One thing stories about science generally fail to mention is how dirty the business of doing science can get. While the public seems to understand how labor intensive bench work can be, it also seems ignorant of other difficulties scientists encounter on a regular basis -- things like useful information being hidden from you, professional rivalries, or the big one, funding.
In an academic environment at least, securing funding tends to consume a larger portion of an investigator's time than most people would guess. Yes, science does get done while we're producing preliminary results, but preparing a grant means an nearly immeasurable amount of time spent organizing data, tweaking figures, and simply writing and editing.
To some extent, having to put this much work into writing a grant application is understandable. Given their limited budgets, funding agencies can only afford to give money to the best proposals. Still, waiting to hear back about a grant can be a nerve racking experience, especially for new investigators. One person I know has told me she's avoiding academic research due in large part to an aversion to the grant writing process.
What makes the process really frustrating are seemingly bizarre budget priorities. For all its talk about investing in science and technology, the U.S. federal government continues to woefully underfund research agencies. The FY 2008 budget provides $143 billion, less than 1% of U.S. GDP, for all research and development expenditures. Excluding defense R&D expenditures, federal R&D investment is expected to be a little under $60 billion; while that may seem like a lot, this actually represents a cut in R&D spending, especially in terms of real (inflation adjusted) dollars.
These raw numbers hide some of the effects at the individual lab level. For example, although NIH received an increase in its budget, a large fraction of that increase is being dedicated to Roadmap related programs as well as other programs like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine which frankly shouldn't be funded at all. This leaves less to fund key grants like R01s and forces paylines to move down. The net effect is that otherwise strong proposals simply cannot be funded, leaving good and important science undone. For new investigators, failure to get an R01 could slow, if not scuttle, a career.
I suspect the public isn't more upset by this cut for a number of reasons. First, aside from the occasional DoD program, R&D funding tends not make for good politics; as such, neither politicians nor the media tend to make a fuss when funding levels drop.
Moreover, a lot of science simply isn't sexy. Yes, there are sexy projects like establishing a moon base, but from a scientific standpoint, such projects often have a very poor return on investment. Ironically, these projects are the kinds that grab the public's attention and cause them to demand increases (however minute) in science spending, even though such projects divert money that could be spent on more important things, like finding a killer asteroid.
What about corporate funding? While corporations spend quite a bit on R&D, they tend to be (rightly) focused on making the Next Great Thing (TM) to sell to customers. Relying on corporations to support basic science research is sketchy at best; by and large, corporate executives tend to frown upon dedicating employees and money on high risk projects that have no guaranteed return on investment, especially in the short term (meaning less than five years). As such, we are pretty much dependent on government funding and academic labs for basic science research.
So, what can be done about funding? In short, I think it's a public relations issue: as researchers, we must inform the public about funding shortfalls and screwy budget priorities and ask for their help in demanding change. However, therein lies the problem. As a group, scientists tend to be bad at PR, not matter how interesting the science. Until we learn how to be good at PR, I don't see the funding situation changing anytime soon. But, that's a topic for another post.
[As an aside, The Onion has a hysterical piece on egregious abuses of funding; fortunately, these tends to be rare in the real world.]
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