Thus, we have a perfect example of the free market at work.

If the government had gotten involved to “usher the technology along,” the price certainly would have increased UP from $2 million, and the technology would still be in research stages and unavailable to the general public, probably on the basis of “consumer protection.”

“I once worked on a chicken farm. Actually ‘farm’ is far too gentle a word for the way these chickens were raised, and ‘factory’ sounds too clinical. This was the seventh circle of chicken hell, a clucking, stinking, filthy production line with just one aim: to produce the maximum quantity of edible meat, as fast and as cheaply as possible, regardless of quality, cruelty or hygiene.”

“As swine flu spreads, and fear spreads faster, it is worth remembering that this, and other animal-to-human viruses, are partly man-made, the outcome of our hunger for cheap meat, the result of treating animals as if they were mere raw material to be exploited in any way that increases output and profits.

There is a tendency to see a flu outbreak, like the plagues of old, as an unstoppable natural event, a scourge visited on Man from above. But there is nothing natural about this form of disease: indeed, it stems from an abuse of nature.

Vast modern pig farms, like the huge poultry plants across the globe, are ideal incubators of disease, and many scientists believe that viral mutation can be directly linked to intensive modern agricultural techniques. With enfeebled animals packed into confined spaces, pathogens spread easily, creating new and virulent strains that may be passed on to humans. When dense populations of factory-farmed animals exist alongside crowded human habitations, the potential for disaster is vastly greater.”

It’s not just destroying the
wealth of the middle class by precipitously devaluing their savings.

It’s also filled with germs that could spread the flu.

The results are disturbing anyway, because the real effect could be that scientists are less likely to criticize something they know or suspect is wrong in fear of harming their careers:

Once polywater was considered a failure, not only were those who had written in its favor punished, but those who had written against it were punished just as strongly! If this is a typical outcome, we can conclude that academic incentives are to just ignore contrarian claims that you do not believe will become mainstream. Try to refute a contrarian claim, and even if you succeed you will be treated just like its defenders.

In vitro meat is certainly the wave of the future and solves a host of problems (environmental and health-wise), since our current system is simply unsustainable for our planet (along with our arteries and waistlines). The group working towards bringing cultured meat to fruition is a nonprofit called New Harvest, and I wish them all the best with their work.

In a case that has “long legal battle” written all over it, Sausalito, California might just find out. It’s banned medical marijuana dispensaries, establishments approved by both state and city voters by referendum– a referendum which of course goes against the DEA.

This is an aspect of governmental incompetence I hadn’t previously considered, but it was just a matter of time until something like this happened, when scientists now regularly become government employees– Bruce Ivins had spent his entire career in an Army lab. Scientists want power just as much as anyone (read Cantor’s Dilemma for a nicely fictionalized explanation of this), and anyone who’s dealt with, say, a secretary in the local parking department may be aware that government employees often get full of themselves and drunk on their own power.

According to The New York Times:

The work became even more intense in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attack, as the field grew tremendously, with billions of dollars in new federal support for research on anthrax and other potential biological weapons and to buy new drugs or vaccines to handle a possible future attack.

Dr. Ivins was among the scientists who benefited from this surge, as 14 of the 15 academic papers he published since late 2001 were focused on possible anthrax treatments or vaccines, comparing the effectiveness of different formulations. He even worked on the investigation of the anthrax attacks, although this meant that he, like other scientists at the Army’s defensive biological laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., was scrutinized as a possible suspect.

Sure, it’s possible that a maniac could do a similar thing to get more private industry funding into science or patent royalties. However, at least it wouldn’t be taxpayer dollars wasted for the purpose.

(Of course, it took the FBI four years and cost taxpayers $6 million from a lawsuit before the right guy was found, but that’s another story altogether.)

So what would be the alternative?

What would happen if the NIH, the other assorted agencies such as the Department of Energy, and most military/DARPA spending on this-could-be-used-against-someone-someday research were abolished tomorrow? Scientists might be poorer in the short run, but they– and science– would be better off in the long run. Companies would give grants to universities, just as they do now. Unlike government grants, many of these company grants have no strings attached, little to no red tape, and have built-in accountability– the companies simply want to employ a certain number of graduates from the university in question, and that’s how they determine whether the grant was successful. If government stopped with its grantmaking, there would be more of these. Since presumably the government would get smaller, corporate taxes would go down and they’d have more discretionary funds available for this type of grant. The bureaucracy inherent in a government grant would not be there, either, so the same amount of money could provide for more research. Private foundations also currently give a lot of money to universities, and they too would continue to do so, also helped by lower taxes. Philanthropists with billions at their discretion could make billion-dollar grants if they chose. Alumni would give to research, not just new buildings.

