Today is National DNA Day, (now you know). Students across the country are right now discussing inheritance, the achievements of Watson and Crick (probably not Maurice Wilkins or Rosalyn Franklin), and in more progressive parts of the country, Darwin and evolution. ‘Tis a good day to learn some science. But it’s also a good opportunity to consider a radical overhaul of U.S. science education.

This year, and indeed, this week have delivered plenty of remarkable news that put the astounding science that surrounds the double helix in a special context that probably can’t be adequately resolved in a science classroom in a day and don’t begin to treat the sickness of scientific ignorance in the U.S.

For example, yesterday the U.S. Senate passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, after Senator Coburn (R-OK) lifted his curious block on the bill (he voted in favor of it twice before deciding to block it from even being considered). As much as I would like to pump my fist in victory, we shouldn’t pop the champagne (or Freedom Suds for the jingoistic sect) yet, as the bill is slightly different from the one that passed the House twice this Congress, leaving wiggle-room for more Coburnesque obstructionism. The blocks on GINA were not a science issue, but are at least in part the result of a lack of understanding and appreciation of the fact that genetic predisposition to disease is not a diagnosis. The opposition was mainly about greed and business interests.

We can drop Ben Stein’s magnum crapus, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in the same category of non-science issues, but for different reasons. Now widely discredited as manufactured controversy in the name of creationist activism, Mr. Stein managed to make a fool of himself by displaying a lack of knowledge and intellectual honesty that will likely spell the end of his unusual career (and might be equally indicative that he should seek some professional help for his case of the crazies). That Mr. Stein is attacking scientists does not make his movie or his aggressively ignorant point of view part of science. But that isn’t going to stop it from coming up in classrooms today.

The unfortunate fall of Jim Watson last October will probably stick in my mind for many years to come. Patently racist comments made in a scientific context effectively ended the career of the world’s most famous living scientist, and we are not better off for it. I am still baffled by Watson’s comments and torn on the fate of one of my science heroes. For sure, students are looking at his Wikipedia entry today and learning that he was forced into retirement for falsely linking race and intelligence.

I worry that teachers might not be equipped with the knowledge to explain where Watson was wrong, or Ben Stein, or what a genetic predisposition is, or how it could be used to discriminate against someone.

The truth is that scientific advances have always brought controversy, most often because of a lack of appreciation and understanding of actual achievements or their implications, coupled with fear of change. Expelled and the opposition to progressive legislation like GINA are symptoms of an ignorance of science and a fear of change, not vice versa. Such misunderstanding is certainly not limited to evolution and human genomics either. The only way to combat that fear is to eliminate it, and the only way to do that is to dedicate a serious effort to revamping science education in the U.S. starting with minimum standards for science education, radically improving science teacher literacy and retention, and making a solid science education compulsory for all students. Let’s not beat around the bush; that is going to cost a lot of money and effort. But there are few measures that the next President and Congress could take that would be more worthwhile for securing our future.

We are in the unfortunate position of having to discuss controversy in classrooms because we have done an inadequate job of creating a scientifically literate public. We lie in this bed because of inaction on creating national science education standards, because of decades of educational decay, and an unwillingness to address the roots of fear and ignorance.

The National Human Genome Research Institute deserves a lot of credit for successfully using DNA Day as a tool to have genomics and basic genetics taught in schools, and there seems little doubt that other groups should expand upon their efforts. But let’s not mistake DNA Day as any kind of solution to the kind of societal and education changes we will need to remain competitive. Each of the Presidential candidates and every candidate for Congress should put their cards on the table for revamping science education. Anyone who doesn’t think that is a prerequisite for their jobs is probably not prepared for them.

Michael Stebbins is the Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, President of the SEA Action Fund and author of Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos Confronted.

ShareThis

Read more here

ShareThis

By Jim Turner and Maryann Feldman
We are living through a major revolution brought about by Moore’s Law, the digitization of data, the Internet, and a plethora of productivity-enhancing software. Organizational and geographical boundaries are blurring as corporations reinvent themselves on national and international scales. These changes are not value neutral. They are both productive and destructive. And they are causing massive reallocations of jobs and wealth worldwide—as well as collateral environmental and social damage.

No matter if you believe that the world is flat or spiky, it is simply true that the world order is changing. This is occurring at a time when the U.S. government is diminished due to almost three decades of distrust, downsizing, and outsourcing. Democracy suffers when government becomes an object of ridicule rather than a vehicle for collective action. Democracy thrives when government delivers for the common good.

