Posted on 01/29/2020 5:06:15 AM PST by karpov
For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won more Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, and physics than any other nation. Given our history of discovery, innovation, and success, it is not surprising that across the political landscape Americans consider the funding of scientific research to be both a source of pride and a worthy investment.
Nevertheless, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the pursuit of government grants would have a corrupting influence on the scientific community. He feared that while American universities were “historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,” the pursuit of taxpayer monies would become “a substitute for intellectual curiosity” and lead to “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment…and the power of money.”
Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded and prescient.
My experiences at four research universities and as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow taught me that the relentless pursuit of taxpayer funding has eliminated curiosity, basic competence, and scientific integrity in many fields.
Yet, more importantly, training in “science” is now tantamount to grant-writing and learning how to obtain funding. Organized skepticism, critical thinking, and methodologic rigor, if present at all, are afterthoughts. Thus, our nation’s institutions no longer perform their role as Eisenhower’s fountainhead of free ideas and discovery. Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public, confounds public policy, and diminishes our nation’s preparedness to meet future challenges.
Nowhere is the intellectual and moral decline more evident than in public health research.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Government Grants cause Global Warming, ts rampant at every University.
Academic research in many cases has degenerated into grantsmanship to obtain politicized , agenda driven funding to generate scientific “content” that justifies political agendas
The results are preordained
Has anyone in the last 30 years published any research that contradicts the current group think on virtually any topic of Global Warming?
It’s uncanny how they always seem to find exactly what they are looking for
Yes, government-funded scientific research is often corrupt. The climate change scientists prove it with their bias.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) needs to be disbanded in favor of private firms chosen for their competence in predicting hurricanes and other weather threats.
I’m curious at the extent property and casualty insurance companies use other sources for weather intelligence.
“Instead, American universities often produce corrupt, incompetent, or scientifically meaningless research that endangers the public”
So true! The bodies are starting to pile up because of Academic incompetence:
Punitive eco-taxes, aviation regulations, activist investors, green NGOs and climate-aware passengers conspire to force airlines and manufacturers to lower CO2 emissions by using less fuel, which accounts for 99 percent of aviation’s carbon footprint.
No one has said it explicitly yet, but this relentless pressure to reduce emissions appears to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two fatal crashes in the past year, claiming 346 lives.”
https://nypost.com/2019/10/23/devine-eco-madness-may-be-reason-for-disastrous-boeing-737-max-safety-issues/
I work at a university-this couldn’t be more accurate.
Communist author.
Why do so many authors lack basic thinking skills?
Govt spending destroys, got it?!
I worked at a place that had a couple of employees whose job was writing grant requests.
I worked in Man’s Best Hospital in Massachusetts in the 80’s. It was apparent that whoever funds the Research will get the result they want. Ever since then, when my friends get worried about some new ‘research’ I just tell them to wait 6 months and another research project will give them the exact opposite result. No worries. I am not condemning all researchers, especially at my former hospital. But SOME weren’t abiding by the rules.
There was a great book a while back called “The Master Plan” by Heather Pringle, about how Germany’s entire scientific community was co-opted by the Nazis to support a fictitious “Aryan” race. Hitler , Himmler and Goebbels attempted to replace Christianity but “inventing” their version of prehistoric Germanic history and culture and using that as the ‘new church’ for the Germanic peoples. This BS was peddled at every level of government: This race supposedly populated ancient Germany but was dispersed and weakened by inbreeding. It was promoted by selective grants, university chairmanships, tenure, and media promotion. They even falsified archeological digs on a scale that made Piltdown man seem like joke. Any academic running afoul of Goebbel’s agenda was sidelined or fired from any position of power or influence. Is there any doubt that today’s liberals are the same eternal idiots who still carry the propaganda torch that Goebbels lit? We’re even worse off today. Even the hard sciences are hopelessly politicized.
bump
The nobel prize is worthless since they gave it to the a##clown for nothing, the scientific and research community was compromised when they realized no money if you do not march to our agenda
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