I read an excellent diary yesterday from kismet called Science IS stimulus, which I strongly recommend to you to explain how active scientific research even if apparently esoteric, contributes real economic value to education, jobs, and industry. Go read it, if you haven't.
Then I read a New York Times Op/Ed today called Letting Scientists off the leash that proposes the radical notion that science funding structures actually inhibit discovery in this country.
And so I put them together.
In the Times piece, Steven Quake explains how academic scientists are funded (a significant part of our own salaries comes from our grants, not our universities: the original entrepreneurs, kinda like a KFC franchisee!) and asks,
Could we stimulate more discovery and creativity if more scientists had the security of their own salary and a long-term commitment to a minimal level of research support? Would this encourage risk-taking and lead to an overall improvement in the quality of science?
Now, accepting that there is intrinsic economic value to science (as Kismet articulated so well), how do we maintain that impact while improving the intellectual impact of what we do?
Any investigator has had the experience of being turned down for a novel idea because it goes against the common wisdom, or in times of low funding, because the gate-keepers of the discipline have pulled up the ropes. I have one project that went to NIH for 6 years in one form or another, with good but not-quite-good enough reviews for funding, despite publishing papers in the literature that successfully supported my ideas. But it did not play safe and I have had to leave that field. I had to give it up and instead play conservative science on less challenging questions.
Additionally, when funding goes south (as it did for much of the Bush administration), even the safe projects can't get support, meaning that entire teams are disbanded -- and can't be easily reassembled.
A mechanism that allows for some stability in funding, that gives a little more stability to the investigator, would allow more innovation.
The essence of science should be a sky's the limit "what if?" and not a regretful "if only....".