Poll: Do you support federal funding of science?

[Robor]

"Real" science? Maybe.
Spending $71,000 to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys? No.

I guess we can count you in the 7% against. It's funny how you choose the shit side of every issue and attempt to polish it.

 

[IGBT]

real science, yes. A bunch of agenda driven political hacks in white coats masquerading as scientist? NO.

 

[Carmen813]

Yes, I think federal funding should support science, and the arts as well. I think government needs to work better to get a return on these investments...

 

[hal2kilo]

Can you show me a business plan that makes something like a particle accelerator a profitable investment for private investors? The moon shot? The basis of the internet, cellular networks, satellites, etc without the government first doing the expensive pure science research?

Do you really understand what we would not have today if the .gov had your view for the last century or so? Hell, private industry is just barely getting into the space business and 98% of that is currently putting "stuff" in space but do you really think those private companies would be putting satellites in space right now had NASA not existed?

What about scientific research for .mil R&D? Should we just say "fuck it, we are gonna let everyone else catch up and surpass us because we don't want to fund scientific research"?

The fact is that some science is just to big, expensive and not quickly profitable for the private sector and that includes universities when you take away their .gov grants. Don't get me wrong, I am a firm believer in a balanced budget but saying that the government shouldn't invest in pure science is flat out foolish. I personally like technological advancement and evidently you do too seeing that we are having this discussion on that fancy internet thing.

It's especially important since the number 1 motivator for doing anything in at least publically owned corporations is quarterly profit. A few decades ago people used to at least look at the annual report. Why would they do any long term investing in research anymore.

 

[Darwin333]

It's especially important since the number 1 motivator for doing anything in at least publically owned corporations is quarterly profit. A few decades ago people used to at least look at the annual report. Why would they do any long term investing in research anymore.

While I partially agree with your point, I am talking even longer term than that. Show me a 10 year "break even" plan for the massively expensive particle accelerators that are currently operating (include or exclude the LHC, it doesn't matter). Show me how developing rockets and putting satellites into space would EVER turn a profit if they couldn't stand on the shoulders of NASA or any other government funded space program. The sheer scope of building a rocket, or which nothing remotely similar has ever existed, from scratch and sending dozens of them up for testing and then designing satellites from scratch and then figuring out how to put them in orbit (and keep them there) and the list goes on. Today, 50 years after NASA put a man on the moon, we have only a few private companies that are able to put "stuff" into space and zero that can put people into space (unless you want to compare a few minute joy ride to actually getting to the still relatively low altitude of the space station).

What private company in their right mind would have researched, developed and actually built the first nuclear power plant without proven models and technology already in place? If we would have taken the views of some posters here then we would not have been the first to develop the A bomb but we could have likely been the site of the first use of it.

What about exploration? Where is the profit in sending a probe to study the planets? What private company in their right minds would have launched the Voyager probes? The ocean floors? Giant telescopes?

If you think the .gov shouldn't be funding pure science research you should really go find a science textbook from the 50's or 60's and come back and tell us that you think that our knowledge should still be at that point. Just because you disagree with a few things that are funded by the government (don't get me wrong, I do too) doesn't mean that the entire idea of .gov funded science should be eliminated.

 

[hal2kilo]

What private company in their right mind would have researched, developed and actually built the first nuclear power plant without proven models and technology already in place? .

The nuclear power industry is one giant government subsidy to this day and would not exist if not for the largess of the taxpayer.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

A problem we have is that we don't invest enough in research, not too much.

While I disagree with Craig as to the beneficence of government, business has one concern attributed to W.H. Vanderbilt- "The public be damned".

Business does not exist to benefit anything other than it's investors (and in reality it's upper management). If it suddenly found a way to produce something which would benefit society at large but cost profits in the production (let's say producing a barrel of oil's worth of energy for a couple dollars when it can get far more) then won't put itself out of business.

Once research was a priority of business. It's now more about advertising and recycling old things to get new patents or legal maneuvers to sue a competitor.

Case in point, a drug rep was telling me about his companies new product, a sustained formulation of an old generic. Sounds all well and good, but it's a solution to something which has no problem. The generic works just fine taken at bedtime.

It was a way to get a new patent without investing as much in research.

It's rather absurd to see people saying that they want money invested only in things which will pay profits. That's like saying that we should only spend money on winning lottery numbers. Imagine those kooky scientists who studied things like bread mold. What a complete waste of time.

 

[hal2kilo]

Case in point, a drug rep was telling me about his companies new product, a sustained formulation of an old generic. Sounds all well and good, but it's a solution to something which has no problem. The generic works just fine taken at bedtime.

Many of the new drugs fit into this category. Better efficacy not found. New and different side effects found. Higher costs found.

Never mind, started to rant about not adopting other countries healthcare system.

 

[JSt0rm]

fuck people do you have any idea how much the NIH does? Please research this before you vote no. It's really amazing.

 

[JSt0rm]

Conclusion of the study - monkeys really seem to like cocaine :awe:

For someone in the NIH to get a grant to actually use primates requires such amazing hurtles to be jumped that most anything they are working on has been hammered down as the ONLY way to further the study.

