Rachel Maddow: Sequestration devastates US science, as well as education

[LongTomH]

Here's a recent post from the Maddowblog: The slow-motion disaster on auto-pilot just keeps getting worse. Here's what she says about sequestration's impact on US science:

Conditions are arguably worse for scientific and medical researchers dependent on grants, and Sam Stein explained in great detail last week how the sequester has become "a cancerous tumor inside the world of science." Stein talked to one scientist at the University of Virginia who said, simply, "We are in deep s**t."

The New York Times reports today that five months into sequestration, "much of the United States government is grounded." At this year's National Space Symposium in Colorado, for example, representatives from France, Germany, and China made the trip -- but no one from NASA could be there because the agency couldn't afford to send anyone.

The Sam Stein article at Huffington Post that Rachel refers to is grim: Sequestration Ushers in a Dark Age for science in America. Stein's article mostly covers impacts to medical research; vital research on treatments for HIV, diabetes, and flu (Which still kills thousands every year) is threatened.

The worst impact is on young people considering a career in science:

The problem, Antonsen said, was not just how the lack of funding would impact graybeards like himself, but also the newcomers to the field. Young scientists who had spent 12 years studying for their PhDs would find the climate inhospitable, and future generations would look elsewhere.

"We used to be able to tell people that there was some kind of job security," he said. "That would be a compensation for not being paid as much. Now, if you are taking a big risk in investing 12 years of your life to learn how to do the science, people will think twice."

[longship]

1. Federal grants are the grease on the wheels of primary science research.

This is the core of scientific advancements which nobody sees before the fact. It's like Apollo which gave rise to all sorts of paybacks after the fact. The 27 km circumference tunnel which houses the LHC in Geneva, Switzerland was dug to house its predecessor, the LEP collider. This project gave rise to the World Wide Web, whose protocols and encoding were developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN so that particle scientists could easily share data in a universal format. That the WWW is now the backbone for nearly all global commerce was unforeseen, to say nothing of such a thing as the WWW would be developed at CERN (or anywhere), shows what primary research accomplishes.

There are always paybacks for primary research. Another is digital cameras which came about from astronomers who wanted a more sensitive way to image the heavens. When was the last time you took film to be developed and printed into photographs? When I grew up, that's the only way it was done.

We defund this stuff at our future peril.

[LongTomH]

2. Europe seems to be taking the lead in science now.

Science funding in the US really hasn't been keeping up, even before the sequester.

We passed up a chance to build the Superconducting Supercollider, then CERN built the Large Hadron Collider. We just shut down one of our biggest 'atom-smashers,' the Tevatron.

We don't seem to want to lead in anything but the size of our military and our incarceration rate.

[Puzzledtraveller]

3. Probably does, but it's not going to end

it will probably get worse.

[edhopper]

4. GOP reply

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[LongTomH]

5. Error: The requested page could not be found.

[edhopper]

6. fixed