The Progressive War on Science: Obama Admin. Regulations Crushing Research
But that’s just the paperwork, according to him. The experimental effects are far worse, because time spent on regulation and new restrictions on care of animals slows down the work:
In terms of animal care and handling, we must adhere to regulations regarding cage size, food intake, water intake, “environmental enrichment” (activities other than just sitting in the cage), temperature and humidity measurements and control. We have daily veterinarian health checks for primates, weekly for rodents. Our facilities are inspected at least weekly. We have to train all new personnel (about 15-20 hours each) on regulations with refreshers each year (about five hours each).
A Ph.D., he must attend several classes to ensure he knows how to fill out the paperwork and understands the workplace security regulations — activities which have nothing to do with the practice of science:
In August alone, I spent six hours on annual compliance training in “financial conflict of interest,” “workplace security,” “patient abuse” (required since I spend a small amount of time on the hospital campus), “chemical safety,” “hazardous waste,” “Herpes B virus” (primates can carry this and transfer to humans via bites, scratches, or bodily fluids) — and two hours on a triennial human study informed consent and ethics course.
Additionally, under Obama a system which has worked relatively well for many years has been tightened and made more restrictive:
Before about a year ago, most federal oversight agencies exercised what they termed the “age of education.” When USDA (given regulatory power over lab animals by the “Animal Welfare Act” in the 90s) inspected animal facilities, if they found a shortcoming the institution and investigator were informed, a report was written, and they filed it until the next inspection. Only severe infractions or repeated failure to correct them would result in a fine. Now the agencies are in the “age of enforcement.” Infractions are immediately met with fines and penalties. My institution recently had an incident in animal care that was the first of its kind in 25 years. We have a better record than most federal or academic facilities of that type — but the institution was immediately hit with a $25,000 fine.
Not only that, but more and more drugs are being “scheduled” or restricted by the Centers for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which requires — you guessed it — more paperwork:
Use of these chemicals requires licensing, training, facility certification, usage protocols, facility inspections, identification of disposal plans and more paperwork.
Additionally, the NIH book Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, which contains the regulations they are supposed to adhere to, was to have been in effect until 2015 with a transition window until 2018 to produce a new edition. In 2009, work on the eighth edition was begun. Debate occured in 2009 and 2010, with public and researcher-only hearings to determine the extent of rules and when they would be applied. According to our source, by 2011 the Guide was in press, and in late 2011 he was informed that the Guide took effect on January 1, with a one-year window to comply.
I once knew a medical researcher in St. Louis. To kill a mouse used for an experiment it was necessary to call “animal authorities” who would direct the killing and who sometimes had to do it themselves. “Progressives” have their own Sharia!
[faculty were appointed to 80 percent research and 20 percent teaching and administration.]
Sorry, I believe that it should no more than 50 percent research!
I don’t believe in paying thousands of dollars to have a TA grade student teach my child and grade their papers. Publish or Perish is the bane of the modern college.
Academia brought these “regulations” upon themselves because of the excessive and redundant experimentation, waste, embezzlement and dishonest use of grant funds. Put the blame fairly on those who deserve it.
Are you talking about intro level courses? My observations have been that as students advance, they get more face time with higher faculty as they are mentored through their own research projects, which are most likely to be a part of the professors’ own larger scale research interests. I’m not sure that having top-notch researchers devoting more time to required courses for first-year …studies majors is as important as spending time with students who want to become researchers themselves. As far as excessive and redundant experimentation goes, are you aware that controlled and repeatable experiments are essential to the scientific process? I am far more worried about the time wasted on PC regulations.
I am addressing three issues: Professors who don’t “teach”, tuition and grant money wasted on duplicate studies, and unnecessary inhumane treatment of live animals.
1. Professors that don’t teach. Patrick Richardson makes the obvious case that 40 years ago professors spent the same amount of time on teaching and research. During that period, education was relatively inexpensive and, generally, excellent. Costs have risen because of both regulatory overreach and administrative staffing bloat.
