Posted on 10/26/2012 11:20:22 PM PDT by emax
This inquiry ideally meant for anyone here who is a research scientist or engineer in the STEM disciplines and who has a Master's or a PhD or a Doctor or current graduate student and/or anyone who has genuine knowledge of Democrat and Republican, in particular Obama and Tea Party Republican, policies of research and development.
The main question is this : How do we address those within and outside the scientific community who insist we must have Obama and fellow militant leftist Democrats in power otherwise STEM research and development and cancer and other medical research in this country will decay and that with TEA Party leaders in charge, science in America will die ? I raise this question because I interact with members of the science and research community fairly regularly and I hear this rather often. I hear about how the Conservative Republicans plan to eliminate support for medical and cancer research labs, physics labs like Oakridge National Lab or Jefferson Lab and chemistry labs as well. Physics and Chemistry professors have actually said that the Tea Party plans to eliminate and gut their funding so they can't get any research done. And the thing is, this is issue that Conservative Republican leaders often loss critical votes over since this is one of the most important issues for a nontrivial segment of the American population. For the Conservative community, insisting this issue is unimportant is not going to do any good.
So the key questions are as follows : What is an accurate description of the Conservative/Republican and or Tea Party plans when it comes to support for public labs in cancer research, nuclear and particle physics, chemistry and other sciences ? Are they for simply slashing budgets for any science research in these or any other STEM discipline ?
And also, if you are in the science research community and you are told by liberal coworkers that an important reason to reelect Obama is because we need to keep public support of science research alive - and if you work in science research fields, chances are you will hear this being said - what you you say in order to effectively counter this point ? What would be your counterargument ?
Thank you for any support and useful advice you can provide.
I thought that the money we spent on them was better spent than on some other things we wasted money on. Was it worth it? Some of it advanced the state of the art. Military research and development is inherently wasteful in the short term. We had a positive influence on NCAR as a whole, I believe.
Many have made the argument that if we do not get our fiscal house in order, it will be destroyed. I fear that most who have been feeding at the government trough will be desperately saying... Just keep it coming for another couple of years, until I can retire...
We need to keep pushing for fiscal sanity. I think they can understand that. It is probably the best we can do. People are capable of tremendous self deception when their livelihood is endangered.
Stem cell research, and almost all other “science” experiments can be funded by private industry NOT by our tax dollars. Actually stem cell research, except for adult stem cells, should not be done at all. Who cares how many galaxy making clouds there are in the Milky Way, it affects us how? The only science worth government funding is weapons research. Who cares if a couple of thousand overpaid scientists sucking up our tax money vote for Obama? They all vote for socialists now anyway, that won’t change.
The Dems have cut sci/tech funding FAR more than the ‘pubbies have (guess who killed the space program), in order to have more funds to channel into welfare. I seriously doubt that the ‘pubbies/Tea Party have any intentions of cutting SERIOUS sci/tech research at all. They might cut some of the funding for “boutique” research (like global warming/fetal stem cells). I would think that any serous scientist already knows this.
NASA contributed a wide body of science for decades, today they focus on islam.
The nuclear labs like the Oakridge or Idaho are being dismantled and decommissioned. Not because of lack of funding...but because of ‘treaties’ the left believes in.
Science and research at the government level should go into defense. All the rest should be in the free market system.
I worked on one of the government research stations decommissioning two of the 1950’s nuclear reactors there. It was a bit of a pet project because the goal was to be able to return the site to ‘green space’ and safe for residential homes. The ‘government’ science people viewed the project as being able to carry them to retirement. They stopped the project at every chance they could. While we, the lead contractor, were the one’s moving forward and accomplishing the goal. Millions of dollars were wasted due to the government science folks involved.
This is not a matter of people not understanding science or the research lab, or the field lab. It is a matter of science not being budget conscious. Should we have the technology and protocols to cleanup a nuclear contaminated site? In the era of a terrorist dirty bomb...yeah...you bet we should. Was the price to have those protocols, worth the extra decades it took us to cleanup the project site? Government Science folks goal: retirement from project they thought impossible to do Independent Contractor goal: show it could be done
If engineers are out of work on the space coast it is because they are unwilling to move. There is high paying aerospace work in other places in the country. I have worked oil industry in the past, but the job boards have many postings for aerospace as well at the same pay rate or more than the oil industry especially if you have prior experience in that field.