 

[hal2kilo]

"Real" science? Maybe.
Spending $71,000 to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys? No.

That couldn't possibly have anything to do with trying figure out why it's so hard for people to quit a coke habit. Our government is already spending billions to keep cocaine out of the country. Seems like a pathetically small investment in comparison.

Doesn't even get close to basic research. It's actually applied research.

 

[Rainsford]

"Real" science? Maybe.
Spending $71,000 to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys? No.

That attitude is exactly the reason I support government funding of scientific research. People in general have a very poor understanding of how research leads to advances, and tend to not support anything that they can't see an immediate application for. And while short-term research is good, it's not the entirety of scientific endeavor, and government funding is one way to make sure that ALL research paths are followed.

 

[JSt0rm]

Thats why congress has no say in what the nih actually does. They just control the total money. Its really the best way to do it. Ignorant tea party fucks telling medical researchers what they can do would be so bad I can't even comprehend the brondo level society we would end up with.

 

[sandorski]

Thats why congress has no say in what the nih actually does. They just control the total money. Its really the best way to do it. Ignorant tea party fucks telling medical researchers what they can do would be so bad I can't even comprehend the brondo level society we would end up with.

It's what People crave.

 

[Rainsford]

Thats why congress has no say in what the nih actually does. They just control the total money. Its really the best way to do it. Ignorant tea party fucks telling medical researchers what they can do would be so bad I can't even comprehend the brondo level society we would end up with.

The fundamental problem is that a lot of people have absolutely no respect for science or scientists. They probably slept through Biology in high school, yet feel totally OK with telling medical researchers how to do their job.

 

[ericlp]

why not? Don't you think Russia and China are doing it? Of course they are!

We need more of it. If it wasn't for Bill Clinton we would have not mapped out the gnome.

 

[hal2kilo]

If it wasn't for Bill Clinton we would have not mapped out the gnome.

Next thing you know, someone will claim Al Gore supported DARPA funding of the internet.

 

[ericlp]

Next thing you know, someone will claim Al Gore supported DARPA funding of the internet.

[SIZE=+2][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=+4]C[/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ompleted in 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. During the early years of the HGP, the Wellcome Trust (U.K.) became a major partner; additional contributions came from Japan, France, Germany, China, and others. See our history page for more information. [/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Project goals were to [/FONT]

• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]store this information in databases, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]improve tools for data analysis, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]transfer related technologies to the private sector, and [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Though the HGP is finished, analyses of the data will continue for many years. Follow this ongoing research on our Milestones page. An important feature of the HGP project was the federal government's long-standing dedication to the transfer of technology to the private sector. By licensing technologies to private companies and awarding grants for innovative research, the project catalyzed the multibillion-dollar U.S. biotechnology industry and fostered the development of new medical applications.
[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Yeah, like this would have gone nowhere with bush in command. That fool couldn't even let science work with stem cell. What an embarrassment to the wold he was ...
[/FONT]

 

[Lemon law]

Once again cogman shows his cluelessness about scientific research by saying, "As for the chemistry comment... Yeah, chemistry was held back for generations because of the work of alchemists. Yes, they developed some of the methods used today, but to say that "all of chemistry was founded on work of people trying to transmute lead into gold" Shows the level of ignorance you truly have."

Please cogman, explain how alchemists held back the scientific research into the field of Chemistry when no government in the history of the earth had the vision to fund the study of Chemistry. But it was the unproductive work of Alchemists that gave someone else the data to analyze, and make the find commonalities guesses
that led to the development of Chemistry. And long before we found the atomic theories to explain why chemistry worked as it did, scientific chemists had already deduced most of the laws of chemistry and were finding applications that made people's lives better. Without that initial data, provided by alchemists, chemistry would have been delayed by hundreds of years.

The same thing may be said about the history of initial research into electricity. Some one commented to , Maxwell as I recall but I could be wrong, ah yes interesting all that electricity stuff, but what good is it? And the answer they received was, what good is an infant, but some day we will tax it.

 

[Screech]

There are private institutes that do research without government funding like the Howard Hughes medical institute for instance.

True, although HHMI is primarily just a very, very large amount of money, the interest (and perhaps small amounts of the principal, I'm not sure) of which is continually funneled into professors at both private and public universities so that research is funded. They also have their own research campus. In any case, it is an excellent resource; however, whether or not the money really goes to 'pure' research is debatable -- a lot of it is channeled toward very specifically defined goals.

