7 If I may be serious for at least one post, I need to discuss Jocelyun Kaiser’s blurb in Science (2006, 312, 1585) on the current budgetary situation the NIH is facing.
A House spending panel last week endorsed a flat budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—but told the agency to make room for a $3.2 billion children’s health study that NIH says it cannot afford. Legislators also want NIH to make mandatory a voluntary program in which grantees submit their accepted manuscripts to a free online archive.
The situation is a serious cause for concern. Congressional leaders are piling projects and costs onto the NIH without a consummate increase in funding. This all translates into 656 fewer grants approved in 2007. It’s already hard enough to get funding.
A number of non Americans read this blog (which is now almost 800 hits a day, if anyone is curious) and, to let you know, it pains me to see science funding being cut in Europe or anywhere. We are a community, one that is very dependent upon each other and, of course, money.
Because, I think, this blog is finally reaching people from so many states, I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to email your senator and inform him or her that scientific funding is an absolute necessity. We as a nation, indeed the world, will not continue to enjoy the quality of life we lead if we do not have the technical know how to over come the impending resistant bacterial strains, the aging population, looming nuclear threats, aggressive cancers, and the quest to actually find that last digit of pi. Not to sound like one of those infomercial douches, but please… email your senator. Go to the link below and find your senator’s name. It won’t take long. Honest.
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
I’ve included a sample email for you to just cut and paste (there is a ‘republican senator’ and a ‘democrat senator’ section in the sample email… don’t send both) in the comments to make your life even easier!
Love,
Kyle Finchsigmate
EDIT: We will be returning to our regular blogging of silly science tomorrow.
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Dear Senator [name],
I am a member of the scientific community, a community which has been working tirelessly to bring new and important discoveries to the market for as long as any of us have been alive.
[use for republican senator]
It was with the guidance of Dwight Eisenhower and continued throughout administrations after his, that our current scientific infrastructure was made strong. It is with these technological triumphs that we were able to defeat the colossus of the Soviet Union and keep America safe. Ronald Reagan knew it, and he appropriated funding which gave us the technological boom of the 1990’s.
[for democratic senator]
It was with the guidance of President Kennedy and continued through administrations after his that our current scientific infrastructure was made strong. It was with those advances that his office put into place that allowed us to travel to the moon and back, and bring down the soviet untion. Bill Clinton knew it, and he appropriated funding through the 1990’s which delivered the therapeutic drug boom through the 1990’s by generous NIH funding.
Please do all you can to support the NIH and the NSF in these coming years. The scientific community has a very long memory and we are very patient observers. This matter concerns all of us. As your children age they’ll need the advances we are working on today. Please do the right thing.
Yours truly,
[name here]
You’re a sap.
I’ve sent one off though.
Uncle Al was a Technical Information Specialist at NIH/National Heart, Lung (and Blood) Institute summer of 1973. The financial waste was awesome. It was awesome everywhere one looked. The psychology areas were huge folding green bonfires. NIH was a political and managerial obscenity jointly and severally.
NOTHING costs $3 billion unless you are bombing and entire country with locals shooting back. How many Sear’s Towers would $3 billion build? The hideously political B-1 bomber cost $200 million each.
The Belmont Learning Center, a four story high school in Los Angeles, was going to cost one $billion having been Officially discovered about half way through construction to be atop (more like snugged within) a toxic waste dump. They’re still thinking about it while suckling the public teat.
Waste at the NIH, that being the institution in Bethesda isn’t nearly the same thing as the money the NIH gives to research institutes and universities to conduct their own research. So far as I’m concerned the NIH in Maryland is a waste in itself. The whole thing should be administered for the purpose of spending money on Universities’ research. And, frankly, Universities shouldn’t be allowed to take 50% of it.
Uncle Al has a point, but there is still no arguing the benefit of publicly funded scientific research. It helps to ensure that benefits of discoveries trickle down a bit deeper and more widely than might be the case with privately funded R&D.
I think we should all become businesspeople. Let China and India do all the research. We’ll buy them out and transfer all the useful technology to America. This country’s strength was never being #1 in research; that’s a dangerous myth. The #1 strength is starting numerous companies until they go bankrupt and eventually starting one that makes you a millionnaire. We’ll be modestly rich and those poor sobs in the Third World can do all the research. After all, it promotes anti-social behavior like working too long and starting blogs.
If you want to do research, move to China with the rest of the commies!