Libertarian Girl

“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal government project allocation, and the power of money, is ever present, and is gravely to be regarded.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government should stay out of science completely. Science, scientists, taxpayers, and the world would be better off for it. Research scientists are usually keen on increased government funding for science, and this is understandable– it seems to be in their self-interest to do so. However, I think that when government gets involved in science, science actually suffers, and the public (who do usually benefit the most when good science happens) is charged for it all while achieving inefficient results.

True innovators are stifled, Nobel Prize winners are turned down for funding and their ideas called “not worthy of pursuit,” and meanwhile, scientists willing to toe the party line publish reams of inconsequential, NIH-funded research just to get published and keep their jobs– perhaps while stifling those dreams of what they truly would prefer to be working on. The government takes perfectly innocuous scientific discoveries such as fertilizers and uses them against the enemy of the moment, funding research that is often only nominally related to actual defense (at the rate of $50,000 a second) and actually giving strong consideration to “gay bombs” while not providing body armor to soldiers or providing them proper medical care when they return with injuries. It is inefficient and unable to govern its own budget, let alone scientific priorities.

When science goes against the government status quo, there is every incentive on the government’s part to misrepresent, cover up, or ban the information in question and little accountability to prevent them from doing so. Scientists spend time on government panels, at taxpayer expense, produce findings that are ignored or reviled, endlessly writing grants, reports and peer reviews and spending less time in the lab, while researchers face the uncertainty and red tape of government funding from year-to-year. A hierarchy of universities is created, needing ever more and more funding at the expense of smaller ones, attracting more and more students and raising tuition rates every year to pay for it all– while probably not even paying the grad students who are actually doing the teaching more than a small allowance. As an aside, a few days ago I attended a lecture by Eric Drexler, the inventor of nanotechnology, which was held at one of the nation’s top research universities and had a decent but not a huge audience. Perhaps the postdocs, grad students, and scientists were at home working on their NIH applications.

In his talk, Drexler asked, “How many minds, how many years?” about the priorities of government funding for science. My answer is “every mind it can get, forever.” It will not get better. The government is fundamentally incapable of providing adequate, fair, and non-biased funding for science.

It gives government too much power.

First of all, science and government’s aims and methods are fundamentally at complete odds with each other– science is rational, following certain rules, cautious and focused on facts, constantly looking for the truth. Government has an annoying tendency to be made up of people who benefit from telling multiple truths to different constituencies and generally don’t care how things are, as long as they seem a certain way– facts are negotiable. Perception is everything in politics, while science is all about facts.

When you give the government a power, you are saying to the public that you trust the government with that power. That’s just how it works. You are giving up control. When scientists give the government power over their work, they are endorsing what the government eventually does with it. As we allow the executive branch to take more and more unconstitutional power, we are encouraging one person to dictate scientific policy. This person, I guarantee, will not be a scientist or even know the basic tenets of science beyond high school. They won’t know a quark from a buckyball. They certainly don’t know better than scientists what should be studied and how, or they’d be doing the scientific work themselves. Our system lets politicians dictate science and lets scientists think they’re dictating politics. That’s why we have scientific advisers, right? Yes, and alas, the president chooses his or her own scientific advisers; most of the time, the power-hungry people at the top prefer to hire people with similar views for these sorts of cushy government jobs.

We can know all these things by simply looking back at presidential scientific policies. The government has a tendency to distort, malign, and ignore science when the research is not compatible with the administration’s own aims. Scientists have been directed to leave information out of official government reports. Ask the physicist William Happer, who was fired as head of the Department of Energy because he was “philosophically out of tune” with the Clinton administration (he was fired over the objections of Senate Democrats). He disagreed with whatever the official line of the moment was, so he lost his government science job. Bush has done the same thing, and so will our next president, and the next, and the next. Whether you agree with Gore or Clinton or Reagan or Bush doesn’t matter; if you are a government scientist or a government-funded scientist, just wait a few years and there will be a president in power who doesn’t agree with whatever you think. They will not hesitate to fire you… the precedent has certainly been set. When you give a president you like this power, you are also giving a president you don’t like this power.

Any scientist employed by the government, if they can even pass the necessary political litmus test first, is opening themselves to this risk. Happer described how scientific policy was decided under the Clinton-Gore administration: “When you ask this gang overseeing ozone depletion and global warming how much two plus two is, they first ask, ‘Why do you want to know?’ Then you say, ‘Well, I’m interested in finding out what’s happening to the ozone layer, and I thought the answer would help.’ Then they say, ‘Well, how much do you want it to be?’”