Globally, other governments that are attuned to the changing world order are working to build competitive advantage, advancing all aspects of their societies to boost the economic prosperity of their citizens. While we debate the merits of innovation policy, they invest heavily in government labs on applied research of importance to their industries, co-locating with research universities and industrial parks to work on focused technologies. While Congress each year debates whether to extend the research and development tax credit, other countries provide generous and lengthy tax holidays and greatly subsidized manufacturing facilities to attract companies from around the world.

Unfortunately, these same governments have sometimes looked the other way as air and water quality decline. And they have been less than rigorous in health and labor inspections and quality control—sometimes alarmingly lax. These governments contend that they will catch up on these problems once they have lifted the prosperity of their citizens sufficiently, but in the meantime their industries threaten our planet’s health. At the same time, they are all aggressively climbing the high-tech ladder, claiming more and more competitive 21^st century industries as their own.

In contrast, our country is not competing as aggressively. Certainly, there is no need to enumerate the problems here that have been laid out eloquently in Rising Above the Gathering Storm by the National Academies, in Innovate America by the Council on Competitiveness and in numerous other studies, including A National Innovation Agenda, by two advisory board members of Science Progress. Yet there are a host of questions these reports cannot answer.

The reason: We as a nation badly need to update our view to include the role of government in science and technology in the radically new environment of 21^st century communications technologies, and to debate new ways of working together on open innovation. With this first posting, we start that conversation on what must be done if we are to retain our position among the most innovative and productive countries in the world.

We and others on Science Progress seek a dialog on the following overarching questions:

• How can the United States, its regions, and its localities turn the communications and computer revolution to their advantage?

• What is the role of government in assuring the competitiveness of industries, companies and individual work? Is it possible that to develop “lean government,” characterized by just-in-time, unobtrusive supplier of services to industry, that still protects the public interest?

• Is there a new Federalism? How is the relationship among federal, state and local government changing?

• Can goods be manufactured in America? How must our policies change to stop further decline? What is the role of human capital in a manufacturing renaissance?

The devil is also in the details. We also seek the best available ideas on the more detailed science and technology policies that will be at heart of any new, effective national policies to foster broad economic prosperity. Among these questions:

• As Federal, State and Local governments digitize, what are the benefits and what are the risks of mining that data for public health and safety or for competitive purposes?

• Given that the United States is the only major country to develop its technical standards in a distributive, inclusive fashion, does that give us any advantages in this new era?

• Without government incentives and coordination, are we in danger of becoming a “gadget economy,” where innovation is focused on incremental improvements while larger concerns are unaddressed?

• Is it too late to establish level playing fields through standards or international agreements regarding environment, labor, and other quality of life issues related to companies and the workforce?

• Does the distributive nature of work in an Internet era increase the importance of state and local government?

• At the Federal level, how can the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House and quality standards be used to allow the government to function in a real-time, lean manner?

• What changes must occur at universities for them to be real-time suppliers of knowledge and solutions to industry?

• What trade offs would this require and under what circumstances should universities make the changes?

• What is the responsibility of companies to local communities in constructing competitive advantage?

Over the course of this year, at Science Progress, we and others will begin to develop detailed answers to these questions, in prelude to the arrival of a new President and a new Congress in Washington and to the election of new state and local officials around the country. This is a debate we as a people need to have about our government and our future. We and others at Science Progress plan to put forward our best ideas on these topics. We hope you will join us.

Jim Turner is Chief Counsel, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives and serves on the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America. Maryann Feldman is the Miller Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Both are writing as individuals and not in their official capacities.

This story was originally published on Science Progress 

ShareThis

I recently learned that that a friend of mine has been driving his father several times a week to treatment for his smoking-related cancer, and yet there is a Marlboro Light balanced in my left hand as I type this. I hate cigarettes, and after 16 years of addiction to nicotine and countless attempts at quitting, I believe it is time for me to take drastic measures (more on that at the end of this piece).

I didn’t start writing this column about my friend’s father’s cancer or my addiction. I set out to write about legislation that could finally bring parasitic tobacco companies under the control of the Food and Drug Administration and the astonishingly shortsighted opposition to placing basic health and safety regulations on products that have been proven dangerous.

Currently the FDA can regulate my mouthwash, but not the cigarettes that made my breath stink.

In 1996, the FDA actually tried to assert regulatory power over tobacco products, but the tobacco companies fought back and ultimately the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2001 that Congress had not granted the FDA the power to do so. Enter the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, introduced last year by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Senate, and Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Thomas Davis (R-VA) in the House. The bill would reinstate the 1996 rule and expand the FDA’s power to restrict the marketing of cigarettes, to children in particular.

