Posted on 10/27/2003 3:00:20 PM PST by Brian S
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:44:35 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Spurred by complaints from a conservative group, the National Institutes of Health is questioning government-funded researchers about the value of their work on AIDS and sexual practices.
NIH spokesman John Burklow said his agency was responding to a request from Republican lawmakers, who were given a list of 157 researchers with NIH grants.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
They can't find enough flakes with advanced degrees to give money to?
With that kind of cash,
they could have treated freepers
to weekend "retreats,"
and they'd have found out
everything they'd want to know
on sex practices!
"I just keep thinking that this is a bad nightmare and I'm actually going to wake up from all this," said Clark, a physician whose $300,000 grant also was intended to help her earn an advanced degree.
So which part is the bad nightmare? Having to come up with an explanation for the usefulness of her research? I agree...sounds extremely difficult. If she can pull it off, give her an extra honorary degree.
One is already obliged to do that, on page 2 of the research grant. It's supposed to be written in terms an educated layperson can understand.
This is a horrible precedent. If we give Bible-bashers leave to review every NIH grant, why not Scientologists, LaRouchites, or the NAACP? Must scientific research be acceptable to every possible pressure group? How long will it take the fundies to come after any research that proposes to look at evolution?
A slippery-slope argument, professor.
The vast sums of money thrown blindly by the government at anything with AIDS in the name has bred a culture of corruption. People use AIDS funding to talk nasty to kids and tell them more freaky-cool ways to have sex, to generate funding for nonsense studies, and to give some folks money for doing little more than having "AIDS" somewhere on their letterhead. All sorts of things like that being done with government money.
When the government starts paying anthropologists to teach evolution to students in christian schools under the guise of "Religious Doctrine Awareness," and without the knowledge of the parents, I won't mind if the situation is "looked into."
Meantime, there is not a real parallel to the current situation with AIDS research and education money.
The problem is that the NIH is already politicized. For instance, I know people researching neurological differences between races who got their grants pulled. The homosexual lobby kills projects that are unfavorable to their agenda all the time, and it also sees to it that AIDS research is overfunded. Given these precidents, how can you expect Christian conservatives to sit on the sidelines?
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