Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I don't think it is the governments responsibility todo "General" research with my money.
... both parties are guilty of pushing forth the agenda to help their own pet projects.
If the research represents technology for defense, or security... 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.
Spending in the US is completely out of control. We need someone to clamp down on this insane tax and spend matra
...in my bank account.
:)
Now, you didn't specify I had to have any enlightening goal.
I believe gov't spending is best focused on areas that while important do not perform well enough in the market to attract private funding. Many long-term projects and pure research fit this description. Concrete examples are space exploration (I favor astronomy and probes over manned flight, on a bang-for-the-buck rationale), basic biological research (genome project, medical research, niche or long-shot vaccines & medicines, etc.), big-capital-investment projects (supercolliders and such).
There, is that vague enough? Seriously, good gov't funding can provide benefits from boosting young researchers to providing the massive infrastructure for the big ticket labs.
Of course, the gov't's involvement in national research is already huge; the NSF is down the street from me, and NIH/NIMH not far away; look at their websites for an idea of what they are underwriting. Every researcher I can remember seemed to be preparing grant proposals for the gov't. I hope that the short-term shift in administration priorities to what it views as immediate goals does not cause too much long-term loss. I think the administration is mostly sincere in its belief about what is important, but that it is short-sighted. (My 2.)
Finally, I don't suggest research should be socialized. Government spending is complimentary to private spending, not its substitute.
I don't think it is the governments responsibility todo "General" research with my money.
One of the problems with your post is that you never really define what you mean by "General" research. You follow this sentence with the following statement:
If the research represents technology for defense, or security... 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.
Using this as a reference, I'll assume you mean the government should only fund research that has immediate application to "important" areas such as defense. There are a lot of problems with this viewpoint. First, is how to draw the line between "general" research and "applied" research. Almost every scientist can do some wordsmithing to claim that their research has some concrete benefit now or in the future. So one could place a time barrier and state that only research that will pay off in new technological improvements within the next N years should be funded. The problem with this is that long-range research never gets funded. Another problem is that estimates of how long it will take the basic research to generate improved technology will always be wrong and scientists will give overly optimistic estimates so they can get their funding. There's also the big problem of identifying what research that seems pretty "pure", "general", "theoretical", whathaveyou, will produce useful "applied" results. I can't imagine the snide comments that mathematician George Boole must have endured when he developed an algebra assuming only two digits: 0 and 1. But today Boolean Algebra, as it is known today, is very applied stuff. Fourier faced similiar problems when no one recognized the practical importance of Fourier series and transforms when he introduced it.
Your statements also indicate that you are really upset at government research assistance for commerical technologies. The problem is that American companies are very short sighted. Their stockholders demand that they not engage in risky, long-range R&D developments. Without government seed money, most American companies wouldn't tackle the "big problems". Other governments, however, are more than willing to use their resources to give their companies an edge. The MagLev train is an obvious example. This idea was developed at MIT and they went so far as to develop a minature prototype. However, funding went dry. The governments of Japan and Germany saw the potential and began developing the technology in cooperation with their native hi-tech companies and they quickly leapt ahead of the US in the development of viable technology. The US is starting to gain back some of the ground now, but if the US government had funded this thing throughout, the US would be a lock for the first nation to bring this technology to the worldwide market.
GMD
watch this
Yes, Celera did do a genome. But the public consortium also did one which is equivalent or better in most scientific terms and vastly superior in one important respect: it is public domain.
While non-profit researchers can obtain free access to Celera's genome data, it is a pain in the ass to deal with their legal department, and the data is viewable in a sub-optimal interface. The public genome is easily and readily available to anyone and everyone with a web browser.
I had nothing to do with the public human genome project, but I use their data every day in my research as do thousands of other researchers. To suggest that the government pissed away money on that project is simply wrong.
It seems clear to me that everyone benefits from the public genome project in particular, and public science in general. Why should we enrich a private company for basic scientific information which is needed by all researchers (both for-profit and non-profit)?
I've worked for two different government funded labs, so I'm a bit biased, but I think that government funded research is vital for the long term health of our country.
The great thing about working in government funded research is that you have the ability to fail. Failure can be good. Unfortunately, in the commercial world, failure is bad, and must be avoided at all costs- if you fail, you go out of business. But if you don't fail sometimes, you're not pushing the envelope hard enough, not taking any risks. Unfortunately, there has been much movement in the government to divert resources to private industry- to people looking for short term profit.
Private industry looks for short term gains- long term is 5 years, 10 years (or more) out is just too far. The government can afford to look that far out, or farther. That is where the neat stuff happens.
Someday, I'll be back there, back to making cool stuff, and trying to avoid the politics as much as possible.