A superficial glance at the bill reveals that it fails the logic test by requiring an agency charged with protecting the health of Americans with regulating a deadly product without the authority to ban it outright. But the alternative, of leaving Big Tobacco to freely manipulate their product to keep me and the rest of my stinky-fingered brethren addicted, is unacceptable.

Indeed, a 2007 study by the Harvard School of Public Health¹ confirmed a previous study by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health showing cigarette companies deliberately increased the amount of nicotine in the average cigarette by 11.6 percent between 1997 and 2005. So during the time period that I and many other Americans were trying to quit smoking, Big Tobacco was bumping up nicotine levels to make it even more challenging.

Since cigarette ingredients are unregulated, they were neither required to seek approval before increasing the amount of an addictive chemical nor to inform their customers. That’s the kind of regulatory oversight the FDA could bring to this drug-peddling industry.

Cigarettes are unregulated drug delivery systems.

It’s common knowledge that cigarettes are far more than dried tobacco leaves, and that the companies that produce them have misled the public for years. But somehow we don’t think of cigarettes as highly engineered nicotine delivery systems. It is the nicotine-induced blast of dopamine and other neurotransmitters that keeps me coming back for more, so, naturally, improving the drug delivery mechanism will increase addiction. And that is the key. Cigarettes are unregulated drug delivery systems.

A recent report by several respected health organizations, including the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association, details many of the clever advances that make the modern cigarette an engineering marvel. Case in point: Philip Morris, which manufactures my brand of cigarettes, discovered that adding ammonia-based compounds to cigarettes increased the absorption of nicotine. That’s the same principle as crack cocaine. Genius!

The addition of ventilation holes in the filter paper is another brilliant bit of engineering designed to dilute the smoke so the machines that test for tar levels register lower amounts, and the cigarettes can be marketed as “light.” The problem is, smokers functionally draw on cigarettes differently than the machines to maintain nicotine levels, and there is no net health benefit, just smooth smoky goodness². The best part about these companies is that they continue to innovate. A recent Wall Street Journal article detailed the many wonderful products that Phillip Morris has developed, including a high-tar, high-nicotine cigarette and shorter cigarettes for those who just need a quick fix³.

Fear Itself
Like cigarettes marketed to minorities and children, opposition to the FDA regulating tobacco comes in a variety of flavors. Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the Commissioner of the FDA, told the Associated Press last year that the FDA “approve(s) products that enhance health, not destroy it,” and that if regulated the FDA could unintentionally make a decision on cigarettes that could make “the public health radically worse.” In a Senate hearing last year, von Eschenbach also expressed concern that “the public will believe that products ‘approved’ by the Agency are safe and that this will actually encourage individuals to smoke more rather than less.”

Yet the bill now in Congress does not mean the FDA will be approving cigarettes. And the public, while foolish enough to start smoking, is not so foolish as to believe that smoking is okay because the FDA regulates it.

The fear that the FDA could make things worse scares the hell out of me. Are we to believe that the FDA is incapable of making rational decisions about cigarettes, but rational ones about all other consumer products they regulate? It is also irrational to think that forcing companies to lower the amount of nicotine in cigarettes or to remove the ammonia compounds that help deliver it to the brain faster could cause people to smoke more cigarettes, especially in light of a study by the National Cancer Institute that found that gradually lowering the level of nicotine in cigarettes does not cause smokers to smoke more or inhale more.

Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) is perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the bill in Congress, and along with eight Republican colleagues on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, he voted against it. Enzi has referred to the bill as a “public health disaster” because it does not allow the FDA to kill the tobacco industry completely.

He also claims that the bill is a peace offering to Big Tobacco because Philip Morris has expressed support. But the support by one of the biggest offenders is not an indication that the bill is a public health disaster and does not preclude passing additional laws that aim directly at stopping people from smoking or putting Big Tobacco out of business.

To that end, Enzi introduced the Help End Addiction to Lethal Tobacco Habits Act, which he touts as an alternative to having the FDA regulate tobacco. At its heart, the bill is a kind of cap-and-trade program that allows companies to divest from the tobacco industry over a period of 20 years. Keep in mind that Enzi’s bill is not mutually exclusive from the Kennedy-Cornyn, Waxman-Davis Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which has 55 cosponsors and has passed the Senate twice before—virtually guaranteeing that it will pass when brought to a vote.