2. Duplicate studies are the heart of science. Repeat the experiment to prove the conclusions. Repeat experiments with possible minor variations to disprove alternative hypothesis. Repeat experiments to add to the collection of outcomes which form the basis of both statistical evaluation and meta-analysis.
3. Animals have been treated well on the whole. But now the regulations are used by fanatics to essentially regulate animal experimentation out of existence. There is little or no benefit to the animals for these proliferating regulation and small armies of intrusive overseers. The benefit is to the kind of nutbags who opposed human dissection and now oppose animal experimentation. The ironic part is that the nutbags now complain about escalating costs and professors who do not teach because of the cost and time impact of their superflous regulations.
A sane society does not listen to collections of individuals with the obvious agenda of destroying that society and replacing it with some distopian nightmare. Progressives, animal rights fanatics, Islamists are all good examples of the kind of nutbag that people, in a mistaken effort to address hypothetically legitimate claims, too often allow as even a viewpoint in legitimate discussion.
It really depends on the university. I’ve worked as a research professor in the physical sciences and as a research administrator as well as a permanent program director at the NSF. The breakdown between teaching/research/service varies amongst and even within universities. Despite spending time at a major research university (MIT), I’ve never seen ANY faculty member whose load is 80% research and 20% split between teaching & service. That was not true 20 years ago. Furthermore, the time devoted to teaching does not, ever, count towards writing grant proposals and writing papers.
At many universities, there are scientists who are supported entirely by research grants (my field actually has a very high number of such “soft money” scientists). In their case, of course, they would have no teaching load.
Because of those exaggerations, it calls into question the entire article.
As a research professor I’d be curious to know your take on one thing that isn’t expounded upon in this article. The subject matter here seems to revolve around government research grants as opposed to private grants or endowments. For example, how much federal grant money does a private institution like MIT receive? And how could they complain about regulations when the government is the the source of their funds? Can anyone explain why universties can’t start adopting policies that don’t make their research dependent upon government financing?
“And how could they complain about regulations when the government is the the source of their funds?”
That’s simple, …They want the government to treat them like they think tenured people should always be treated, …as free people within the hierarchy. That is the ideology of tenure, after all. It’s not the reality, but it is the ideology.
“Can anyone explain why universties can’t start adopting policies that don’t make their research dependent upon government financing?”
There are several reasons, all revolving around the point that governmental relations have become the major business for most large universities. We are talking about institutions that pull in many $Billions each year in student loan money that comes directly to the universities, which they then extract tuition and fees from, before passing the remainder to their now dependent students. Given the current monopsony/oligopsony of government on science funding in the US, it is far more expensive for university fund raisers to raise money from private sources than to do so with government grants.
Not surprisingly, it is the researchers who mostly apply for the research grants, not the university fundraisers. There is a distinct clash of interest here if researchers contact private funding sources themselves. These private funders are often the same people that university fund raisers go to for building a new library wing, or a better scoreboard on the stadium for team sports, or, … Since you can only go to the well so many times, the university fund raisers are seldom going to steer researchers to the wealthiest of the university’s “good friends” with any regularity. They don’t want a request for $500,000 in highly specific research money (minus the percentage for the eternal “administrative overhead”) to scuttle their chances for scoring $50,00,000 going into the general endowment.
By contrast, the more that researchers’ funding requests appear in front of governmental funding peer review groups with competently planned work, the better a claim they have to being in that precious “main lines of research” mental category of their reviewing peers in any one field. In general, the pols are giving you “other people’s money”, so they, and their reviewers, are far more interested in filling out forms right than in the effect the funding has on the world. Not so with, private funders who often know all too well how much research churns through because of “publish or perish”.
Federal grants are the lion’s share of available research funding. Moreover, the non-government grants that are available often look to how much federal funding an institution receives to figure out whether it’s reputable and a good target for their money. It’s turtles all the way down.
