3/14/2008 11:51:00 AM (link)
The stagnation of the NIH budget -- five years of flat funding and verging on a sixth -- is putting biomedical research at grave risk.
I saw this happen in physics. The Cold War was over, and with it died public excitement over physics and the funding which physics research needed. Of the nuclear theory graduate students I knew, none of them remained in nuclear theory despite an abundance of interesting problems. In my first year of graduate school, our panicking department made mandatory an "alternative careers" seminar, and fully half the speakers were drawn from investment firms to tell us how much better life was on Wall St than in an ivory tower. I saw my friends and colleagues -- bright minds, all of them -- leave cosmology for systems biology and economics; leave high energy for IT and software development; leave condensed matter for the semiconductor industry.
In its place, the life sciences flourished. The NIH budget grew, and advances in computational power made possible the analysis of high-throughput experiments which could examine biology in astonishing detail, and in turn provide a foundation upon which to study the complexity of life. Many great minds (some of them ex-physicists) were drawn to this new frontier, and the discoveries came fast & furious: over the past decade we've sequenced the human genome; determined, at atomic resolution, the three-dimensional structure of over 11,000 proteins; developed technologies for genotyping half a million markers and monitoring the expression of tens of thousands of genes at a time; discovered heretofore unknown regulatory mechanisms (siRNA, miRNA); and identified connections in the interaction network responsible for the emergence of complex traits and diseases. As a result, we are much closer to understanding, preventing, and treating the diseases which pose the greatest public health burdens.
Now, six unprecedented years of stagnation in the NIH allocation is putting all that at risk. If the budget for the life sciences dies, so will the most profound work -- reagents, apparati, and computer time are all expensive and indispensable to modern research. Slumps such as these are difficult to recover from; despite new interest in defense and energy -- physics' primary sources of funding -- physics has not recovered: it's gotten to the point that Fermilab is laying off researchers just at the cusp of major discoveries (the top quark mass was just this week narrowed down once more, to within 1.1%, which gives us a better idea of where to look for the Higgs boson -- the one particle in the standard model which is still unobserved, and which would explain the origin of mass). With the NIH budgetary stagnation, we are running the risk of sacrificing basic knowledge about the natural world, about life, about our health.
We have seen it happen in physics. We cannot afford to have it happen in the life sciences.
More: http://brokenpipeline.org/ ; http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311081142.htm
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Any resemblance between the preceding views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader.
Test. -Rosemary Braun
10/05/2005 11:16:00 AM (link)My main homepage is now hosted at http://braun.tx0.org.
11/19/2004 08:58:00 AM (link)
A team of UC Berkeley researchers (http://ucdata.berkeley.edu) have issued a working paper The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections in which they examine the statistics of Bush support by county in Fla for 2000 and 2004 and find a correlation with electronic voting machines.
Author's Summary:
There's an underhanded attempt underway to stuff into legislative action a piece of a bill that would make it easier to extradite persons to random countries in which they would have no reasonable expectation of fair treatment -- read: outsourcing torture, legally.
Learn about the bill and Rep Markey's (MA) amendment to fix it HERE; link to it; tell your friends; and write to your representative. Let's not let America become one of "those places."
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