This brings up the second and perhaps more important point regarding Enzi’s alternative bill; he has failed to convince a single Senator that it is worthwhile enough to co-sponsor.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will be considered by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health this week, and the full committee is likely to consider it in the next couple of weeks. But ranking subcommittee member Joe Barton (R-TX) now claims that part of the bill might be out of their jurisdiction because the user fees charged to tobacco companies are adjusted for inflation over time and thus, in his view, constitute a new tax. The House parliamentarian will surly resolve this minor jurisdictional issue before next week. Then we may hear much of the same hollow and often embarrassing opposition from many in congress, including Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN), who invoked the slippery slope argument at a House hearing on the bill last fall, stating “What are we going to do? Outlaw Halloween, Valentines day, the Easer bunny?…That gets pretty ridiculous when you think about all that.” I have and it is.

What is clear is that this brand of specious opposition will be far less decisive than the over 600 public advocacy groups that support it. With over 430,000 Americans dying of tobacco-related deaths each year, one would suppose that in most districts, more constituents have died from cigarettes over the years than would oppose the bill today.

I hate the fact that I am at the mercy of a tobacco company that has engineered their product to keep me addicted. And I hate the fact that my friend has to bring his father to chemotherapy because of cigarettes. But the fact that cowardice has prevented our government from protecting us from such manipulation makes me physically queasy.

Sen. Enzi is correct—having the FDA regulate tobacco will not get rid of cigarettes. But it sure will make it a lot harder for more dangerous products in development and currently sold abroad to make it to the United States. And if Big Tobacco has to stop developing their products for and advertising them to children, then please explain to me again how this bill is worse for us than a pack of Luckys.

Smoke-by-numbers
An estimated 20.8 percent of all adults (45.3 million people) smoke cigarettes in the United States.

In the United States, cigarette smoking is responsible for about one in five deaths annually, or about 438,000 deaths per year; on average, these people die 13 years younger than non-smokers.

For every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, 20 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.

Annually, cigarette smoking costs more than $167 billion, based on lost productivity ($92 billion) and health care expenditures ($75.5 billion).

In 2005, the latest year with available data, the cigarette industry spent almost $13.11 billion, or more than $36 million per day, on advertising and promotional expenses.

Each day in the United States, approximately 4,000 people between the ages of 12 and 17 years initiate cigarette smoking.

In the United States, 23 percent of high school students are current cigarette smokers.

Among adult smokers, 70 percent report that they want to quit completely, and more than 40 percent try to quit each year.

Michael Stebbins is the Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, President of the SEA Action Fund and author of Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos Confronted. He quit smoking as of the publication of this piece and will donate $1000 to the American Heart Association for every cigarette he smokes from now until the end of the year. You can track his progress at SexDrugsandDNA.com.

Notes

[1] Connolly, GN, et al., Trends in Smoke Nicotine Yield and Relationship to Design Characteristics Among Popular U.S. Cigarette Brands, 1997-2005, A Report of the Tobacco Research Program Division of Public Health Practice, Harvard School of Public Health, January 2007.

[2] National Institutes of Health, Risks Associated with Smoking Cigarettes with Low Machine-Yields of Tar and Nicotine; Report of the NCI Expert Committee, National Cancer Institute, Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph 13, October 2001.

[3] “Philip Morris Readies Aggressive Global Push,” The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2008.

ShareThis

I recently started a talk on High Energy Physics with the first line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities - “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That is the situation science is in today - the best of times because opportunities in all areas are legion and many will lead to new insights and transformative technologies; the worst of times because federal research budgets are not even keeping up with inflation, much less with the opportunities.

Scientists have been caught in a squeeze between the administration and Congress over priorities for the past two years. In FY08, the President put in generous increases for the physical sciences in his budget and Congress added even more in the individual appropriations bills. The America COMPETES Act, which aimed at doubling the basic research budget for the physical sciences over the next decade and improving science and math education, passed with a huge bipartisan majority and was signed into law in August 2007. But it all crashed in the year-end budget wars when the President held fast to his original budget submission totals for the first time in his administration, and the Democratic leadership in Congress forgot that Bill Clinton won every budget battle after the Democrats lost their majority in Congress in 1994. In the end, R&D funding for FY08 did not keep up with inflation (after subtracting pork projects), and the COMPETES act promises came to nothing.

The same thing is likely to happen to the budgets for the next fiscal year. In his proposal for FY09, the President’s budget has been extremely generous to the physical sciences, but he has been less than generous in other programs of importance to Congress including biomedical research. All the rumors in Washington are pointing to a long term continuing resolution where funding will be held to some relatively low level. Three years in a row are a long time to starve the country’s science programs.

An even more serious problem is the attitude of the young. I recently attended one of the west coast regional science bowls. It was full of bright kids, several of whom asked me what was happening to science and why if it was so important people were being laid off at government laboratories. Worst of all, some of them wondered if they should go on into science careers if science was so poorly regarded by the government.