It wasn’t always this way, and doesn’t need to be this way… but it’s gotten to be this way over the course of more than half a century, and unwinding it is going to be more complicated than just refusing federal money and looking to other sources for research funding.
(Also, the reason so many of these regulations are tied to federal funding is that federal grants control so much of the research. Move away from federal funding, and the people who imposed the regulations will see that control is slipping and move to have them imposed on all research – for some, like drug control, that’s the case already. So even if it were easy to get off the federal tit, doing so wouldn’t be enough to solve this particular problem.)
There are 3 problems with your position.
First, if academics spent most time on teaching, they would no longer be researchers who also teach, but teachers who might or might not also do research. If the teaching is done by teachers rather than researchers, then the university is no longer a research university, but a sort of glorified community college. Such institutions presumably already exist in the US, but the degrees they award, rightly or wrongly, are not worth as much as those of research universities.
Second, US universities do not charge so much in tuition because they have to pay top salaries to top academics: they charge it because there are people willing to pay.
Third, when I was an undergraduate, we did not expect to be spoon-fed: if a professor was a poor teacher, we worked our way through the textbook by ourselves. Of course, we paid much less tuition, but frankly if I could go back I would not spend more in tuition for better teaching.
Academic science hardly suffers from “excessive and redundant experimentation.” Quite the opposite. A key principle of science is the reproducibility of experimental results, yet a researcher gets no credit for attempting to reproduce another’s experiment. Rather, he must do “original” work if he wishes to survive in academia. As a result, most studies are *not* reproduced, and there are plausible statistical arguments that this results in a majority of published research findings being wrong (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124).
At research universities the typical load for a Professor in science is one course per semester. This is my teaching load (I am a professor of physics). Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can be a substantial piece of work. At the low end, in a course one has taught many times (notes are prepared, etc.), teaching might take 7-8 hours per week, including time for grading, office hours, prep, etc. That would be 14%-16% of the typical 50 hour average workweek that professors at research universities must put in to be successful. If it is a course one has not taught before, the story is different. Now you might be talking up to 15 or even 20 hours a week, depending on how challenging the material (like a graduate theory course – think Jackson or Goldstein if you know Physics).
But that is not the whole story. One essential function of a research university is to teach people how to do research….by doing research. That is how you train scientists. So any research-active professor will have graduate students that he/she is mentoring toward a Ph.D. degree (M.S. students don’t count). In addition, most research-active professors provide opportunities for undergraduates to do research in their labs, either for course credit or for pay (or even both). All of that is teaching, but in a research context because the thing being taught is how to do research. I typically spend anywhere between 10 and 20 hours a week in these kinds of interactions. Then one has to find time to attend conferences, write papers, and prepare and submit proposals to secure the funding that supports the whole enterprise. And funding is getting harder to secure. Many programs in my area have a 15% or even 10% proposal success rate. Of course, a successful professor who is a leader in the field might be batting 333, but that still means writing 3 proposal for every one funded. In addition there are department, college, and university committees on which one might serve (like Promotion and Tenure – which is a lot of work), as well as national service (reviewing papers for publication in journals, serving on committees of professional societies or the National Academies of Science, etc). The range of tasks for faculty at the top of the game in research universities is enormous, and a focus on them teaching “only one class” is highly misleading. And so I have to agree with Beyond Politics, that I have never known a professor, even at research universities, who only spend 20% on teaching (despite all the other responsibilities), once you understand that teaching includes the mentoring of students across the board.
Count me in: I don’t think that any of my advisors spent anywhere near 80% of their working time in research. Except one who is an emeritus, and even then we have to include writing papers under the rubric of research, and anyway he is under no contractual obligation: he can do whatever he likes.
Note however that the original statement from the anonymous source is ambiguous:
“It used to be the case that faculty were appointed to 80 percent research and 20 percent teaching and administration.”
