The benefits of science to society are extremely significant. The so-called scientific revolution has driven much of the medical and technological benefits that we currently enjoy. But many of those those benefits were arrived at slowly and over long periods and thus can become invisible to the general public and targets for ignorant policymakers, such as the one depicted in this cartoon.( I used this in my book The Great Paradox of Science to help make this point.)
Over at Pharyngula PZ has a post about how the situation for science in the US is dire and he is not exaggerating. One of the ways The Trump gang is doing that is by imposing ideological blinkers on what kinds of research can be done. It has frozen all funding for research pending review to see if it “aligns with the new administration’s priorities”. What that looks like in practice is to comb through all the research grants and proposals to look for words like African American, race, gender, minorities, sexual violence, diversity, equity, or any other keyword that they can think of that suggests any attempt to improve the situation of any group other than white affluent men. And of course, anything that is remotely concerned with addressing the problem climate change is going to be cut.
One of the first things they are doing is cutting the amount of indirect costs that they will allow in grants for medical researcch. This is going to have a huge impact on research funded by the National Institutes of Health which announced that they will have a cap of 15% on all indirect costs. (The announcement by the NIH can be read here.)
For those not familiar with how this works, when a university researcher applies for a grant from a funding agency, the proposal budget will consist of direct and indirect costs. The direct costs are the amounts that are actually needed to carry out the work, such as salaries, equipment, supplies, publication and evaluation charges, attending meetings and conferences, and the like. For example, when doing research with human subjects, sometimes people are induced to participate by offering them a small payment. (Recently, I took part in a study related to aging to see if bridge players had better cognitive abilities and mental health. I got $150. Few people volunteer just for the money because involvement can be time consuming. They do it because they are interested in the study and want to help address the problem. But if the sample size is large, that can amount to quite a bit of money and has to be included in the grant.)
But in addition to those direct costs, researchers are also required to ask for indirect costs. This is for things like electricity, water, building maintenance, support staff, administrative costs, and all the other things that the university provides researchers so that the work goes smoothly. The amount is something that is negotiated by their universities and the funding agencies and is usually a percentage of the grant award. So if the negotiated indirect cost is (say) 33%, then if a researcher needs $1 million to run the project, they have to ask for and get $1.5 million, but they will only be able to use $1 million with the rest going to the university. Some of these indirect costs can go back to research by enabling the university to hire more researchers, provide seed money for new projects, construct new labs or facilities, etc..
This article looks at the consequences of these cuts.
The National Institutes of Health will now cap indirect funding, which it provides to universities, hospitals, and medical centers to cover the costs of facilities, equipment, and staff, at 15 percent of the value of the grants it issues. The move is expected to wreak instant havoc on universities’ budgets: Currently, the average indirect-cost rate of the NIH’s institutional grants is 27 to 28 percent, and some universities receive allowances of more than 50 percent. The NIH, meanwhile, asserted in a post on X that the cap will save more than $4 billion annually when it goes into effect on Monday.
…The across-the-board 15-percent cap represents a radical departure from the NIH’s standard practice of accounting for indirect costs. Typically, colleges have negotiated their indirect-cost rates with the government, resulting in a fairly wide spread across institutions, depending on their locations and research output.
…That overhead includes what Mitchell called “the most unsexy and uncontroversial part of a university’s expenditures” – electricity, equipment, and facilities maintenance. “This,” he said, “is not ideologically oriented money.”
The NIH says that last year they gave out more than $35 billion in research grants which was made up of $26 billion in direct costs and $9 billion in indirect. The indirect costs differ from university to university so this says that an average of about 26% of all grants awarded go to indirect costs. They say that they are going to place a cap of 15% on indirects which means that $26 billion of direct costs will now only allow for about $4 billion in indirects. The loss of $5 billion in indirects is a big hit. If that saving is plowed back into research by the NIH using it for more grants for more researchers, so that the total NIH spending would remain at $35 billion but now $30 billion would be for direct costs, that would mitigate somewhat the loss. But I don’t think that is what is going to happen. These people want to just cut funding as much as they can to fund their tax cuts for the wealthy.