An online blogger was recently given a journalism award for reporting on the story of the United States attorneys and the “pattern of federal prosecutors being forced from office for failing to do the Bush administration’s bidding.” Do you think that people put in power who have such little respect for United States attorneys will have any more respect for research scientists? Could research scientists be forced from universities if their research interests don’t match those of the government’s? I think it’s quite likely. Even private universities accept so much federal funding that they feel they can’t even get rid of military recruiters on campus when they want to for threat of losing their federal “welfare checks.” Although public universities operate under a Board of Trustees or Board of Regents, who appoints those trustees? The governor is usually a member, and the governor or legislature usually appoints members, often those who have done political favors for the governor.

Some Democrats out there might argue that only Republican lawmakers have been guilty of this type of wrongdoing. This is not true. In 1979, a federal study of the effects of Agent Orange was abandoned by the CDC; the American Legion and other veterans’ groups sued the federal government, alleging that it was purposely attempting to conceal the harmful effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam soldiers, due to both the huge health costs it would then have to pay for the vets and to shield the companies responsible for the poison. Who was the president in 1979? Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter. Twenty years later, officials from the American Legion continued to criticize the Pentagon under President Bill Clinton for what they called a continued cover-up and official denial of the effects of Agent Orange. And of course, Agent Orange and other “rainbow herbicides” were approved for use under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Another Democrat and Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, is guilty of the same crime: global warming expert James Hansen of NASA, who unlike Happer did agree with Gore on climate change and greenhouse gases, still says that Gore demanded certain answers, even when the science didn’t jibe: “Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something that wasn’t consistent with that. I got a little fed up with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now.” Ironically, Dr. Hansen has himself criticized government officials who do not go out of the bounds of their legislated duties, thus further propagating the system of rogue officials that he claims he is against.

Annoyance by politicians will always be institutionalized eventually. Governments always take more and more power and rarely give it back. Yes, corruption in regards to scientific fact has been a common theme through almost all federal governments in the US in modern times, both Democratic and Republican. Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore was not just referring to the current administration when he said the problems with government interference stemmed from a “theory of government”– that the executive branch has unilateral power to do as it pleases. Our next president will think this, too.

Only scientists should be deciding scientific policy.

We have a democratic republic form of government, which means that the majority often gets its way even if that way is bad– think slavery, women not being allowed to vote until 80 years ago, Japanese-Americans being sent to internment camps, segregated education. Quite frankly, the majority doesn’t know what it’s doing a lot of the time (and I would say, most of the time, because we don’t yet have a libertarian government). A recent study found that more than 70% of Americans have decided that nanotechnology is morally unacceptable. These are the same people who oppose stem cell research from embryos and genetically modified foods, but at least there’s a semblance of a reason for those objections.

In this case, they obviously don’t even know anything about nanotechnology (although they say they do) because while objecting to the science itself, they tell the researchers that they don’t mind what it has brought to us, such as stain-resistant Dockers, and they don’t mind future developments such as incredibly small computers. That’s right, they don’t know what it is, and yet they are willing to ban it just based on the name containing the word “technology” and a description of it containing the words “atom” and “molecular,” and these are the people who will elect our succeeding presidents and whom scientists are begging to be put in charge of our national scientific policies. I thought scientists were, well, smarter than that.

It funds what the government wants to fund.

When the government is in charge of funding and allocating funds, it controls what research scientists can do. If AIDS and cancer research is the “It” funding that members of Congress want to get re-elected this year, and you’ve spent your whole life dedicated to the many worlds theory, well, you’re just out of luck, aren’t you? You’d better find a way to make those many worlds attractive to the average American voter who’s never even heard of quantum physics, pronto, or even better, the industries that make up the backbone of what goes on in Washington, or you can say goodbye to your funding. This is perhaps one of the largest reasons why government funding has to end. Things that have immediate consequences to people– usually some type of biology or chemistry research– will get rained with cash while those in sciences like astronomy or physics or zoology or archeaology, a bit more esoteric and not necessarily aimed at curing diseases, will suffer. Einstein probably wouldn’t have been able to get funding from the NIH for his preferred research topics. That whole E=whatever thing isn’t sexy enough or popular with voters; it wouldn’t make the cut. All would not have been lost for Einstein the modern era, though: the Pentagon, of course, would welcome him into the lab to build a nuclear bomb.

It creates a cycle of status-quo research.

Why would researchers go along with this absurd system of having to achieve government approval of their research? The idea sounds like it would be at home in the 1960s-era Soviet Union and nowhere else. At universities in the United States, tenure is important– you can’t get fired, your job is protected, and you’re better respected if you’ve gained tenure at a university than if you have not. Tenure is usually granted depending on how much research you’ve done and what you’ve published. A professor who doesn’t try to tailor his or her research to make it low-risk, marketable to the government, and easily publishable could be faced with the high cost of getting fired. There’s a big incentive to just go with the latest trend in research, publish a paper, even if it covers ground that’s mostly been covered before, and then go on to the next trendy area of research that is also sure to be funded.

