"The Negative Effects Of GOP Malice And MBA Stupidity On Research Show No Signs Of Slowing Down"

[hatrack]

The commenters at In the Pipeline are beginning to think that nothing short of a bacterial apocalypse is going to get the public’s attention. I don’t even want to think of how that could come about. Derek continues to document the atrocities. Amgen acquired Onyx and laid off 300 of their researchers this week. Add that to the antibiotic researchers who got laid off last week, the 100 or so Sanofi oncology investigators who got laid off last month and the Shire investigators who got the ax last week as well.

By the way, we are now referring to ourselves as investigators, not researchers. Add it to your glossary. And now, the NSF is complaining that the Republican Congress is sticking its mitt into research, playing politics and generally making an already miserable situation even worse. I got this article in my email blast from Nature yesterday:

EDIT

But such efforts seem to have had little influence on an investigation of the NSF’s funding decisions by Representative Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Since he took the job two years ago, Smith has sought to root out what he sees as wasteful spending by the US$7-billion NSF. He has introduced legislation that would require the agency to certify that every grant it awards is in the “national interest”, and he has repeatedly sought, and been given, confidential information about individual NSF grants — albeit in redacted form. On at least four occasions, staff from the science committee travelled to the NSF’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to review such documents, most recently on 28 January.

“There is a sense of exhaustion among researchers as this has continued,” says Meghan McCabe, a legislative-affairs analyst at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. An NSF programme director who asked not to be named is more direct: “Having them in our building questioning our work like that felt like an attack.”

Some of these politicians make a big deal out of the fact that they don’t believe in evolution or the effect that human activity can have on climate. I am assuming that some are lying to get elected. But I’m hearing from former investigators that they have stopped doing research on dementia because only traumatic brain injury was being funded. Department of Defense grants seem to be in somewhat better supply in these fields of study.

EDIT

https://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/the-effect-of-gop-malice-and-mba-stupidity-on-research-shows-no-sign-of-slowing-down/

[pscot]

1. The need for research on dementia is desperately necessary

Maybe we need an exorcist