Engineering Science - “Boom and Bust” – April 20, 2007 article in Science Comments

Comment on '“Boom and Bust” – April 20, 2007 article in Science ' by JS

2007-05-14T15:02:04Z

No, there's a bad link on the Science page itself, that takes subscribers to the wrong story!

Anyway, regarding "One might think that the catastrophic failure of the management of NIH, and of the science policy community as a whole, to prepare its community for this “day of reckoning” would elicit a bit more ‘what the F!@#!! were you thinking???’ comments from folks.":

My impression is that academic scientists typically have a mentality that once a university search committee has blessed them with a position, they're entitled to funding. They don't blame administrators for misallocating resources since why should there be any scarcity in the first place?

The Science article is a good example, actually. Is there any reason to think the effect of nicotine on fetal brain development is insufficiently understood? If it is, is the zebrafish a better system for doing than work than spending a little extra on a mammalian system? I don't have the slightest idea, but it doesn't seem to occur to the authors that anyone might care. Kurt Svoboda has a faculty position, and is entitled to funding, end of story.

Comment on '“Boom and Bust” – April 20, 2007 article in Science ' by Peter Fiske

2007-05-04T02:53:43Z

JS - and everybody:

Sorry about the links to the articles - AAAS only lets "members" link to the articles. I will see if we can get a copy to share on this blog.

Stay tuned -

Peter

Comment on '“Boom and Bust” – April 20, 2007 article in Science ' by JS

2007-05-04T00:59:26Z

Two quick points, and then I'll go home and think about this some more:

1) The page you link to has a bad link if you follow the "full text". The PDF link works. (I puzzled over that for a while, wondering why yit seemed like you and I were reading different articles..)

2) It was the Zerhouni article in Science a while back that (indirectly ) brought me to this site. Reading him here, I was struck by how much more appealing his honesty is here than was the "The budget doubled but due to some completely mysterious process, so have the applicants, so we need to double again." in the Science article. I'm still struck by how little interest anyone has in fixing the system instead of just buying a few more years, but at least I'm not storming through the halls in a rage like I was a few months ago.