I haven't written in a while, but after seeing this, I needed a place to vent and thought a diary would do the trick. Eric Cantor's website recently posted a video of Adrian Smith launching what might be the most hostile action Congress has taken toward science in recent memory.
It's one thing to have anti-science rhetoric from FoxNews and Sean Hannity, or even from some relatively obscure member of Congress with little or no clout. But when this type of anti-science crap comes from the incoming leadership, it's a whole new ballgame.
Scientific progress in the United States and many other countries relies on an extensive peer-review system that helps determine the merits of grant applications and journal articles that are submitted for publication. Although imperfect, the peer-review system has been a critical part of scientific decision-making for decades and deserves a fair amount of credit for the vast scientific progress witnessed by the last few generations.
Now, unfortunately not surprisingly, the incoming majority leader is calling upon the public to scour the databases of grants funded by the National Science Foundation, looking for things that they find wasteful. Basically, Congressman Cantor is telling scientists that their training and decades of education isn't worth crap, but Joe the plumber should be making decisions about which scientific projects have merit.
The video posted specifically attacks an NSF grant awarded to an chemical and biological engineering professor at Northwestern University who runs a VERY productive and highly praised laboratory that investigates complex biological systems. The work in question recently resulted in a publication in a very prestigious scientific journal and has far-reaching implications, instead of simply wasting taxpayer money on studying soccer players, as suggested by the video.
As noted by the website, Live Science,
LiveScience did some digging and found that the money went to Northwestern University engineering professor Luis Amaral, who has created models to rank soccer player success. But the work is more broadly applicable to understanding the contributions of team members in any organization, including workplaces, the researchers wrote in a paper published in June in the open-access journal PLoS One. Amaral also researches other complex systems like the stock market and ecosystems, as well as the impact of scientific research and the performance of individual scientists and institutions.
I hope that many of you will write your representatives and urge them to fight this initiative and stand on the side of science. If your representative is a republican, urge them to have the courage to stand against this misdirected move by their party. Urge them to consider the greatness of American science and the peer-review system that helped it to greatness.
The link to Cantor's website is here so you can see for yourself how easy it is to misrepresent important science as trivial.