Private industry would pick up the slack. Most current medical discoveries are made by pharmaceutical companies hoping to find new drugs. Scientists right now must be tied to a huge research university, a corporation, or the government if they want a good job. Why can’t we have scientific cooperatives, foundations which hire scientists, organizations that scientists develop themselves to conduct and own their own research? Potential scientific entrepreneurs have less money (in a culture of endless regulation and steep taxation) if they did want to fund research of their own. This makes no sense when the free market can do better– the Gates Foundation shows this. However, why would private industry fund research now, when the government is all too willing to pay them to do it? The government subsidizes private companies in activities that they should be funding themselves and takes away the power of the market and the consumer to decide what is the best product. Private companies do donate to universities for research, but they don’t do as much as they would if the government hadn’t taken over that role.

How do I know that there is waste in the system? If you are a researcher with a lab that has funding, you know there is as well. The government not only has waste, it encourages waste through its policy of taking away funding if a researcher doesn’t use it all. The theory is that if you don’t use it, you must not need it and someone else does. Labs may not use all their money this year, but they may want it for next year, so they’re encouraged to spend on things they don’t really need. I had a friend a few years ago who was a buyer for a military base. She just bought things that they needed, all day, every day. The busiest time of the year was the month leading up to the September end of the fiscal year, when the base would buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra equipment, often in multiples, just so it wouldn’t lose any funding the next year.

Why would anyone do this to keep funding they might not even need? It’s such a bureaucracy applying and getting the funding in the first place that no one wants to risk losing any part of it. In the free market, looking out for your own self-interest is good; in the government, it’s bad.

The military and DARPA.

I also believe it hurts our military. Any time someone says the government came up with anything of merit, it came from DARPA, which has a relatively small amount of the Pentagon’s research funding. The difference is that it takes risks and acts a bit more like a start-up company experimenting with ideas than a government agency. It’s much more efficient than the NIH and could be a model to other government agencies. However, it’s not as good as it should be. Compared to a private organization, it has huge amounts of waste and an incredible number of really dumb ideas. If you have 100 crazy ideas, of course one of them will work out, but that’s no way to run a private company and of course, it’s no way to run a government agency, either.

Sure, someone should pay for fringe research that could result in invisible cloaks or mind control, or even bombs which cause the enemy to engage in homosexual orgies and forget about fighting. However, it shouldn’t be a taxpayer-financed military. If those technologies are actually viable, they’ll be worth a lot of money to whoever develops them, and people will be jumping at the chance to invent them. Let private industry develop them, shoulder the costs, and then we can buy it from them when it’s perfected. As it is, we pay for products to be developed– and for many more to not be developed– and then pay the contractor again for use of the item. The taxpayer, as with many things, gets hit on all sides while benefiting little. If we left it up to private industry to come up with this stuff, we may very well have invisibility cloaks by now.

While in college, I was walking to a football game with some friends, a little late, and heard a very soft sound. I looked up expecting to see a bird, and 50 feet above me was a Stealth bomber heading to the stadium for a fly-over. A minute later, it was over the stadium and everyone was roaring with approval. We all like technologies that keep us powerful like that, and the Stealth bomber is impressive. No one can deny that. It was created through DARPA.

The Stealth bomber is what allows us all to stomach the idea of letting the Pentagon have $90 billion in research funding each year. The space program is what allows us to give NASA $17 billion a year. However, even the Stealth bomber has its flaws, and the space shuttle has many even fatal flaws. Would we have gotten a man on the moon without the government? Yes, and we still will. The first person to build an airplane did it without government funding, the first person to fly across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh, did it to win a prize from a St. Louis philanthropist. There was no government funding or bureaucracy involved. The XPrize has given $10 million for the first team to achieve private space flight, and now the Google Lunar XPrize is going to pay $30 million for the first team that gets to the moon with a robotic mission that sends pictures and video. Someone will win it. Perhaps the next prize will be to send a person to the moon, and someone will achieve that. A private organization or institution along the nature of Bell Labs could have invented something better than the Stealth bomber, better than the space shuttle, in each case for less money, I’m sure of it. But why would it ever try, when the Pentagon spends close to $90 billion a year on research funding, $50,000 a second? Bell Labs and Abbott Labs have publicly stated that they will let the government come up with the long-term breakthroughs that they once excelled in. Why is that? The government bleeds money. What private company can compete with that? The best you can hope for are government contracts and grants… and oh, what contracts! In what other industry can you go $10 billion over budget and be two years late with a project and still get 90% of your bonus, or $849 million? Do you really think free enterprise can’t do better than that? The military-industrial complex is squashing real science and real innovation in favor of rewarding certain segments of society pursuing aims of certain special interests.