First, it does not say WHEN this used to be the case.
Second, and pay close attention now: it does not say that faculty used to spend 80% of their time on research; it only says that they were SUPPOSED to spend 80% of their time on research.
I am a researcher at a medical school, and we have a similar “80:20″ distribution. However, the “80%” refers to salary covered by grants and the 20% is salary contributed by the university. As a matter of fact, my own appointment is 90:10 as non-tenured faculty. There is certainly teaching going on in the “90%” portion of my job – students in the lab, journal clubs, dissertation committees. Virtually all classes are team-taught, and I for one teach about 8 hrs worth of specific lectures per semester.
Please note that this is in a hospital/medical school setting where the medical curriculum is taught by MDs and the PhDs teach the grad studets who are expected to be in the lab.
This is an embarrassingly bad article. Citing one source who requested anonymity is hardly journalism. Go do your homework and write a better article.
Has it occurred to you that there’s a sound reason for this researcher to want to remain not only anonymous, but unidentifiable?
That is the beauty of the progressive/fascist operational model. Damage or destroy those who speak out. Then, when people are reluctant to speak out for attribution claim that no one is opposed to the status quo. Works very well in Islamic states as well in the old Soviet Union (and Nazi Germany).
I can verify that these regulations for animals are the same for the private sector companies who engage in animal research as well. My husband’s job is in animal pharma where it is an absolute necessity to use a certain number of animals for testing, and they are getting the same treatment. His position is in QC, and it used to be a one-man job when he took it over. Thanks partially to his company doing well, but mainly to the Obama regulatory regime, his position has grown into the work of 10 people. And the rest of the QC department overall has had similar growth under Obama because of increased regulatory burden.
In this particular case I granted anonymity because for the source’s political leanings to get out would damage his career — which has been a distinguished one in his field.
But do you truly think he’s the only one? That no one else has seen these issues?
How many scientists do you think stay silent on this and other topics such as climate change for fear of losing their funding or being unable to find work?
How many do you think have been blackballed because they published something unpopular?
“Obama’s promises — “restoring science to its rightful place” and “[meeting] the demands of a new age” — have in fact led to policies that put science under the government’s thumb…”
“There will be no loyalty except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love except the love of Big Brother… There will be no heart, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.” George Orwell – 1984
George Orwell was more than a good writer; he was a prophet. “Democracy” will not reverse the suicidal downward slide of the United States. There is only one thing that can save us – a Constitutional Amendment which limits Federal taxation and borrowing – outlaws fiat money creation – and requires a balanced budget. We must amend our Constitution and thereby win the battle of the Republic, or we will surely lose the “battle of democracy.”
“The proletariat [labor-challenged, tax-eating, non-disabled, government-dependents] will use its political supremacy [democratic majorities] to wrest, by degree, all capital [property] from the bourgeoisie [laboring, tax-paying middle class and entrepreneurs], to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state [self-serving Marxist Government]… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois [middle class] individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the [non] working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” Karl Marx
Requiring a balanced budget won’t do much. We have already found that the process of writing checks is disconnected enough that no budget at all permits government spending to continue nearly undiminished.
A Constitutional amendment requiring the Federal government to spend no more than it receives, and which limits how much it receives, will be a Constitutional limit on how much Federal government spends. A Constitutional limit on Federal income and spending is a Constitutional limit on Federal power. The States have the power under Article V to make it happen, and to put teeth into the enemies of our Constitution – foreign and domestic.
Amendment XXVIII
Section 1. Federal taxation shall not exceed 10% for any individual, nor shall Federal taxation exceed 10% of the nation’s GDP. Federal taxation shall be a national sales tax
Section 2. Federal income shall only consist of a maximum 10% domestic taxation as per Section 5 of this amendment, plus foreign tariffs, plus the sale of domestically purchased U.S. bonds by U.S. Citizens, plus the donations of U.S. citizens. Federal income shall not occur through borrowing, except for the sale of domestically purchased U.S. bonds by U.S. citizens; nor shall Federal income derive by fiat creation of money
Section 3. Federal spending shall not exceed federal income. Federal spending during wars, which must be declared by Congress under Article 1, Section 8, may exceed domestic taxation only via foreign tariffs, plus the sale of domestically purchased U.S. bonds by U.S. Citizens, plus the donations of U.S. citizens.