These research grants are what lubricates the science pipeline. They pay for graduate and post-doctoral student salaries who are the people who do much of the day-to-day work in the labs that generate the data that is used for analysis by the principal researchers, with the latter spending a lot of time preparing new grant proposals to keep their research going. With this freeze, all hiring has suddenly stopped since no one is sure what to do. No one will make offers to young people in case they are countermanded. Young people who had ambitions of entering the world of scientific research may well start to look elsewhere since it will increasingly difficult for them to get positions at any level.
What might be the consequences of this move?
Capping indirect funds may prompt leading biomedical researchers to move their work outside of the United States, Mitchell and Thorp said. “Our competitors are loving watching us do this, because we will be effectively cutting the research output of the United States, and at the very time when we’re in a global competition that is determined by technological capability,” Thorp said. “This is certainly not the time when you want to be cutting down on the research acumen of the United States.”
PZ describes a talented young woman in his lab graduating this year who would normally be a shoo-in to a good graduate program. But she is suddenly stuck in limbo. What is she to do? This stage of their lives is very different from when they graduated from high school. Then they could take a ‘gap year’ to get a job or go hiking in the Amazon or whatever before entering college the following year. When you graduate from college you face great pressure to get into graduate school or get a job. If you opt for a job, your chances of getting back into science become remote. The science pipeline has mostly exit valves. So if she gets the chance to go to a science program in another country, who could blame her for accepting it? Multiply her situation for thousands of graduate and postdoctoral students across the country and around the world who were hoping at this time of the year to hear from universities in the US that they had been accepted.
Other countries were used to seeing their best and brightest people move to the US to pursue scientific careers and had been trying to keep them home or lure them back. China in particular had already been making strenuous efforts to recruit people from the US and elsewhere, offering them jobs with good salaries, modern facilities, and the promise of generous research funding. That country is going to be the immediate beneficiary. The decline in US science may take a while to manifest its consequences but you can be sure that it will happen.
https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/09/ian-kershaw-brexit-would-be-greatest-act-national-self-harm-postwar
“Brexit would be the greatest act of national self-harm in postwar history”
Phew. Not any more.
So the great collectivisation/ repression of the “kulaks”, the Great Leap Forward and the introduction of Lysenkoism has now its western analogue in MAGAism. I suppose we can go back to the burning of the library of Alexandria if we want western comparisons.
Ah, but remember--the competitor was blatantly and unrepentantly A WOMAN. And sometimes SHE SMILED! What choice was there, really, but to vote for this? (/s)
The tv show MST3K features old movies and educational films with talking puppets and a human making fun of them. Most of what they’re lampooning is available on Youtube in the original form. With the school ones, it’s obvious that the makers of the film were trying to provide additional education to the kids--not only were they taught basic grooming and behavior at home and in school, but there were also films on science, such as how springs work and where we’d be without them, or how to cook. This was probably the inspiration for the short films shown in the 1960s and 1970s on Saturday morning tv between the cartoons--the newer ones talked about the importance of eating balanced meals at regular times (with examples) and providing kid-appropriate snippets of the news. Then there was the famous Schoolhouse Rock, the cartoon series that set mini-lessons in science, math, English grammar, and history to music kids would like.
We really need a population-educating format like this.
I still think we need Mr. Rogers back. We managed twelve years without him and then we elected Trump the first time. Now we’ve got a whole voting generation that was born after he died and the results are not looking at all good, especially with the younger voters.
