There is another thread kicking around:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1567316/posts
Has to do with a Climate Expert at NASA complaining about being censored. When science becomes federalized this political stuff is bound to happen.
My question for you guys is: what effect has federalization of research had on our favorite whipping boy evolution? Any? If so how should it be combatted?
The politics of the Left has pushed much of the climate change issue, based, IMHO, on weak data. The creationists complain that Evolution is also pushed by the feds through education standards and lawsuits over religion and the classrooms. Is there any truth in this?
How can we keep politics out of Science, whatever the field?
I gathered up this information a while back, to debunk the notion that evolution researchers were "in it for the money." But it's useful information for answering your question. The simple answer is that most federal funding in biology is medical research. That certainly involves evolution (viruses mutate) but it's results-driven, so it can't be purely ideological.
Non-medical spending (where there could be ideological issues) is only about 3% of the total, and there are sources of research funds which don't involve the feds, so although there is the potential for political pollution, it's probably not very great:
From the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): Biological and Ecological Sciences in the FY 2005 Budget:
";... funding for non-medical biology ... accounts for only 3 percent of all federally supported life science funding."The National Science Foundation (NSF) remains the principal federal supporter of the biological and ecological sciences, providing 65 percent of the academic funding for non-medical biology. The NSF proposed budget for FY 2005 includes a 2.2 percent ($13 million) increase in funding for the Biological Sciences Directorate (BIO) to bring it to a total of $600 million.
That $600 million (which is a lot of money for non-medical research) is broken down into Molecular and Cellular Biosci, Integrative Biology & Neurosci, Environmental Biology, Biological Infrastructure, Emerging Frontiers, Plant Genome Research. Here's a table with a breakdown of those expenditures by category: R&D in the National Science Foundation.
If that $600 million from the NSF is 65% of all non-medical funding, then the total (which would include other stuff from the Agriculture Dep't, forestry bureaucracies, oceanic research, etc.) is about $900 million for non-medical funding, which is 3% of federally supported life science funding. The grand total, adding in the other 97% which is medical funding, is $30 billion. That's a nice number.
But it's only from federal funding. There is also a large amount of private, industrial funding, from biotech and pharmaceutical firms for example. (There is, of course, absolutely no creationism/ID research program of any kind, private or governmental.)
So let's stick with what the feds spend, non-medical, because that's where the objection seems to lie. If there are, say, 100,000 scientists and technicians working in such research (and it may be more), that comes to ... $9K per person. Incredible riches!
Part II of my comments....
I neglected to mention in part I of my comments that generally, there hasn't been much political influence exerted on basic scientific research. But there are a couple of potential exceptions to that:
1) if the research inpinges upon public policy issues
and
2) if it gets in the way of someones' personal belief system.
Let's face it, basic research into particle physics hardly has major public policy ramifications, so there isn't much incentive for political influence (outside of cabals of competing particle physicists vying for the same funding, perhaps.)
But take "global warming" as an example -- there you have an area of research which has enormous public policy implications, whch can have huge ramifications for business, industry, trial lwayers, and political power. Thus, one should not be surprised to see eco-Nazis trying to influence the direction of the research and the debate on the issue (it is, after all, the last refuge, outside of Havana, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, MA, of the Marxists remnant trying one last grasp at resting control of the World Economy from the unfetterred Invisible Hand of Adam Smith.) Second hand tobacco smoke is another example where the public policy ramifications have impinged on the research. It's not pretty when that happens.
Another area that could be an example of personal ideology getting into the mix would be in the area of certain types of biological research that offend some peoples' faith-based beliefs. Stem cell research comes to mind. There are sincere people who oppose funding it on moral grounds, notwithstanding the potential upside to medicine that might come to fruition from such research.
If we take funding out of the hands of government entirely, then people are free to invest their dollars in whatever form of research floats their boat, including "none at all," if they prefer living out their lives with their heads in the intellectual sand. No system of funding is perfect, but private funding introduces competetion into the equation, and eliminates government coercion from the process. Nobody likes a monopoly, and getting government out of science research funding means government has one less place to meddle in the affairs of man.
And that's a good thing.