Section 4. This section of Article 1, Section 8 shall be changed to: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States, and all provisions for general welfare shall be uniform throughout the United States and enumerated herein this Constitution; To borrow money on the credit of the United States as per Section 2 of this amendment; To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and to regulate disputes of commerce among the several states…”
Section 5. This section of Article II, Section 1 shall be changed to: “No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States. Natural born citizen shall mean any person born within one of the states of the United States or upon the territorial waters of the United States, of parents who are both citizens of the United States.”
Section 6. This section of Article VI shall be changed to: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made not in violation thereof, or which shall be made not in violation thereof, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme amendable secular law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”
Section 7. Article III, Section 3 shall be changed to: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them or against this Constitution, or in adhering to their enemies or the enemies of this Constitution, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason except for cases of treason involving the President of the United States, members of the National Congress, or the Supreme Court, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted. State legislatures shall have the power to try cases of treason involving the President of the United States, members of the National Congress, and the Supreme Court, and to declare the punishment thereof within the respective States.”
Section 8. Term limits for Congress (shorter) and the Supreme Court (longer)
Section 9. Amendments XVI and XVII are hereby revoked
Section 10. Supreme Court decisions shall be revoked by Congress with 2/3 or greater vote in both houses
Section 11. The Declaration of Independence is the supreme un-amendable natural law of the United States of America
Oops,
Section 2. Federal income shall only consist of a maximum 10% domestic taxation as per Section 1 of this amendment…
This brings back some unpleasant memories of my academic experience; especially since, in a couple of universities, I worked in a building physically connected to a university hospital.
Things seem to have got worse, but the anonymous contributor makes a poor case for putting the blame on the Obama admin: it is a universal law of human society that bureaucracies expand. Ideology plays a role in creating bureaucracies, and sometime it cajoles them in their expansion, but bureaucracies expand even when there is no ideology driving their expansion; indeed a very strong anti-statist ideology is needed simply to stop their expansion.
However, this was specifically about government regulation that was never this onerous before. IOW, the universities are finally getting a taste of what the private sector has been dealing with for the past 40 years.
OF course it was never this onerous before. That’s because bureaucracies always expand. Once they expand, they are more onerous than they were before.
I said it and repeated it, and now I repeat it once more: bureaucracies always expand unless there is a concerted effort to restrain them, and once this effort is exhausted, they start expanding again.
Exactly right. The best that can be said about prior administrations is that this sort of intentionally destructive regulatory overreach grows a little slower. No bureaucracy ever willingly shrinks.
I am put in mind of Frank Herbert’s “Bureau of Sabotoge” (Dosadi Experiment), in which a government department (go figure) existed to do nothing other than to sabotage (up to and including murder) government bureaucracies whose purpose was to “… frustrate the workings of government in order to give sentients a chance to reflect upon changes and deal with them. ” The alternative to sabotage is, of course, war and civil dissolution as the only ways to end the tyranny of the bland, faceless, fanatic bureaucrat (current EPA officials fit this characterization quite well).
Quite interesting. I have never read Frank Herbert, but maybe I’ll find time for The Dosadi Experiment.
You might have noticed that my claim that bureaucracies necessarily expand unless a concerted effort is made to stop them expanding, is based on Parkinson’s Law.
After reading Parkinson, I found that Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, book 3, chapters 36–41) discovered the same principle centuries earlier, in a different civilization.
I also found evidence that this happened in the Roman Empire, Chinese dynasties, and Renaissance states, as well as modern states and Islamic empires.