I am not saying that gutting Nasa was or wasn’t the right thing to do, but our country hasn’t lost that knowledge, just relocated it to other states. I thought the same as you and figured that there would be no work and was really surprised that it wasn’t the case.
At this point I would guess that if you stopped a hundred people on the street not one would mention gov. spending on science as a big concern.
Instead they wonder how they can pay for gas and groceries at the same time, whether they will have a job next week or next month, and hope no expensive emergencies arise.
Science and technology will do quite well with private funding and a good economy can provide those funds.
Between the anti mullah Persian scientists who escaped Iran, the anti Communist Chinese scientists who escaped China, and the religious economically conservative American scientists I work with; I am unsure where you get the impressions that scientists are liberal.
I agree with you, but also vehemently argue that this viewpoint is an incredibly uninformed and frankly stupid one. Funding for biomedical research, and pretty much all research is down markedly right now. Why? Because the economy under this moronic socialist sucks, like economies always do under moronic socialists. It is anti-intellectual to be a socialist, and therefore quite amusing - in a tragic way - for universities to be so full of socialist leaning faculty.
There are lots of ways for conservatives to seize this issue, but it requires a recognition by some that the kind of research funded by federal research dollars is the kind that will not find funding in the private sector - generally. I've dealt with private investors many times, and they are not interested generally in funding things that are very basic and without a clearly defined path to a revenue return. That pretty much excludes all basic science. Philanthropic funding is a bit different, but there's not enough of that around to fund science in a big enough way such that we are funding the basic discoveries that fuel future development and assure that we stay at the forefront of the world in innovation.
That said, the US taxpayer should not be funding politically active self-aggrandizing arrogant faculty who game the system and produce crap - and there are a lot of them. Less than half of all biomedical research papers are ever cited, even once.
Recently a private pharmaceutical company conducted a study to try reproducing the results of 53 of the highest profile papers in cancer research - from high stature labs and published in high stature journals. They could only replicate the results of 6 (Nature 483, 531–533; 2012. If any private company had a research department that produced results that were only accurate around 11% of the time, they would go bankrupt. This should not be tolerated in biomedical research.
What should we support? Well, I would first off put an absolute limit on the number of grants and the amount of US taxpayer dollars that can go to investigators who are not US citizens, including the amount of grant funding that is allowed to go to foreign post-docs. I would make this around 20-25%. Americans are not going into the sciences anymore, because the careers are often based on soft money (e.g. government or private donations) and the reward for time spent training etc. is low relative to so many other things they can do. So, several decades ago investigators decided they could stock their labs with people from overseas, pay them less, and get the most work for their federal grant dollars. In a sense, these investigators - the majority of whom are liberals - were practicing outsourcing.
Of course, in a university environment that is called ‘diversity’, but what it really did was to markedly change the demographics of American research, and further push American youth away from scientific careers. I can tell you with absolute veracity that some of those from Asia and elsewhere who were trained and supported here under US taxpayer dollars now sit on federal grant review committees and direct funds to their growing inner circle of friends and collaborators. There is proof of this, and to doubt that this is happening is naive.
To address this, and other problems with peer review in science I would institute a system in which 1) the scientific portion of all papers and grants were reviewed without knowing who the authors were, 2) the ‘peer’ reviewers would be identified - and therefore have to stand by and defend their comments, and 3) any proof of collusion or falsification of data would be punishable in the first offense by exclusion from public funding for 10 years, and the second offense would allow imprisonment. Harsh, but necessary.
I would cap the number of grants any one lab could have, and would make it clear to universities that the government was no longer going to allow overheads of more than 50% - and all universities would be required to provide stringent proof that overhead money would be used to fund research-related expenses - not extraneous things that are only peripherally connected. (for those who don't know what ‘overhead’ is, it is an additional amount of money that gets tacked onto research grants - and goes directly to the parent institution, not to the researcher.