Start-ups and venture capital.

Dr. Dr. DeSimone mentioned at the lecture that his start-up company can do things that he can’t in the academic lab– it has more workers and can devote more money to trying out ideas and allow those workers to experiment with what will and will not work. It can also move forward more rapidly than a university lab when it does find something interesting. He also said that the private industry suffers from a lack of ideas; billions of dollars in venture capital are waiting to be claimed by those with good ideas, but (editorial comment) they’re probably being tied up by DARPA. Meanwhile, there’s no chance that a scientific start-up company is going to fund war rather than science.

Many people might say, “Private industry only cares about short term gains.” In true free market capitalism, that is untrue. A company wants to survive for the long haul and must conduct itself accordingly. However, in an atmosphere where quarterly reports are required by the SEC, CEOs certainly do have a reason to put off, cover up, and distort negative information to keep the stock price up for another quarter. They also don’t have to worry about being profitable in the long term because they can probably ask for a government bailout if anything really bad happens. In a true free market, none of that would exist and companies would have to keep themselves healthy to survive– to put a scientific spin on it, it’s a bit of Darwinism for corporations that we do not have right now. We give crutches to those who are certainly not the fittest. In addition, this argument matters little if what Drexler said at his talk is true (and I believe it is)– now, the government also relies only on short gains when allocating funding at the expense of long-term possibilities. The most PC, low-risk venture will be certain to gain funding while true creative research will be thrown to the side and refused– unless it has a possible military use, of course.

What if it doesn’t work out for these companies? What if they fail? That’s fine, some of them will. You will go through many bad ideas before you come to a good one in science, that’s just the way it is, but the market compensates for that as new companies start up. The taxpayer shouldn’t be on the hook for the losses, the business owners should be. Good ideas will succeed, bad ones will fail, and that’s the way the market goes. Things directly related to the military could still be funded, of course. The most successful military-related spinoffs are the Internet and GPS, and they are more related to military purposes than the many projects that have died a slow death at DARPA. In a free market of world superpowers, at least, the European Union’s Galileo system is going to be better and more accurate than GPS– and if the Europeans can do it better, you know private industry could. Competition is good. Our current system discourages any form of competition with government research.

Conclusion: Science is cool, and it deserves something better than the current system.

We shouldn’t just wait around taking leftover medical technology that trickles down from the military-industrial complex. We can make breakthroughs today, tomorrow, and in the future, without politicians in Washington or your state capital taking our own money from us and then dictating what we can research, how, and why, and what we can do in the meantime.

Science can do better. It deserves better.

Tags: nanotechnology immoral, government science funding, scientific funding, government science

“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

Apparently the fever tick is a really bad thing that we don’t want in our country. We don’t want it so much that taxpayers still pay $4 million a year for the fever tick eradication program on the Texas border. The state of Texas writes: “Overall, the expenditure represents a good bargain; a l990 USDA commissioned cost-benefit study showed that, for every dollar spent on the program, producers save $121.”

However, is that a good deal for taxpayers? If a program like that is so cost-effective for producers, wouldn’t they pony up the bill to have their own fleet of “tick riders” if the government didn’t do it for them? It amazes me that people are against corporations, but they tolerate millions in corporate welfare going to huge industries like that for Texas cattle.

Of course, in the end it turns out that this federal program was just as pointless as almost every other one… Mexican cattle long ago became naturally immune to the fever tick, and it simply doesn’t affect them. The Mexican government spent $0, and now have a better result than we do.

As will happen when the government hands out money, the beef industry wants more manna from the taxpayers: “The Fever Tick Force and the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers Association asked Congress this summer to spend more than $30 million over four years, plus a $2.5 million grant to the USDA Agricultural Research Service to find and develop new chemical agents to combat the ticks.”

Tags: Tick riders, Tick riders Mexican border, tick riders Texas, fever ticks