Everyone in Washington seems to understand that long-term R&D is essential to our economic health as well as to our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Most also recognize that because of changes in the way our economy works, long-term R&D has been almost entirely driven out of private industry and is increasingly the responsibility of the government. However, Washington seems incapable of enacting budgets in a considered manner and doing for science what all agree needs to be done.

If our leaders would only open their eyes they would see the rest of the world gaining on us in R&D. Part of this is natural. China and India, like Japan and Korea before them, have entered a stage of rapid economic development. First their manufacturing expanded and now their science and technology base, both short term and long term, is expanding as well. But if we slow down as they speed up our long-term position as leaders in science and technology will be lost.

A long-term view is needed. Unfortunately, in Washington long-term is defined as the time to the next presidential election. On the brighter side, that is not too far away. If science does badly again this year, it is only one more year until long-term means another four years and there is a chance that coherent policy will be enacted and funded.

Burton Richter is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 and is on the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America.

ShareThis

By Henry Kelly, Ph.D.

No Child Left Behind has created the wrong kind of debate about testing. Given the lack of new funding, many states are jiggering their tests to obscure the failure of poorly performing schools and undermining the accountability that was the core goal of the program. Others are attempting to opt out of the program altogether. The process is wasteful, confusing to students, and fails to produce the information that education enterprises badly need to ensure continuous improvement in what they do.

Instead, we should first engage in a national debate about the expertise students need to acquire in order to prosper in the 21^st century, and only then settle on how best to measure their progress. The interactive methods used in computer games represent some of the most powerful ways to test newly acquired skills, but understanding why they are so useful requires a clear recognition of why our current testing procedures are thoroughly outdated.

Despite all the complaints about the numerous tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act, the problem is not too many tests but too few tests. High stakes, standardized tests are an artifact of a mass production model imposed on education out of necessity during the last century. Traditional tests measure performance in situations that will seldom, if ever, occur in an actual job. Someone trained to solve problems working in isolation, with no access to reference material and no ability to consult experts, is largely useless in today’s economy—however many facts they may have mastered. We use such tests because they are inexpensive to implement.

But consider the ideal classroom scenario: An instructor able to spend plenty of time with each individual student, constantly challenging them, asking probing questions, and presenting increasingly complex challenges tailored for each student. By the time a test is taken the student should have run through the material enough times that they and their instructors have high confidence in success.

These powerful methods aren’t used in standard classrooms for two obvious reasons—they’re unaffordable and we continue to think of the classroom the same way they did 200 years ago. A solution, however, has emerged from an unexpected source—computer games.

The average U.S. teenage boy spends about 14 hours a week glued to computer games. Yet, we aren’t taking advantage of that. Most adults can’t imagine how the lessons of Super Mario could be applied to high school science or history. But consider that a good game will capture and hold a player’s attention with a series of compelling goals, each slightly beyond the player’s current abilities. A great game draws players in what designers call “the flow.” Once in it, they will try, fail and try again, working for hours to master the skills needed to win.

What’s striking, of course, is that they’re also being continuously tested. Tests are an integral part of winning, and players accept the fact that they will fail before they master the skills needed to move on. If you keep crashing your simulated aircraft you know that you’ve got to work harder—and want to. Winning at the most advanced levels of game play requires players to draw on a huge body of knowledge and experience.

Winning many games, moreover, often requires more than mastery of specific skills. They require precisely the skills that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills recently reported are in greatest demand in today’s economy: gathering evidence, making decisions under uncertainty, evaluating options, and (in the case of multiplayer games) working effectively as a member of a team.

The U.S. Department of Defense, which unlike most organizations is completely unembarrassed about having its employees play games (war games), has come to appreciate the power of simulation-based games to teach and test individuals and teams. They have convincing evidence that skills acquired through simulations translate into performance in the field.

Simulation-based instruction can reproduce the complexity, confusion, and tension of field conditions so faithfully that the success a soldier gains in the simulation translates directly into reliable performance during first real combat experience. This powerful transfer from simulation to practice has also been demonstrated for pilots and several areas of surgery. Surely it’s possible to create challenges in biology, history, or engineering that can capture and hold attention.

Building software to teach and test complex skills is expensive. Several billion dollars were invested and lost in education technologies towards the end of the dot-com boom a decade ago, and investors have been wary ever since. Schools and universities are a notoriously poor market for innovations, in part because of an understandable reluctance to take risks with unproven approaches. But as a result, an enormous opportunity is being lost.