This fundamentally distorts what is being researched and published and is highly detrimental to science. One of last October’s Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Mario Capecchi, had his research turned down by the NIH for years before they finally conceded that it was worthy; they had maintained it would never work and refused to fund it. How many researchers out there now, faced with the same bureaucracy and centralized source of funding, decide that they need tenure too much to persist with their idea (perhaps even Nobel-worthy, as Capecchi’s was) and move on to a sure thing for funding, such as AIDS research?

“You could set up a foundation with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. …First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. …By going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. …There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashions would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not.” — Leo Szilard, Manhattan Project scientist, when asked how the growth of scientific research could be slowed, 1961

It distorts scientific priorities.

In his lecture, Drexler lamented the over-funding of research he said is trendy but that he thinks little long-term promise, such as fusion power. He implied that at the same time, nanotechnology, which promises to be a revolutionary technology when perfected, is under-funded. Over-funding of a not-so-great idea and under-funding of a great idea would never happen in the free market. The best ideas would get the most money, the worst ideas wouldn’t get money. It wouldn’t be based on who you know or what the voters like this year or what the latest scientific buzzwords are. Dr. Drexler said that every funding body (and university) comes to the table with its own agenda, and if it has pre-conceived, unscientific notions such as “gray goo” or other fairy tales about nanotechnology, nanotechnology simply won’t get funded or researched. Once these types of myths are out there, they’re difficult to get rid of.

According to Dr. Drexler, the “hysteria” surrounding false ideas about nanotechnology has set the research timetable back at least 10 years from what it should be. He said that the government has ignored funding for important fundamentals like protein synthesis development while it instead funds “a probe to Mars, a plasma future machine, and one day of war.” He asked “how many minds and how many years” it would take for the government to get its act together. It’s probably no coincidence that Drexler has left academia to join nanotechnology companies instead.

True innovation is stifled.

This type of bureaucratic attitude in denying funding to things that are not “safe” or guaranteed to work the first time, using the latest “in” techniques and technologies that appeal to voters, is fundamentally flawed and is devastating to scientific research. The best scientific research is done by an innovator with a spark of an idea. The best NIH funding goes to a well-connected researcher with plenty of postdocs at a “name” university who has previously published many mainstream, amenable papers and is therefore a “sure thing.” However, the best scientific innovations were not discovered this way. Einstein never had to play that game.

“The idea behind the MacArthur Prize is that Einstein could not have written a grant application saying he was going to discover the theory of relativity. You can’t write a proposal saying you’re going to discover something you don’t know exists. Einstein needed to be free, and so do future Einsteins.” — J. Roderick MacArthur, son of the founders of the MacArthur Prize

Allowing scientists to be “reviewed” in the way the NIH does, prior to conducting the experiments, automatically rules out many kinds of research that have historically been vital. Anything that goes against currently accepted, mainstream science is likely to be denied. The reviewer brings along his or her own personal and scientific biases and will not think twice about denying funding to the proposal in question, although it could be groundbreaking research that changes the way scientists think. Galileo wouldn’t have made it past the scientific reviewers and funders of the day– his ideas would have been too out there, too crazy, too impossible.

It creates uneven distortions in the university system and prevents competition from independent scientists.

Universities probably also like the system because in order to qualify for NIH and other types of government funding, a scientist must be linked with a university or a similar type of organization. According to Joseph DeSimone, the top 20 universities get 1/3 of federal R&D funding. A hierarchy is established, and top scientists can’t venture too far outside of it or they lose certain funding options. DeSimone said in the Drexler lecture, “It’s a cliff [for funding] if you’re not in the top 20.” Steven Pinker couldn’t open his own laboratory and apply for NIH funding on a type of language research that Harvard didn’t approve of. No, he would have to stay at Harvard if he wanted to receive funding from the government and do what they wanted him to do. These huge universities are themselves large bureaucracies prone to waste and high overhead costs. Therefore, it’s possible that even fewer dollars go to Pinker’s research than if Pinker opened up his own shop and started taking donations. The current system favors universities over the individual researcher, so they have no reason to try to change it, even if science suffers. Universities are often a haven for unconventional thinking, but the government is not– and more and more, the government holds the university’s pursestrings.

Scientific panels’ findings are often distorted and used to argue the government’s agenda.

In many cases, scientific advisory panels’ findings against something are used to argue the government’s case for something. More commonly, advisory panel recommendations are simply ignored. Science just can’t win in these battles. By saying that the findings for are direct from the government panel, people will listen and will never dig deeper and find the true story. In these cases, which are more numerous than you may think, having the panel in the first place and being used as a tool to spread disinformation was worse than not addressing the issue at all.

