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?"
...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.
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)?
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.
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.