Science Stimulus

Posted by Geoff Davis at 11AM on 03/18/09 | Categories: NIH Crisis | 1 comment

Sam Wang (an old friend of Peter's) and Sandra Aamodt have an interesting proposal in today's NY Times for spending a chunk of the NIH's $8B stimulus funds: hire a bunch of recent college graduates as lab techs in a program modeled after Teach for America. The goal is to provide the needed supply of cheap lab labor without producing lots of extra scientists. I think the intent is good, though I wonder how useful recent college graduates might be in the lab. I wonder whether having recent college grads in the lab would encourage more people to go to grad school or less. It might encourage more to become grad students by familiarizing people with the lab - doubtless inertia would carry many on to further study. On the other hand, many would find out how much of a grind laboratory life can be. Richard Freeman published a great survey a few years back that showed that the more contact undergraduates had with grad students and postdocs, the less likely they were to want to go to grad school. I worry that without some change of course the NIH's windfall is going to be as much of a disaster as their budget doubling has proved to be.

The Times article points to a silly op-ed in The Scientist calling for the country to dedicate a fixed percentage of the GDP to scientific research. I, too, would like a fixed (and non-small) percentage of the GDP dedicated to my work. More seriously, though, I agree with the author's claim that variability in funding levels is bad for science. But pegging research spending to the GDP is definitely not the way to go. That would mean one more system awash in money during good times (and all the problems that entails - e.g. the NIH doubling) and starved during the bad. If anything, I think one would want a countercyclical mechanism: cut back government support when the economy is booming and increase it when things go south. During boom times it should be easier to find alternative mechanisms of support - foundations, corporate partnerships, and so forth. During busts, the government picks up the slack.