We’ve confronted this kind of market failure before. The federal government has been able to fill gaps by funding basic science research, development, testing and evaluation that can be picked up by private investors. It can do this in new technologies for learning as well and create significant markets for robust new products…or we could just continue to fool ourselves that our education system can be fixed with ad hoc testing standards.

Henry Kelly, Ph.D., is the President of the Federation of American Scientists and Chairman of the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America.

ShareThis

Funny Numbers:
A large part of the confusion comes from the way earmarks are considered. Having presided over the largest increase in research earmarks in history while Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the administration is suddenly using a war against earmarks as a backdoor way to cut research. Here’s how it works. Last year the president’s budget was well below what the Congress wanted in areas like energy conservation and health research. They added funding to these areas but many of the additions were in the form of earmarks - funds aimed at a specific recipient. But when the president considers the “baseline budget” which is used to compute increases, these earmarks additions are removed. Thus research areas where the total funding is actually cut show up as small increases (increases above the budget minus earmarks).
The administration’s accounts presume that spending on earmarks is the functional equivalent of dumping the money into the ocean. While there are obviously absurd uses of the funds, in fact over 83% of the funds are directed to the nation’s top 100 research universities. While these institutions are fully capable of doing shoddy work, internal quality standards ensure that the funds are not all spent on beer. There’s some evidence that earmarked funds result in research that is not cited as frequently as papers produced from peer reviewed research, the difference is not enormous. Agency managers, always talking “off the record”, report that they are often able to negotiate with members of Congress and redirect the earmarked funds to higher priority research - assuming of course that the funds remain in the appropriate State or Congressional district.

This clearly does not argue that the nearly $1 billion dollars in research earmarks are a valid way to select research priorities. There is some movement in the right direction since in the current Congress, research earmarks are 60% below their peak level reached in 2006. But while earmarked research may not go to the best possible research, most of the funds are used for perfectly respectable research that should be counted in baseline used for budget comparisons. In fact it turns out that the administration’s own budget is filled with earmarks including a $2.1 million neutrino detector and $28 million directed to General Electric and Siemens for do research on hydrogen-fuel turbines.

Eye of the beholder:
The official definition of “earmarks” does not include enormous research projects that would never have been selected given an honest assessment of national goals. Given the national security threats faced by the US in the coming decades it’s astonishing that cold war research programs in nuclear weapons, missile defense, and aircraft to fight the Soviet Union continue virtually unchallenged. The manned space program may have made political sense when it was begun, but would never have met “peer review” criteria if the peers were people interested in astronomy or astrophysics. Yet these programs continue to absorb the lion’s share of NASA budgets - largely because of the political pressures from Florida, Texas, and other states where the manned programs support huge numbers of people.

The result of this creative accounting is a research program that is, at best, difficult to understand. It is good to see that funding for NSF, NIST and the Office of Science in the Department of Energy are getting sharply increased funding as a result of the America Competes initiative, but this growth is paid for with shockingly large cuts in other research programs. The authors of the National Academy study that led to this initiative state directly that increases in physical science research are badly needed this should be done “…without disinvesting in the health and biological sciences.” Yet this is just what has happened in the budget proposal. In constant dollars the administration proposes to cut research funding in HHS by nearly 2% (4% cut compared to FY07).

The 19% growth in funds requested for the office of science in the Department of Energy is badly needed - particularly given the sharp cuts suffered last year. However this growth this has been offset by sharp cuts in funding for the agency’s core missions in energy efficiency and energy supply research. And since hugely expensive white elephants like the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership are given priority in the budget, most of the technologies that can actually help meet US energy and climate goals at acceptable prices are cut sharply. Since NSF budget actually declined last year, the administration’s proposal would leave the NSF budget 4% above FY07 levels.

It’s impossible to see how NASA can sustain a huge new manned space initiative with a proposed FY2007-2009 increase in funding without further strangling the investments that will actually lead to fundamental discoveries in the origins and structure of the universe and the matter in it. Under the proposed budget, basic research in NASA would fall nearly 11% between FY2008 and FY2009.

It’s also difficult to see how the Department of Defense can focus on complex future threats while its overall research budget shrinks. The administration budget creates a situation where the total DoD research budget declines an average of 3.45% a year between FY2007 and FY2009. Given that funding for hoary favorites like strategic defense and the development of new nuclear weapons remains strong, funding to meet the critical needs of future defense and intelligence services are sharply reduced.

Forest through the trees:
If the US economy depends on competing in a highly competitive global marketplace, and by the administration’s own budget document states that “Economists estimate that as much as half of post World War II economic growth is directly due to technological progress fueled by R&D” it’s difficult to understand why the Administration proposes cutting Federal Science and Technology investments. If the Administration’s strategy of relying on technology and innovation to address the problem of global climate change, it’s difficult to understand why it proposes cuts in critical areas of research.