One industry I watched as a youngster was steel. After a single visit to Sparrows Point, watching the Bessemer tubs pouring their decoction, I was in love forever. As a teenager, Sparrows Point closed. The Baltimore Sun a newspaper that usually spoke the party line, reported that the steelworkers’ union and the company couldn’t come to terms so the great plant grew silent and cold. As an adult, I heard about how the Chinese ‘stole’ American jobs. But, to me, it sounded more like the companies couldn’t keep making early 20th-century profits off a steel mill that was running technology from the 1920s. When I got older still, I would see videos on youtube, shot in Chinese factories, of a 50-something woman in a control booth, running an entire shop floor of machinery, automatically turning out, stacking and bundling, vast reams of steel rebar smelted from various scrap shipped from the US and Europe. Of course the mill didn’t hire Americans. It barely hired anyone. Dirt cheap labor in Pakistan and India broke up warships from the 2nd World War and early Cold War and turned them into the scraps that the factory consumed. Obviously the Chinese had thought about their supply chain, supply throughput, customers, and customer consumption. They thought about labor and designed systems that were not quite hands-free. Meanwhile, as I aged, I worked with technology guys from Bell Labs (formerly AT&T, the premier research organization in the world, later a part of Lucent) Why did Bell Labs shut down? Bell Labs is where Information Theory and coding theory were invented. The “laser” was invented down the hall from my friends’ office. My friends were the guys who write the C programming language, and the UNIX operating system. The laser wasn’t it -- it was also the transistor, the charge-coupled device, the solar cell, the horn antenna, and some stuff to do with compression, security, coding, and complexity. Was that stuff “profitable”? I don’t know. In 1998 I worked on a couple projects, fielding some of my code at Dupont Research in Delaware. I parked my little Honda CRX next to the Ferrari Testarossa owned by the guy who invented kevlar, and cordura. Dupont invented Teflon, a zillion kinds of epoxy, and loads of space-age stuff for the production of nuclear weapons, and re-entry vehicles.
All of this started to sink in to me when A. Q. Khan was busted selling nearly-complete uranium enrichment cascades. I was shocked. How did Khan steal this information? Answer is: he didn’t. He worked for URENCO, a joint US, Dutch, whatever conglomerate that “outsourced” enrichment, and he learned how centrifuges worked based on some designs from Germans and Dutch manufacturers, who had improved on the American stuff. Seriously, how can any non-idiot expect that sort of information not to leak? I was considered to be a sort of big shot in the information security field until I started biting the hand that fed me. For example, there was a big deal about how the Chinese government had gotten the source code for Microsoft Windows. There was shock and awe and gnashing of teeth. China, of course, was to blame. I did some digging and made some phone calls and it turns out Microsoft had agreed to the deal in order to open a production line for something or other in China. That was when I invented my nonfunny joke, “how do you steal secrets from a capitalist?” (a: “in the boardroom”) The whole system is corrupt, basically selling trade secrets for convenience, but complaining anyway. I remember when there was a big kerfuffle about the S. Koreans making advanced jet engines. OMG! Could it have something to do with the fact that the US exported the tech to them because they could make jet engines cheaper than Boeing? I remember the kerfuffle when the Chinese got complete CAD layouts for the F-35 (OMG!) because the F-35 program required sharing all that stuff with the Turkish, whose idea of information security was less rigorous than the Russians’ and Chinese. (I was peripherally involved in the investigation until I commented in a meeting that they may as well have put them up on facebook for download)…
At every step there were opportunities for US companies to look at what was going on and do something decisively better. There is no need to keep it secret if it’s decisively better because you’re 10 years ahead of the competition. You can, literally, tell them how to make a smart power grid because you know that by the time they do, and they’re gobbling up the parts of the market you don’t want, you’ll be selling genius power grids based on underlying technology that is 20 years ahead. I loathe and despise Elon Musk but what has happened at SpaceX and Starlink are examples of how an innovator can basically blow off the competition. Even if they have the CAD files, by the time they understand them, you’ll be rolling out matter transporters or whatever.
The US is still running on the momentum it got from the Manhattan Project (which was publicly funded research) and the cold war technology ramp. We learned to make Inconel and Titanium and let the steel industry go fuck itself. Capitalists absolutely should NOT be allowed to devise national technology strategy because they absolutely suck at it. Next time someone complains about US jobs going overseas, just ask them gently if “do you mean all that hugely profitable outsourcing?” All military research is core science. Unless, of course, you’re behind the enemy and you’re trying to figure out how they did that tricky bit in the stolen CAD files.
PZ describes a talented young woman in his lab graduating this year who would normally be a shoo-in to a good graduate program.
Probably a bit late to apply this year in Canada though a bit of special pleading from her prof might do wonders in this kind of situation.
Any Canadian university is going to understand the problem, it will just hing on the number of refugee applications they are getting.
Maybe Australia, NZ or South Africa if she wants to stay in an Anglophone environment however I hear Brazil is nice.
Russia and China have some very good universities but like Brazil there may be a language problem.
Learning a language is a high school and a college requirement. The older I get the more I regret not learning Chinese.
I can order tacos!