The government will use your research for things you don’t intend– think Manhattan Project.

Many scientific discoveries can be used for either good or bad– that has been true since a human first figured out how to start a fire. Scientists like to think that their research will be used for good and to better humanity. Unfortunately, when the government is paying, the government can use it for what it wants and that is often bad. Very, very bad. Remember that Agent Orange was tested by government labs before it was used in Vietnam. No one knows what the results of those tests were exactly, but they were quite probably ignored.

Dr. Joseph DeSimone, a panelist at the Drexler lecture, said that he often works with DARPA, and the agency is constantly looking not just at the positive but also the negative ways to use research– on the enemy, as a weapon or a tool in warfare, and also on civilians, for tagging, tracking, and monitoring. Any scientist using government money for their research is leaving it open to the government to do with as it chooses, be it good or bad. As with any government agency, it has little accountability built in (although it is better than other Pentagon agencies), so it’s easy to find thousands of old projects that didn’t work out for DARPA for any one that actually made the cut.

It hurts students and education in general.

What about students of science? They benefit from these magic government dollars that help them with research, right? Well, not exactly. Researchers spend so much time writing grant applications and submitting them in triplicate that they don’t have much time for teaching actual students anymore, and universities spend so much time chasing federal research dollars that they don’t really pay too much attention to undergrads once they’re at the school. They let the TAs take care of that. The massive amounts of NIH funding that even private universities get create a hierarchy among funded schools– — and allow these schools to draw students away from smaller colleges which focus more on teaching. This may or may not be bad, depending on your point of view, but it is not done on the larger college’s own merit– the government is funneling students to the larger colleges and away from the smaller ones. It’s not the proper role of government, and it certainly doesn’t help scientific study at those smaller schools to lose the best students due to government policy.

But science is good!

Some of you might say, But science is good! It should be funded even more than it is now! I absolutely, completely agree with you. The reason it’s not is because the government is involved. Every American has less money because they’re paying for the NIH and DARPA and NSF and all these agencies, which include a large amount of bureaucracy as any government agency will– in fact, it even calls itself a “large bureaucracy,” if that tells you anything. Therefore, if we took the amount of research that comes from $1 billion of funding from the NIH and gave it to the private sector, we would have 20% more research. We wouldn’t lose all that extra to bureaucracy. No one can apply for NIH funding if they want to avoid Kafka-like red tape. At this point in time, scientists feel they need the NIH, but the NIH doesn’t need scientists, and it shows in the grant application and approval process. These are typical government agencies we’re dealing with. Some people even think they cause the problems scientists are trying to solve.

Private organizations can be more efficient and innovative.

Let’s look at some numbers. The NIH has an annual budget of at least $28 billion; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced an initiative in which they would give 10 $20 million grants to deserving applicants who wished to try innovative solutions for tackling some of the world’s most pressing health problems. The program is widely considered to have achieved success just with these relatively small grants– because they were efficiently targeted, goals were set and in many cases achieved, and accountability was built in. Bill Gates is a businessman if there ever was one, and he’s not going to just throw his money around and not demand results from it. He’s also going to recognize and reward innovation when he sees it. Does the NIH have similar mechanisms built in? Has the NIH ever achieved a similar goal with such a relatively small amount of money, $200 million? Does the NIH reward innovation, or does it reward expected results?

The United States isn’t even conducting its “trendy” research in an efficient way. It conducts a third of the world’s cancer research, but only has the fifth-best results. It’s funding a lot of things, but they’re not the right things.

Again, you just can’t trust the government with this stuff.

Scientists have signed a petition alleging that the Bush administration is:

“all too willing to deny scientific truths, disrupt scientific investigations, block scientific progress, undermine scientific education, and sacrifice the very integrity of the scientific process itself — all in the pursuit of implementing their particular political agenda. And today this dominant political agenda is profoundly allied and intertwined with an extremist (and extremely anti-science) ideological agenda put forward by powerful fundamentalist religious forces commonly known as the Religious Right. These fundamentalists now have extensive influence and representatives in major institutions of the U.S. government, including Congress and the White House.”

They are arguing my point for me. In the type of political system we have, people can elect whoever they want to office. More often than not, those people will be ignorant of science or want to exploit it for their own political agendas. The administration in question had the ability to do all this to science because we gave them the power to do so. If we entrust the power to decide where science goes and what is done in science next into the hands of these government officials despite knowing what can and will happen, we have only ourselves to blame.

In my follow-up post, I discuss what the alternatives to government-provided science are.

Libertarian science, science funding, science regulation, science and government, government influence on science, evil nanotechnology, nanotechnology, Eric Drexler, James Hansen, Republicans science, Democrats science

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Free market economics, Government, Non-free market, Other People's Money, Privatization, Science, bureaucracy, libertarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.