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Researchers Warned About AIDS Grants
winksmith writes "The NYTimes (free registration, etc.) is
reporting
that scientists researching STD's (including AIDS) must be careful in the wording of reports and particularly of grant requests. many have been verbally warned that phrases like: "sex workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," may cause the government to withhold grant money."
This is entirely appropriate.
Look, there are lots of diseases that affect human beings. Everything from the common cold to ebola. Some of them are very rare, some widespread. Some are deadly, some place a heavy burden on our health care system, and some are mere nuisances.
Medical science is a zero-sum game. Every dollar or minute spent trying to find a cure for disease X cannot be spent on disease Y. There's only so much money and effort to go around.
Diabetes, stroke, cancer, heart disease, and trauma all kill more people every year worldwide than HIV. Not a few more, either; we're talking about millions of people every year.
Now, every educated person knows that HIV is not limited to gay people, or to drug users, or to people who have anal sex. HIV is out there, and everybody is at risk of contracting it, though for the vast majority of people that risk is statistically insignificant.
But the notion, correct or incorrect, that HIV is confined to a particular group or that it's only transmitted by a particular illegal or socially unacceptable activity gives one pause. Is it really right to spend $X on AIDS research when one hundred times more people die of cancer or heart disease or stroke every year?
If you want funding for your AIDS research, you're going to have to convince the organization offering you the money that your research is more important than research that will help tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people over the long term.
many have been verbally warned that phrases like: "sex workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," may cause the government to withhold grant money.
Instead they were requested to use phrases like "hookers", "faggots", "buttfucking" and "junkies".
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Your post displays a complete and total ignorance of how science works. The simple fact is, we never know what's going to lead to what. Prof. Gorovsky at the University of Rochester has spend years researching a single-celled Eukaryote, Tetrahymena, which doesn't superficially appear to have any relation to human problems. However, it is in Tetrahymena that telomeres and telomerase were discovered, which has major implications for cancer. It was in Tetrahymena that many advances in RNA-interference, a technique which may be useful for shutting down (for example) viral proteins in humans, have occured. Studying biology at a basic level on primitive organisms often has enormous impacts in other areas. And it works vica-versa too, as well as between different areas on a similar level. Research on HIV and AIDS doesn't just lead to more knowledge about how to stop HIV; it leads to information on our immune system, and all sorts of other biological processes in humans.
Of course, your post is exactly how these idiots in Congress think. In their puny little brains, somehow it makes sense that the research done in NASA has lead to many other good things, and it should be funded, even though it's direct goals are completely useless to human beings; while the same should not be true in the biological sciences.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The reason the government doesn't like phrases like "sex workers", "anal sex" and "men who sleep with men" is because they indicate that AIDS discriminates, which is not what the government would like you to believe. If people stopped doing the things that spread AIDS (it's not exactly airborne), it would eventually go away. Consequently, politicians and activist groups would lose a manipulation tool to siphon tax dollars away from issues that are a lot less preventable and affect more people.
I'm not trying to troll, but it's just common sense that if you're concerned about the risks that come with an activity, you either don't participate in that activity or you (not your fellow citizens) accept the risks. You like Big Macs? You accept the risk of clogged arteries. You like to smoke? You accept the risk of lung cancer. You like games on Windows? You accept the risk of Outlook viruses. You like sex with prostitutes? You accept the risk of AIDS. Even my dog understands that there are consequences for certain actions.
Another excellent example of this is good old polymerase chain reaction (PCR, natch.). The old enzyme that made it sooo much easier to do (insert DNA manipulation of choice here) came out, according to the dimbulbs who give out Golden Fleece awards, "a $1 million study on algae [sic] in warm water." A second example near and dear to my heart is green fluorescent protein (GFP). This tool vital to modern molecular biology eventually fell out of a study on why jellyfish glow when you poke them.