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U.S. Science Agencies Get Some Relief In 2014 Budget
sciencehabit writes "The ghost of former President George W. Bush permeates the 2014 budget that Congress released this week. His presence is good news for physical scientists, but less cheery for biomedical researchers, as Congress reserved some of the biggest spending increases for NASA and the Department of Energy. The National Institutes of Health, meanwhile, got a $1 billion increase that is drawing mixed reviews from research advocates."
Only if you're willing to put 0% of increases in disease treat-ability down to NIH research. It's hard to look at a person who survived cancer due to an experimental treatment and say "if we let 20 people like you die, we could have gotten an extra satellite in orbit." That's not to say I think NASA doesn't need funding, it does! It's just that NIH as useless is staggeringly unreasonable.
I don't think anybody called it "useless". They simply stated that NASA has a better ROI and deserved more of a budget increase.
They didn't DEFUND the NIH. They just gave them less of an increase. The real world isn't binary where it's all or nothing.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And give it all to NASA, pls.
Without getting political, if we're going to spend public money on research, energy and space exploration probably make more sense than anything else right now. Oil is eventually going to run out and we will eventually face an extinction threat to the species at some point (yes, true, research into disease might help with the next plague, but there are asteroids, global war, and many other things to consider). A long-term survival strategy is not keeping all of us on this single planet, but rather, spreading out to the stars, and the continuing discovery of earthlike planets is eventually going to lead us to one that is habitable.
we are still spending more than the previous year. so yes it is a spending increase
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Ghost of GWB?
How many years has Obama been in office? Eventually you've got to give him some credit... you know, what with the 2nd term and all....
Agile Artisans
Economics tells us that there are only two real things that cause economic growth.
1. Population growth.
2. Technological progress.
We need as much of the latter as possible, and should address that goal with the full intent of the nation starting with generous public support of math and science education as early as possible in the life of our children.
Furthermore any public constraint or impediment towards that end should be uprooted and eradicated with extreme vigor and prejudice.
The motivation is nothing short of the survival of the human species.
How do you compare survival of the species (NASA) over increased survival of more people (NIH)? In my mind NASA funding is long term benefits while NIH is more about short term benefits. To put is simplistically, nothing the NIH is doing is going to save us from the inevitable death of this planet. But NASA research will. I'm digressing though. We can play a subjective cost/benefit comparison game all day. But that wasn't what I meant by ROI. I meant it in the strict economical sense. For every $1 of investment I get $X of profit. I'm essentially saying I feel like the advances found by NASA produce more economic growth and capital, and by extension more tax revenue for the government, than advances from the NIH does.
I fully recognize that this is a complex answer with varying perspectives. Which is why I qualified my statement as purely opinionated and even explicitly stated I may be wrong. And like others pointed out, I did not mean to say the NIH is useless or more specifically that it doesn't deserve funding. I was merely implying that NASA deserves more funding than the NIH.
Let's be honest after retirement you're just chilling in the waiting room while you wait for death to call your number.
I'll tell that to my dad who became a professor in his 60s
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
2013 NIH budget: $31.3 billion
2007 NIH budget: $30.3 billion
Far from doubling the NIH budget hasn't kept pace with inflation and has been declining in real dollars since 2003. The $8.2 billion (not 10) stimulus largely went to fund existing projects that the previous decade of NIH budgets were too miserly to properly fund. Scientists have become accustomed to having the NIH whack 10% (or more) off of a successful grant application, and when only 18% (officially, though I know of no field getting anywhere near that high) of grant applications get funded there's no end of worthy research that isn't being properly funded.