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==Is supporting the efforts of painters, sculptors, and poets to learn and practice their craft in public Universities subsidization?

In the context of government funding...yes.

==I say we should build particle accelerators, and superconducting supercoliders, and help fund a Genome project.

I’m all for it if there is a market for it. But not a penny of taxpayer money should go towards science unless it is directly related to national defense.

I’m all for it if there is a market for it. But not a penny of taxpayer money should go towards science unless it is directly related to national defense.

That is one of the most ridiculous things I have seen you post.

It seems that you are so against "evilution" that you are willing to trash all of science to kill off the small part that you disagree with for religious reasons.

I am sure glad that you, and thinkers like you, are not in power in this country and likely never will be.

You folks would have us living in a theocracy so fast we wouldn't know what hit us.

And you, of course, will deny wanting to impose a theocracy on this country. Sorry, from your posts, such as the one above, I don't believe a word of it.

Paging Nehemiah Scudder. Pick up the white courtesy telephone please.

Universities turn out graduates who can work in the industry doing research without a totally new education. This is because of grants to University Scientists which enables graduate students to perform experiments researching cancer, signal transduction, cardiovascular disease, gene function, synthetic chemistry, mass spectrometry etc, etc. This all involves expensive equipment and reagents. Not all of it involves being better able to kill people, but enables us to save lives.

Wilson was perhaps a little sensitive to the idea that all a particle accelerator was going to do was enable us to make bigger bombs because he worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the Atomic bomb.

At some point there is pride to be taken in pure research, pride in discovery, national pride that it takes place in the U.S.A. more than in any other nation. I have pride that I am doing my part to discern a small part of this great and glorious creation. I am proud to be looking for small molecule therapeutics to heal the sick. But not all research needs to be packed into pills or bombs to be of value. Where will the next generation of Scientists be trained? Alumni seem willing to spend millions on new football stadiums, but springing a few thousand for a DNA sequencer and some DNA purification kits seems to be beyond their realm of interest. A few elite Universities could work on endowments but they would have to curtail the scope of their research efforts without funding from the Fed.

I am sure India and China are willing to train the next generation of Scientists and Engineers for us. I already enjoy working with many people from other nations who have come to the U.S.A. to work, but I would like to continue seeing American graduates of American Universities.