Scientists Brace for a Lost Generation in American Research

[applegrove]

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE at the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/trump-budget-cuts-science/519825/

"SNIP.............


Scientific discovery costs money—quite a lot of it over time—and requires dogged commitment from the people devoted to advancing their fields. Now, the funding uncertainty that has chipped away at the nation’s scientific efforts for more than a decade is poised to get worse.

The budget proposal President Donald Trump released on Thursday calls for major cuts to funding for medical and science research; he wants to slash funding to the National Institutes of Health by $6 billion, which represents about one-fifth of its budget. Given that the NIH says it uses more than 80 percent of its budget on grant money to universities and other research centers, thousands of institutions and many more scientists would suffer from the proposed cuts.


“One of our most valuable natural resources is our science infrastructure and culture of discovery,” said Joy Hirsch, a professor of psychiatry and neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine. “It takes only one savage blow to halt our dreams of curing diseases such as cancer, dementia, heart failure, developmental disorders, blindness, deafness, addictions—this list goes on and on.”

For decades, scientists have been rattled by the erosion of public funding for their research. In 1965, the federal government financed more than 60 percent of research and development in the United States. “By 2006, the balance had flipped,” wrote Jennifer Washburn a decade ago, in a feature for Discover, “with 65 percent of R&D in this country being funded by private interests.”


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[The Big Ragu]

1. It will be like the burning of the library at Alexandria

Trump will usher in a new dark ages.

[applegrove]

2. Or the last scene in The Name of the Rose

[DemocraticSocialist8]

3. We're not going to feel the impacts of this right away...

but give it a generation or two and it'll be very noticeable. Countries that don't maintain their science/tech advantage ALWAYS get over-powered eventually.

[applegrove]

4. The public and small to medium sized corporations will suffer. Why does Trump and the GOP not want

medium sized companies to thrive Because that is private equity source of new millions when they get bought out. So the mid sized companies have to be cannibalized to make the rich richer.

[n2doc]

6. They don't want the competition

Much easier to game the system than to actually compete on a level playing field. It's the only way for stupid and privileged oligarch kids to succeed.

[applegrove]

8. In Canada under the Conservative Harper, they got rid of the long form census. Making it harder

for small and medium sized business to get information. No other reason than that they wanted people to have to pay for the information which acts like a gatekeeper.

[n2doc]

5. Exactly.

If tRump and co. manage to eviscerate federal funding, one of the big casualties will be the current and next generation of tenure-track researchers. At major universities, and even at many smaller ones, one of the primary conditions for gaining tenure, and not being kicked out, is getting a federal grant or 2. If those become impossible to get, you will see a whole generation end up leaving academia. Over time I am sure the tenure qualifications will change, but there is a lot of inertia. And also many universities rely on the overhead from those funds, and will shrink departments like physics and chemistry that don't have a lot of undergrads but generate lots of funding.

[applegrove]

7. Lizards

[Kber]

9. American science risks moving from "beacon" to "backwater".

Trump didn't create this phenomenon, but he did take advantage of it and he will accelerate it if he can.