Do I have to draw you a picture ?
The final goal is total control of research by the State.
After Obama
?
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Before Obama /
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“It is a universal law of human society that bureaucracies expand…”
Like gravity, eh? Expanding bureaucracy augments the power of elites. That the ambition to extend power and control over society is a shared quality of modern Progressives and the authoritarian governments and entrenched aristocrats of states gone by is unsurprising and fails to disprove the ideological dimension of this issue.
The ruling classes want to expand the power of the State?
why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?
All you have to do is use the phase “Climate Change” in your application and you will get all the money you want and no restrictions on the use of it.
Very funny.
But even that pot is of finite size, and I’m sure smaller than the hands grasping at it.
Plus plenty of fields don’t have an even vaguely plausible connection to it. This researcher using animals is probably in one of them.
It’s all Political Science now a days.
If you don’t believe me, just try doing or saying something that the Prog Morality Police don’t like.
This is a basic societal, and organization problem: how much policing is the best? There is no question that policing of the bad guys is needed, the disaster on Wall Street, Bernie Maddoff, Enron, too-big-to-fail shysters, are examples. However, America has more regulators now than at any time in history. We pay TSA bureaucrats to screen nuns from carrying darning needles on board aircraft. We pay regulators to control research scientists who are essentially government paid, via grants. In my field, nuclear power, we paid DoE $30,000,000,000 to design and build the Yucca Mountain repository, and have not gotten a penny of value in twenty years. And we are now broke.
The government spends more and more, but gets less and less value, in this article, state of the art research. IMHO one reason is that we ignore reality. More regulation does not necessarily mean higher quality. It is a certainty that it means higher costs, and slower scheduled accomplishments. In the professional fields, it is also a certainty that the expertise lies in the private sector for the simple reason that the majority of workers are employed there. With the advent of megaregulators, and tort lawyers, the role of self policing by the professions has vanished. Some claim with good cause, but there are vast numbers of examples of brain dead government regulators. One example: pencil whipped lethal practices in the BP well blow out by government people who did not know what they were doing, an entire agency. Every professional has had similar experiences.
There is a legitimate issue about the amount of time a full Professor, in universities, spends teaching students or doing research. This is largely determined by the source of funding, tuition or research grants, and there is heated concern by the payers, with huge loans, on what they are getting for their money. TAs who can not speak English, or teach, and on line education are town and gown conflicts which are getting worse. Every alumni has had similar experiences. The solution lies in the professional societies, who have a horrible history of self policing on best practices. It is impossible to solve by hiring more bureaucrats, or creating more law suits. Scientists, professionals, must self police; it is the cost of doing business. They must say “No” to the guy with the money.
Seems to me that most conservatives who accept evolution and do not believe the anthropogenic climate change hoopla think that the difference is in ideology alone. In my opinion, such people have decidedly not considered the foundation upon all the hoopla as the core problem, because they have made it their own as well. That foundation is not Reality, or Science, but Evolutionary belief. You are on the same boat, and in fact, such conservatives are the ideological warriors.
This is because the natural course of an Evolutionary mind-set is what the liberals are all about, and it simply has the appearance of an ideology because that term can be afixed to any worldview that affects behavior. This is why accusations of ideology fall on deaf and dumb ears directed at the left. They are not ideological. They are simply following the most direct course of their reality, which is that Evolution and it’s main constituent claims are now truth, and mankind is simply the social animal at the top.
You can say all you want that you believe in God, but it is not relevant to the argument you are trying to affect: Society’s direction. It doesn’t matter because if Evolution is true then the Bible is false, period. It means, according to you, we don’t have God’s Word, but a book of morality ideas and fairy tale lessons that may be inspired or not (this applies to all who accept Evolution). You may say you believe in Jesus, and that is fine and good, but you do not own the helm of society in that position alone. Nor do leftists. So, all in all it means you have accepted a new foundation of sand, as has much of the world, and it is a major driver in the world deteriorating at such a clip.