The FY2009 budget is extremely opaque and a detailed critique will require much more work. On the whole the research budget proposed seems long on symbolism and short on strategy. It does not provide a sensible blueprint to start negotiations with the Congress about building a research portfolio responsive the enormous challenges faced by the US in 2009. Gerry Epstein has already identified one major mystery: a $2 billion research facility proposed for the Department of Homeland security for purposes we can’t find in the budget documents. We hope that others will step forward to interpret the budget and help. R&D can and should be a place for strong bipartisan agreement. The current proposal seems determined to ensure that this will not occur. We can only hope that the Congress can restore seriousness to the process.

Dr. Henry Kelly is the President of the Federation of American Scientists and the Chairman of the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America.

ShareThis

Overall funding for Research & Development in last year’s final budget–the FY2008 Omnibus bill–increased only by 1.2%, less than the rate of inflation. Indeed, major increases that the President had requested and various parts of Congress had provided early in the budget process disappeared in the endgame. But there was a glimmer of light for science in the President’s State of the Union address, when he urged congress to “double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences” to support his American Competitiveness Initiative. With this context, science and technology policy wonks across Washington tore into the President’s FY2009 budget (pdf) request as soon as it was released, looking for how research and development fared.

What they found was a federal R&D budget that increased by a modest 3%, or only 1% when correcting for inflation (Table S-10). Within this total, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy — two agencies that form key parts of the American Competitiveness Initiative — fared rather well, receiving 16% and 8% increases, respectively. (See Table 5-1 on p. 52).

Oh, that 2 billion dollars:
But by far the largest single agency R&D budget increase was that of the Department of Homeland Security, which received a whopping $2.144 billion increase. Not bad for an agency whose entire R&D spending in the previous year was estimated at about half that, or $1.143 billion.

When looked at in detail, the story gets even more curious. This increase comes not in basic research, applied research, or development — but rather in “facilities and equipment,” which shows DHS with a $2.102 billion increase.

The detailed DHS budget, however, indicates none of that. The only facility included in the FY2009 budget request is the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Centers (NBACC), which is almost completely built at Ft. Detrick, in Frederick, MD, and which is budgeted for an increase of $43 million in FY2009 (pdf, page 107).

Whence the rest? Here, the trail runs cold until one recognizes another mysterious — and curiously similar — budget item elsewhere in the DHS budget. Table 3-1 on p. 20 of the White House budget document breaks down Homeland Security funding by agency. At the bottom is a line in the FY2009 budget labeled “Plus Bioshield” that adds $2,175 million to the federal budget, but apparently outside any agency.

Bioshield?
Project Bioshield, funded in the FY2004 DHS Appropriations bill, set aside a pot of $5.593 billion to be reserved for the procurement of medical countermeasures such as therapeutics and vaccines that could be purchased by the United States government and placed in the Strategic National Stockpile for use in event of a bioterrorist attack or other national medical emergency.

When Congress established this fund, it only permitted $3.418 billion to be used in the first four fiscal years, FY2004 - FY2008. The FY2009 budget is the first one that does not face this restriction, with the consequence that the remaining $2,175 million are freed up for possible use. Although these funds have already been appropriated, they count against the spending ceiling of the Department in whose budget they appear - which in this case is DHS. Disbursing funds from this account is a complicated process involving the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House, but DHS is the banker, and it can’t release the funds unless they appear in its budget.

Now the only remaining mystery is why these funds are called “research and development”. By offering a procurement market, these funds are intended to stimulate private sector R&D by firms seeking to develop medical countermeasures that the government needs. And provisions do exist for Bioshield funds to be disbursed to fund R&D in advance of product delivery. But the funds can also go towards purchase of products that have already been developed, and which would not incur any additional R&D. So attributing the entire amount to R&D is an overestimate. And attributing them to “facilities and equipment” is just plain wrong, unless that category is taken to mean “none of the above” - i.e., not basic research, applied research, or development.

At any rate, since these funds have already been appropriated, since they can be spent over a multi-year period, and since only some unknown fraction of them will pay for R&D at all (and only indirectly, at that), they can’t be considered part of the federal governments FY2009 R&D budget.

Sorry about that.

Gerald Epstein is a senior fellow in the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

ShareThis

We head into Super Tuesday with the economy, once again, becoming the number one priority of voters. A recent NewYork Times poll (done before the stock market turmoil) found that Americans are more worried about the economy than at any time in the last 18 years.

