Jonathan Moreno raises the specter of the use of neurotechnologies in the intelligence arena. I’m not at all sure I agree with his sinister take–but it’s worth considering as we consider that these technologies will become ubiquitous in society over the coming years. This is what we would definitely call a tripping hazard.
Jim
.cc_box a:hover .cc_home{background:url(‘http://www.comedycentral.com/comedycentral/video/assets/syndicated-logo-over.png’) !important;}.cc_links a{color:#b9b9b9;text-decoration:none;}.cc_show a{color:#707070;text-decoration:none;}.cc_title a{color:#868686;text-decoration:none;}.cc_links a:hover{color:#67bee2;text-decoration:underline;}
There’s an awful lot going on at the same time this week as far as science funding is concerned. Besides the Recovery Act, there’s the Omnibus Bill for the FY09 budget and then the blueprint for the FY10 budget–it’s all hitting at the same time and so this is not the time for drawing conclusions.
From Scienceinsider:
The National Institutes of Health will dedicate most of its $8.2 billion for research from the economic stimulus bill to funding grant applications it has already received and to supplementing existing grants. A smaller amount, on the order of $100 million to $200 million, will go to new grant applications it receives in the coming months.
Also mentioned are a new set of targetted challenge grants which will be for as much as $500K for two years.
It suggests to me that NIH is managing the new dollars in anticipation that it’s overall base budget will not change so much going forward.
Jim
Senator Charles Grassley has been on the warpath against what he considers to be ubiquitous bad behavior (e.g. conflict of interest) on the part of biomedical scientists. However he was blocked on that agenda as far as the current stimulus package.
Jim
I’ve been pretty occupied with the budget over the past week, hence fewer posts than I would have liked. But I’ve been at it far to long to give up my blog! So I’ll take this time to point you to Olivia Judson’s blog at the NYTimes.com–she’s got a guest this time, he’s a bioengineering professor at Stanford and he’s advocating for a recalibration in how we fund science.
Jim
While the current Recession isn’t the first downturn I’ve lead the Institute through, it’s by far the worst. The combination of cascading negative external factors combined with the uncertainties have created a unique set of challenges. On the other hand, this time around, the Institute is well situated in terms of a scientific critical mass, an excellent sponsored research portfolio and the massive (and still growing) infrastructure of George Mason, Virginia’s public Carnegie Research university in the National Capital Area.
Given the times, and the fact that I’ve been director long enough to have seen downturns before, I thought that it might be useful to put down some of the principles that I am using to get us through the current difficult conditions:
1) Budgeting–prioritize to protect the core scientific/academic mission, realizing that with those two intact, all else can be quickly regenerated.
2) Transparency–keep all stakeholders up to date on exactly what is happening, what the current plan is, and where the uncertainties lie. Do this continuously in multiple contexts throughout the crisis. The result is to strengthen morale and to mitigate distracting what-if scenarios that can damage the scientific/academic programs.
3) Maintain a position that will allow for rapid transformation back into growth. While recessions are macro-economic events that affect scientific institutions, the nature of science funding is such that a massive downturn might happen in tandem with significant increases in federal science investment. It’s important to keep that in mind so that the institution is prepared to opportunistically emerge from hunkering down to compete and win new awards.
4) Protect support staff–those who have invested years to support the science of the institution may not be the feed grain, but they are surely the farmers, who through their experience, can both see us through the difficult times and make possible the conditions for scientific success in the future.
5) Fundraising–realize that the continued engagement with those who have given personally to the institution in the past, but may not be able to under the current circumstances, is central to the building of long-term loyalty so central to leadership level gift opportunities.
Jim
Scienceinsider quotes Beryl Lieff Benderly on the trend towards fewer graduate students and postdocs as the engine–the new model has career PhD super-technicians and bachelors level permanent employees dominating the mix. Sounds an awful lot like the Big Pharma I knew during the 1980’s. Was that model a recipe for success?
From the ScienceInsider blog. Look at NIH and NSF.
Aron Moscona was one of the reasons that I became a biologist (and all neuroscientists really are biologists). I was at the MBL in Woods Hole in the late 1970’s and was taking an invertebrate zoology course through the Boston University Marine Program. The professor, the late Arthur Humes, led us through a combined field and laboratory intellectual exploration of the field that was like nothing I had experienced at college during my undergraduate years. At the end of the course, we had to devise our own experiment and mine was based on a basic finding of Moscona’s: namely that closely related cells of different species (in my case two different species of the sponge Microciona) when disassociated through cheese cloth, would somehow find their own kind to re-aggregate with. The basis for this self-self interaction turned out to be Moscona’s major discovery: cathedrins. This basic self-self cellular recognition turns out to be crucial throughout biology and Moscona’s early work during the 1950’s and 1960’s turned cell biology into a molecular-based science. We’ll miss him.