I’m not saying a person is not saved if they believe in Evolution, but that they are declaring that they do not know if there is one true God or not, and therefore, not very much about God at all. By my understanding, if you do not know the Father, you do not know the Son. But I still am not accusing anyone of not knowing Jesus. It could be that you see one little speck of the Father, and therefore accept Jesus.
God put his Bible in the world so that men, of all stations, whether learned or not, rich or poor would know what the truth is. That is God’s style.
I run an academic biomedical research insitute and this article is the first accurate description I’ve seen of what’s going on. The last decade has seen an explosion of regulations that are gradually restricting preclinical and clincial research to the extent that it is becoming a waste of time to take federal money. The present government is a disaster and many scientists are beginning to see this.
“With a less gullible populace and a defense against frivolous lawsuits and audits, much of the regulatory and compliance burden could go away, leaving us the ability to do more and better research.”
Good luck on getting that “less gullible populace”. A more likely solution to the spreading paralysis will be a government that cuts through the red tape as Alexander did the Gordian Knot.
We should all be careful what we wish for, though.
Cry me a river. This isn’t an Obama problem. It is a government problem. It has been getting worse for 40 years. At first they went after the “evil” corporations. Many of these academics probably participated or ran the protests. Well, if it’s good for the “evil” corporation, it is good for the academic and government labs. Over my career I had to deal with many professor or government scientist whining about having to meet the health and safety regulations they more often than not support for being imposed on industry. I will acknowledge that government/academia suffer from the problem that they can’t pass the costs on to consumers. But tough luck. They should have thought of that before creating the monster to punish their favorite “evil” industry.
On the other hand, I do advocate strict compliance with all regulations with serious consequences for failure to do so. Not because I think the regulations are appropriate but if we follow the law, it will all come to a stop. Then maybe, someone besides the idiots in academia and government, who works in the regulatory reality will have a shot to reform the system. Academia is getting hit now, but government is where we need zero tolerance policy. If you were to look at some government operation, you’ll find gross violations of the simplest health and safety regulations simply because of internal enforcement and wink/nod enforcement when other agencies have jurisdiction.
We cannot function if we follow all the rules. Instead of the wholesale violation of the rules with whimsical enforcement, we need to trim the rules till they are workable with full compliance.
At least Obama killed the ridiculous restrictions on stem-cell research. Now we just need someone to cut away the research restrictions on various drugs, return a spirit of free inquiry to our science institutions.
The restrictions on fetal stem cell research wasn’t ridiculous but ethical. Adult stem cell research had no restrictions placed on it except maybe for possible human life cloning.
I’ll say 1 thing, at least Obama is consistent in his lack of respect for all human beings.
To echo Jeanette, there hasn’t been a single useful treatment come from fetal stem cell research, there have been several come from adult stem cell research.
Moreover, scientists have discovered ways to make adult stem cells become fetal stem cells. So the argument that we have to destroy embryos to get the stem cells is moot in any event.
The reality is, this is simply a convenient club liberals use to A. beat conservatives, in particular George W. Bush, about the head and shoulders for being anti-science, all while promulgating regs which stifle basic research and B. advance the “abortion anytime, anywhere for any reason” agenda.
No one ever stopped private industries from investing in stem cell research. The fact none ever did should be the first clue that most of the pie-in-the-sky claims about fetal stem cell cures were just that – pie in the sky. Now, if you want your tax dollars wasted on things that will most likely never realize any real benefits, you should want us to keep running trillion dollar deficits. At least then, you’re feeding some starving bureaucrat in China.
Interesting article. My two cents:
1. As your friend should have told you, one data point does not make a trend. Are others seeing this as well.
2. In what field does your friend work? I would hope to see more oversight in say, genetic manipulation of contagious viruses: running rats through mazes, not so much.
Looking forward to a follow-up.