I know this doesn't answer your question of how to bring these people into the conservative fold, but my view is that we should emphasize the above in the general context of: 1) Research funding will dwindle unless there is a strong economy - and liberal politicians hurt economies. 2) There has been too much cheating and pocket lining in research, and too many elites have been controlling American research. Republicans will push to make American research the most reproducible and productive in the world - and to assure that it is carried out by Americans - and not outsourced via funding too high a percentage of non-US citizens. 3) American universities need to use their endowments more to pay for their research operations and not expect the federal government to fund anything other than that which is directly involved in producing top quality research. 4) In every country in which ‘socialized’ or government directed health care has been put in place, research dollars have dwindled. Obama care will absolutely and unequivocally reduce research funding and therefore innovation in the US. This can not be allowed.
IMHO.
” I am unsure where you get the impressions that scientists are liberal.”
Most are, including those from China.
I'm an engineer and I serve on an advisory board at my alma mater. One of my roles is to help secure private funding for interesting initiatives that aren't part of the school's core mission and therefore don't get much (if any) public funding. Some of our largest private contributors are Exxon/Mobil, Panasonic and Colgate-Palmolive.
Where is your data that non academic scientists are mostly liberal?
I didn't say ‘non-academic’. Academic scientists clearly are, and this can be discerned by looking at where political donations go. That said, not all are, and some are getting the message that supporting democrats doesn't necessarily mean there will be grant funding to go around. I don't have a good idea about the politics of private sector scientists, but it wouldn't surprise me to know that the percentage of liberals was less than in academia.
yup and that is the all out truth. another gimmich by the commies in charge
If you are in academia then it is like living in Pelosi’s district of SF (or being a registered republican in NYC)....you worry too much. Agnew called the pointy headed academics nattering nabobs of negativism for a reason
Sign up to make phone calls for someone who needs the help. Know that here you stand and the world be damned. You want to change the minds of people who are hard core left....you CANNOT. Why do you think commie countries have ‘reeducation camps’? They are frothing deranged brain washed true believers and useful idiots...Even the Good Book tells us not to cast our pearls before swine.
granted too broad a brush on my part...but you have to admit conservatives on the college campus are rarer and rarer
It’s not a full reply, but one thing you can point out is that under the stewardship of the Obama administration, a greater and greater proportion of the NSF budget has been going to education projects (of dubious value — for instance we don’t actually need more Ph.D.’s in mathematics, but there are lots of NSF programs trying to increase the numbers, the value-added by trying to get more women to chose careers in STEM disciplines is unclear) and to pick winners in terms of areas of research which will be important (all sorts of solicitations with the adjectival particle cyber- in their titles, and attempts to force interdisciplinary work on the scientific community), rather than on supporting basic research on its own terms. Whether this is really the Obama administration’s doing, or whether it’s simply bureaucratic fashion that will go on regardless of who’s in the White House is unclear.
Science research has already declined significantly under Obama. Just look at our manned space program, we don’t have one any more.
*When I was a grad student at Penn back during the Reagan era, I used to jokingly self-parody my political positions by saying "There's no social problem facing the U.S. that can't be solved by the judicious use of tactical air power." When I went back to visit after Goode's fiasco with aerial bombardment of the MOVE compound, I ribbed him by saying "I see your man took my advice." "What?" he replied. "Well, I used to say 'There's no social problem facing the U.S. that can't be solved by the judicious use of tactical air power.'" "Oh! Don't even talk about it!" he cried.
The 50+ people on the PSU faculty in the early 1970's could easily be non-representative as you well know; and I'm never surprised to discover that people with analytical faculties don't have their heads completely up their posteriors.
Actually I did forget one sensible mathematician, who became Math Department head at PSU when I was in Southern California -- then in my second PhD year -- who ran a running battle against the left-wing jackasses of the University Faculty Senate in the pages of the Centre Daily Times. My girlfriend used to send me the back-and-forth, this was in 1978-79.
My thesis advisor was a far-left guy. He and I would've probably exchanged gunfire if he'd had a gun. Luckily his labs were on the third floor of a very old, very cavernous stone building and up there no one could hear our screams. We got along otherwise.
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