"Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age. Let's set high standards for our schools and give them the resources they need to succeed. Let's recruit a new army of teachers, and give them better pay and more support in exchange for more accountability. Let's make college more affordable, and let's invest in scientific research, and let's lay down broadband lines through the heart of inner cities and rural towns all across America."
This is a direct quotation from the Obama for America website http://www.barackobama.com/... I begin this diary with this quote in order to underscore an important reason why we should care about science funding.
I am a scientist. And over the course of the last several years I have seen funding go down for my colleagues in research labs all across the country, have seen some of the top scientists in America get denied grant money from federal sources such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), and NIH. Why? Because the Bush Administration does not believe that funding scientific research is of much importance.
This is a belief that is shared by John McCain, who seems to feel that scientific research is a "special interest" that deserves to be part of the spending freeze he proposes.
There are many reasons to be concerned about this, reasons that go well beyond merely the financial security of a few science-nerd eggheads.
One of the reasons is that, of course, we can make no advances in science and technology without such research--cannot advance the fields of medicine, or crop improvement, or clean energy without it. And this research requires funds.
Laboratories are enormously expensive to run, to the point where a one-million-dollar grant spread over five years is considered by many to be small peanuts. Part of the reason for this expense is that the supplies that are necessary for many scientists to do their work are considered "specialized" because they are not purchased by the vast majority of people in the world, so the providers of such supplies charge an enormous amount for their products, and thus the cost of obtaining such supplies can be prohibitively expensive. Therefore for much research to go forward, government money is required to pay for the costs of these things.
Another reason why science funding should concern us is the fact that a large percentage of research that goes on in this country occurs in our universities. If these university labs are not adequately funded, they cannot afford to accept graduate students (who oftentimes rely on federal research grants to pay for their tuition), and these labs cannot afford to pay for the enormous overhead that they must give to the university in order to even have lab space in the first place. What this means is that there are fewer labs for science students to choose from if they wish to obtain a graduate degree, because the fewer labs there are with decent funding, the fewer labs there are available to these students in order for them to do their graduate work, which means our country is left with fewer scientists to make the sorts of technological breakthroughs that can power the economy of this nation.
Here's a key quote from the journal Science http://www.sciencemag.org/... that highlights the threat of Bush's science budget cuts:
The decrease in NSF funding will not only hurt basic science research programs but will seriously hamper efforts to improve science education, in which NSF plays a key role. Decreased science education funding is coming at a time when young people need greater science literacy to live full lives and when the United States increasingly needs a well-educated technical workforce to keep its industries onshore and competitive.
Such lack of research funding not only threatens our already weakened economy, but also limits science education in our schools. This, coupled with the drastic reduction in federal education funding for our universities, makes it so that universities cannot afford to hire new professors to teach science or, as I've mentioned, to create labs in order to train science graduate students.
A quote from an article from the Chronicles of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/... :
Steep budget cuts, either anticipated or in place, threaten many colleges. So do hiring freezes or slowdowns. Some institutions are already couching their job ads in timid terms: Two tenure-track appointments in history at Auburn University are "contingent on funding," according to a Chronicle advertisement that is among several that include such cautionary words.
[...]
Another kink in the market, says Paula E. Stephan, a Georgia State University economics professor who studies the scientific work force, is that research grants will be even more difficult to obtain and renew. In turn, postdoctoral slots and faculty positions for scientists, particularly at public institutions, will probably be tougher to come by.
And it's just gotten worse in some places. Here's an excerpt of an email I received this week explaining the budget cuts that are to occur in the UC system in California:
Gov. Schwarzenegger signed off on the tardy but balanced state budget Sept. 23 [2008]. Less than two weeks later, Treasurer Bill Lockyer predicted a shortfall [for the UC system] of up to $4.6 billion -- and the governor and legislative leaders began meeting to address the problem.
[...]
At the same time, the campus has begun budget planning for 2009-10, which, by all accounts, will bring bigger cuts than this year's.
"The campus is in for some difficult times," Interim Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Barbara Horwitz said during the Davis Campus brown bag.
We all remember Palin's absurd "fruit fly" comment, which others have already commented on here (for those of you who missed it, I refer you to the wonderful diary posted yesterday by Captain Tight, What's the difference between a human and a fruit fly? http://www.dailykos.com/... ). But this willful ignorance on the part of Palin and McCain points to a bigger, graver trend, which is that the Bush Administration, and the administration that John McCain promises, represents a hijack of not only science education but intellectual freedom and the future of our economy, which I don't think our country can afford to gamble on, anymore.
Thanks for reading.