The Mid-Term Elections

As loyal readers know, this blog is strictly non-political (although we do advocate for good science), but without question the mid-term election results will have secondary and tertiary effects that will be felt in the Federal R&D budget. At a macro-level, this is a non-partisan issue because Federal R&D comes out of the discretionary part of the budget (as opposed to mandatory expenditures such as Medicaid and Medicare). As the overall budget gets squeezed by the deficit (and the need to pay more and more on the federal debt), only the discretionary side of the budget is left to cut–at least without a major overhaul of so-called “third rail” entitlement spending.

So the upshot is pressure on the science programs we love to advocate for–such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. It will be interesting to see how the new GOP leadership in the House decides to view these programs. The last time they were in control, after the 1994 elections, NIH did quite well.

We'll have to stay tuned….

Monday Routine at Krasnow–the Seminar

I rarely delve into the day to day here at the Institute, but, mostly to give a flavor of the scientific program, here goes:

Please join us for the next Krasnow Monday Seminar TODAY
Refreshments will be served at 3:30pm.  Come chat with colleagues and like-minded researchers and students prior to the talk at 4pm.

SPEAKER:  Iosif Vaisman,
Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program,
Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology,
George Mason University

Protein function analysis using computational mutagenesis:

Proteins exhibit a wide range of functional consequences upon mutation.
Accurate predictive models for the impact of single amino acid
substitutions on protein stability and activity provide important insights
into protein structure and function. Such models are also valuable for the
design and engineering of new proteins. This talk will focus on a
computational mutagenesis technique based on a four-body, knowledge-based,
statistical contact potential and machine learning methods. For any
mutation due to a single amino acid replacement in a protein, the method
provides an empirical normalized measure of the ensuing environmental
perturbation occurring at every residue position. The predictive
mutagenesis models are evaluated using large training sets of mutants
derived from diverse proteins that have been experimentally studied and
described. These predictive models are either comparable to, or in many
cases signicantly outperform, alternative approaches.

Hat tip to Carolyn Payne and our support staff…

Innovation, Steve Johnson’s perspective

Entrepreneur and author Steve Johnson has a piece in today’s Sunday NY Times on innovation here. His point is that a whole lot of what most of us would consider the core of technology innovation doesn’t come from corporate R&D (writ large) but rather from a combination of academic, government-sponsored and even amateur sectors–a investment area he calls “the fourth quadrant”.

That’s true, but regardless, there’s a lot of chaff to separate from the wheat!

I think the core question is not where the innovation is coming from, but rather how to identify true paradigm-breaking discovery from the same old same old. It’s not entirely obvious to me. There was an obscure predecessor to the Web called gopher that, in the infancy of the Internet, had many of the features of the Web, but with more of a hierarchical text focus. It sure seemed innovative at the time. But of course, most of AS’s loyal readers wont have heard about it. Somehow, it was innovative, but not innovative enough.

By the same token, the early Web browsers (e.g. Mosaic) were incredibly clunky. But the seed for a paradigm shift was there in Mosaic 1.0 and, in the end, it wasn’t in gopher.

How to Balance Science With Compliance?

It’s a fact that the compliance burden (often in the form of unfunded mandates) continues to increase on U.S. scientists and those who support the scientific enterprise here. This increased burden is, to some extent, of our own making as their have been several high profile missteps by U.S. scientists and science institutions which to say the least, has been embarrassing.  But the burden has also been rising inexorably because of the increasing awareness of the taxpayers’ right to have oversight over how taxpayer dollars are put to work for science progress. The end result of this burden is that U.S. scientists have less time at the bench, less time at the bed-side and increasingly are looking at attractive offers from overseas.

What can we do to balance these two often conflicting demands?

It seems to me one thing is to make sure we educate the mid-level compliance officers who are assigned the unenviable job of watching over the practicing scientists to a common mutually agreed upon level–so that there is some degree of certainty of what will be actually be required. This is especially true between different institutions. The notion of one institution, one grant is somewhat quaint. Increasingly, a successful approach, requires a multi-disciplinary team assembled across multiple institutions.

The second, is to educate our trainees that performing compliance requirements is part and parcel of the ethical and responsible conduct of science. All too often, there is a cultural gestalt, passed down by those of us in faculty positions, that all of this is just so much “noise” and that often the best response is to simply ignore a compliance request (in the hopes that it just goes away). Obviously, this is wrong and, more dangerously, puts institutions at risk.

The third, is to work with elected officials and policy decision-makers towards a workable middle-road,  such that there is an understanding that what might be appropriate oversight for the likes of a defense contractor operating in theater, is very different from the oversight required for a typical bench-top scientist PI at an American academic institution. One size definitely doesn’t fit all.

In short, compliance has become a tripping hazard of American-style science. It’s important to begin a larger societal conversation about this issue before the tripping hazard turns into a brain drain.