame, and professional advancement are powerful temptations.
How much corruption this gargantuan system can tolerate and still function is a very good question. The Soviet Union found itself straying down the road of Lysenko, Nazi Germany down the road of some bizarre racial theorists too numerous to cite. This was big government-directed science serving political purposes. The underlying societies were not the beneficiaries; the dominant political classes were, at least until the science itself could no longer keep up. At that point they became systems of lies, not science. These days the systems are bigger, the money bigger, and the people who think they've gamed the system, bigger fools.
Just like the government does.
Taxpayer money (A) is collected by the government (B) which then sends it (some of it, anyway) to a multitude of recipients (C).
(A) doesn't know where the money goes, and (C) doesn't care where it comes from. (B) pockets a lot of the money.
LOL! Perhaps he meant near the end. FDR died on April 4th, 1945. Germany signed their surrender on May 7th, 1945.
People refer to it as if someone said, “You know what we really need is a big bomb, something that will blow up a whole city. Let's get some smart people together and see what we can come up with.”
Far from it, they knew (or were confident they knew) what they needed to do at the very beginning of the process. They just had to figure out the particulars. Granted, the particulars were tough, but they were still just the details of a working implementing a working theory. Ditto for the Apollo Program. Simply put, the Manhattan and Apollo programs were large engineering programs to implement scientific possibilities that were already shown to be mathematically possible.
But politicians today often say stupid things like we need a Manhattan type program to cure AIDS or end urban blight.
I don’t care who ya are, that there is funny!!!
It’s Bush’s fault.
The article should have said, ...toward the end of WWII.
The letter from FDR to Bush was written about six months before VE day, and about five months before FDR died.
VE day: May 8, 1945
FDR: January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt
https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm#letter
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT’S LETTER
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington, D. C.
November 17, 1944
From President Eisenhower's farewell address.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.Eisenhower hit dead center with that warning.Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Again, Bush’s fault!
Eisenhower is an underrated president. He was quietly competent and highly skeptical of statism.
bkmk
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