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How Important is Research Funding?
slowtonejoe75 asks: "I have friends and family working as physicists for the government at national laboratories funded by your tax dollars. Since Bush has been in office, funding meetings for these labs with the DOE (Dept. of Energy) in Washington have turned up dry. The Bush administration is clearly not interested in hardcore research unless it has to do with missles, bio-chemistry, and security. I understand that there are some priorities in life but I see this whole focus shift with respect to funding to be a real step backwards as far as the advancement of science. I want to know where the Slashdot community would place funding if they had their way?"
If the research represents technology for defense, or security
that's the stuff that pisses *me* off.
I am for it, but just pork barrelling our dollars into random research projects, that then get sold into private industry so that I can buy back the result of the research I funded pisses me off.
We'll see if you think that next time you're in a PET scanner trying to get a cancer diagnosed or something. A machine that would not have been produced except for the "pork barrel, random research" projects a few decades ago.
No doubt this is the hardest part of the problem though. How can a scientist asking for money explain that the work *does* have value, it's just that it isn't known what the value will be until it is done. The scientific community needs to get much much better at pointing out the results of the "random research" so that the uneducated masses can better understand the value.
I clearly couldn't be more opposite of you on this one. IMO the *only* research the government should be doing is the "random" stuff that won't get done otherwise because there is no profit motive. It's this research, however, that keeps the US at the forefront and allows the directly applicable stuff to be done later.