Bill
The more money government hands out, the more tempting it is to steal it, and in compensation the more paperwork is required to try to control the process.
Soon the regulation costs more than the fraud would, but this is just to say that having government disperse large funds will always be dysfunctional.
And soon, preventing that bit of fraud becomes the excuse for creating a bureaucratic empire that costs 10x any money it prevents from being peculated. And that omehow always expands, until one day admin overhead exceeds the actual research money.
Endgame: Eventually the system will choke on its own bureaucratic entropy.Entropy isn’t just a measure for disorder in a system: it is also a measure for the disappearance of a thermodynamic system’s ability to perform work.
And yes, the contents of the article sound very familiar.
‘ “restoring science to its rightful place” and “[meeting] the demands of a new age” ‘
Of course, Obama wasn’t specific about science’s “rightful place” and the new age’s “demands”. It’s all “change”. I suspect he’s done EXACTLY what he meant to do.
As a cancer researcher, I can testify that everything in this article is absolutely true. Regulations will greatly delay a cure for cancer. Perhaps that is the point. A cure for cancer might be expensive and it is cheaper to let people die.
Obama’s promises — “restoring science to its rightful place” and “[meeting] the demands of a new age” — have in fact led to policies that put science under the government’s thumb, impotent to defend against threats from attorneys.
Obama meant exactly what he said. In his view, the rightful place of science is under the government’s thumb, along with everything else. The demands of the new age are requirements to comply tith the demands of regulators and bureaucrats, just like the rest of us have to. Did scientists somehow imagine they would be able to avoid our fates?
And yet, how many still plan to vote for Obama?
It can be summed up with this: everything progressives touch they destroy.
Revealed: Army scientists secretly sprayed St Louis with ‘radioactive’ particles for YEARS to test chemical warfare technology By EMILY ANNE EPSTEIN PUBLISHED 29 September 2012
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210415/Revealed-Army-scientists-secretly-sprayed-St-Louis-radioactive-particles-YEARS-test-chemical-warfare-technology.html#ixzz27ya0rUiv
On This Day 70 Years Ago: Fighting Inflation And Hitler Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/01/2012
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2938584/posts
Haiku Guy: “The demands of the new age are requirements to comply with the demands of regulators and bureaucrats, just like the rest of us have to. Did scientists somehow imagine they would be able to avoid our fates?
“And yet, how many still plan to vote for Obama?”
Most, probably.
The root problem is that it’s always more profitable to surf the biases of the wealthy than to defend the status quo. The wealthy are like many others: They may be exceedingly good at something (though sometimes only luck) but they often have a narrow view. Once a fable gains a foothold, the money flows to those who advance its program. The main fable about science is that scientists are dishonest and care about nothing but publishing. Conclusion: We need MORE regulation of science, without limit. Not one person in 100 can face the reality that for every part of life there is a right amount of regulation and that beyond that you get not only less of whatever was the product there, but often more of whatever the laws were supposed to prevent.
In many fields of animal use now — particularly the breeding of pets and farming — we’re at the edge not only of raising prices but of driving the activity underground and out of the country. This will work for the Humane Society of the U.S. because they make their money campaigning against whatever they can claim to be abuse: More REAL abuse is ideal for them. For the animals, Americans, and our country, it’s a loser.
We can live without legally bred pets, circuses, and other animal entertainments. The price of no U.S. animal research will be extremely high. And if we have to import most of our meat, eggs, and so on … you finish the sentence.
I’ve been involved on the defense side of the anti-animal wars for ten years and the animal rights movement is far stronger today than it was when I started. They are making strategic mistakes but there’s no sign of any high price for them in the short run. At this point I believe they’ll be swept away by whatever else befalls our country as a result of our several decades inattention to who governs us and what actions that government takes.
And that sweeping away of the AR movement will be a part of radically downsizing our government.
We’re a tough people but I don’t think the next ten years will be easy.