 

[hal2kilo]

[SIZE=+2][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=+4]C[/SIZE][/FONT][/SIZE][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]ompleted in 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. During the early years of the HGP, the Wellcome Trust (U.K.) became a major partner; additional contributions came from Japan, France, Germany, China, and others. See our history page for more information. [/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Project goals were to [/FONT]

• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]identify all the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]store this information in databases, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]improve tools for data analysis, [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]transfer related technologies to the private sector, and [/FONT]
• [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]address the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) that may arise from the project. [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Though the HGP is finished, analyses of the data will continue for many years. Follow this ongoing research on our Milestones page. An important feature of the HGP project was the federal government's long-standing dedication to the transfer of technology to the private sector. By licensing technologies to private companies and awarding grants for innovative research, the project catalyzed the multibillion-dollar U.S. biotechnology industry and fostered the development of new medical applications.
[/FONT]


[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Yeah, like this would have gone nowhere with bush in command. That fool couldn't even let science work with stem cell. What an embarrassment to the wold he was ...
[/FONT]

I need to start using that winky emoticon when I post my sarcastic comments.

Actual facts on the matter:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

 

[ShawnD1]

Please cogman, explain how alchemists held back the scientific research into the field of Chemistry

For a long time, they were basically the same thing. Alchemy uses a lot of the same ideas as chemistry. A chemist will turn gold ore into gold bars and it works because they both contain the same gold atoms. Alchemists will try to turn lead into gold because they are roughly the same weight so they must be very similar.

Alchemy is really not as stupid as it sounds. Turning lead into gold sounds like a silly idea, but there's a reason someone might think this is possible. Charcoal and diamonds are both carbon. Charcoal is black, opaque, very weak, and tastes horrible. Diamonds are yellow or colorless, transparent, incredibly strong, and diamonds don't have a taste. Charcoal can conduct electricity, but diamonds cannot. Obviously charcoal and diamonds are very different from each, but they are the same carbon atoms. Applying what we know about diamonds (which probably was not known back then), it seems reasonable to think that gold and lead are allotropes of the same material, so all you would need to do is find the correct way to deconstruct lead and reconstruct it as gold.
Modern chemists have done what alchemists would love to do - turn worthless carbon into useful diamonds.

A lot of research projects turn out to be a dead end, but the research is still valuable because it shows you what doesn't work. The government spent a lot of money doing research on psychics and psychic spies, and the conclusion is that it's all complete bullshit.
The government also does lots of work that goes somewhere, and quite a bit of it is from military research projects. RADAR, airplanes going faster than the speed of sound, internet, GPS, parachutes, rockets with several stages, alternative energy, airplanes controlled by robots, missile guidance systems, infrared cameras, communication devices, etc.

 

[miniMUNCH]

In principle, if we are going to have a strong/large federal government, then that government might as well provide funding for "real science".

The problem is, as with things big government, science will be become political. Scientific funding decisions and the governments use of those science agencies absolutely will become political. This is really, really bad. Even worse, political lobbies will find a way (and already have) to imprint their agenda on scientific spending policy, etc.

I have a PhD in chemical engineering and actively involved in nanotechnology research... I have some exposure the scientific political climate in most all of our funding agencies, heard a lot of experiences, etc. Our funding structure is decrepit and corrupt.

Key positions at NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA are not filled on merit, intelligence and capability... they are filled on political grounds more often than not. There is shit tons of nepotism in the system. Political manifestos are tainting science and influencing scientific decisions. People fabricate results to keep their jobs / research funding. This is bad... really bad.

So in actuality, I am not sure I support government funding of research via NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA. In the absence of government, industry will fund high value research where necessary... industry already does so now (funding levels would likely increase substantially). I think in the physical sciences, industry sponsored research dollars are usually better spent and get "more science for the dollar" than government money.

 

[monovillage]

We're not talking only science here, we're talking Government funding of it. Without proper oversight money is distributed based on political connections, social connections,alma maters, political supporters, old boys networks and political payoffs that have nothing to do with where the money is needed and where it would make the greatest benefit for the money spent. Come on folks we're talking the Federal Government here, be realistic.

 

[Darwin333]

In principle, if we are going to have a strong/large federal government, then that government might as well provide funding for "real science".

The problem is, as with things big government, science will be become political. Scientific funding decisions and the governments use of those science agencies absolutely will become political. This is really, really bad. Even worse, political lobbies will find a way (and already have) to imprint their agenda on scientific spending policy, etc.

I have a PhD in chemical engineering and actively involved in nanotechnology research... I have some exposure the scientific political climate in most all of our funding agencies, heard a lot of experiences, etc. Our funding structure is decrepit and corrupt.

Key positions at NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA are not filled on merit, intelligence and capability... they are filled on political grounds more often than not. There is shit tons of nepotism in the system. Political manifestos are tainting science and influencing scientific decisions. People fabricate results to keep their jobs / research funding. This is bad... really bad.

So in actuality, I am not sure I support government funding of research via NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA. In the absence of government, industry will fund high value research where necessary... industry already does so now (funding levels would likely increase substantially). I think in the physical sciences, industry sponsored research dollars are usually better spent and get "more science for the dollar" than government money.

You make some valid points but does the good outweigh the bad?

In your opinion would we have even a fraction of our current understanding of our solar system, and the universe in general, if funding was controlled entire entirely by the private sector? What reason would any company have to send the Voyager probes? What is the ROI on a particle accelerator?

There is a huge difference between advocating fixing problems with the way the .gov currently funds R&D and saying that it should get out of funding science altogether.