Congress and the President are acting on developing short-term economic relief and stimulus packages. Ensuring the longer-term health of the US economy, however, is ultimately a bigger and more important challenge - a challenge the funding of science and technology in December’s Omnibus budget bill fails to meet, and which desperately needs to be addressed in the next round of budget negotiations.

An ongoing problem:
In January, the National Science Board issued its biennial report on science and engineering, expressing concern about US competitiveness in science and technology, and recommending increased funding for basic research. If that sounds familiar, it’s because two years ago the National Academies released a dramatic report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” warning of precisely the same problem and recommending the same solution. Its recommendations received almost unanimous support in Washington, and led to the Administration’s American Competitiveness Initiative, and Congress’ America Competes Act (ACA), both calling for a doubling in funding for basic research in the physical sciences over the next 7 years.

Unfortunately, somewhere on the path between passing the ACA and implementing it, Congress lost its way. Funding for basic research in the physical sciences is almost flat, with the non-earmarked federal investment in basic and applied research growing by just 1 percent in 2008, far less than inflation, making it the fourth year in a row in which such federal research investment has declined in real terms. Earmarks for research, as high as $1.6 billion, add to this figure, but are mostly confined to near-term applied research.

Why the sudden shift away from supporting science? One practical factor is that science has rarely been perceived to affect the outcome of an election. Scientists do not tend to vote as a block in response to single issues such as funding. Moreover the societal benefits of scientific research accrue over many years, blurring the direct connection between science and our economic strength. But the connection is real - and scientific research conducted today will define America’s economic competitiveness for decades.

Economists estimate that public investment in fundamental science and technology have produced annualized societal returns of 20 to 67 per cent. Roughly half the nation’s growth in GDP over the past half century can be attributed to scientific and engineering achievements.

When there is bipartisan agreement on addressing major national challenges the Administration and Congress have shown that quick action is possible. Strengthening our nation’s economic competitiveness is one such challenge and full funding for the America Competes Act is a major component of the solution. Legislators and the public need to ensure sound science and technology policies in Washington. The first order of business should be to undo the damage that will result from the recent Omnibus bill.

The cost of inaction:
The direct impact of the budget will be staggering to the physical sciences. Damage is severe to energy research at all levels. In high-energy physics, which studies the fundamental structure of matter and drives important technologies from superconductors to super computing, major forefront experiments at all US accelerator laboratories have been cancelled or curtailed and researchers and students at universities throughout the country will lose funding. The United States contribution to the International Linear Collider (ILC) project, has also been drastically cut.

At the same time 700 peer reviewed research grants linked to a secure energy future will no longer be funded. All funds have been eliminated for the US commitment to the International Fusion Project, ITER, an international collaboration with China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia. Reneging on commitments such as ITER and the ILC seriously undermines our credibility as a future partner in large international science projects.

No one knows what or where the next high-tech breakthrough will be, but reducing our commitment to basic science and focusing only on short-term applications is not likely to take us there. If Bell Laboratories had focused on improving computing machines in the 1950’s, they would likely have produced faster mechanical calculators. Instead, by researching the fundamental quantum properties of materials, scientists developed the first transistor, and our world was transformed. X-Ray crystallography led to the structure of DNA, particle physics detectors led to modern CAT scanners, and even the World Wide Web was created by accelerator scientists as a way to solve their own special communication needs. A half-century of such examples teaches us that fundamental science is the source of entirely new technologies in the future.

As we consider the opportunities the next generation will have to prosper based upon the priorities we put on research today-even in hard economic times with great security concerns-it may be wise to recall the words of the first director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Robert Wilson when testifying before Congress. He was asked if it would help in the defense of the nation, and replied, “No, but it will help keep the nation worth defending.”

A high quality of life tomorrow will go to those countries that invest in basic research today.

Lawrence M. Krauss is the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the Director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University. He is a member of Scientists and Engineers for America’s Board of Advisors and on the steering committee of ScienceDebate2008. He is also Chair of the American Physical Society Forum on Physics and Society and the Chair of the Physics Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

ShareThis

Over the past few years public debate about immigration issues have merged with the concern about keeping the United States preeminent in science and technology. This has sparked heated discussions about whether increasing the number of highly qualified foreign scientists and engineers is necessarily the best or only way to keep America at the top. On one side are the high technology companies who have been strenuously lobbying to hire many more foreign scientists through an increased number of H-1B visas. On the other side are those who believe that the United States has a sufficient number of highly qualified scientists and engineers who have no incentive to stay in their chosen field of expertise because of the lack of jobs and that increasing the number of immigrants in these areas will only exacerbate an already difficult workplace.

Increase H-1B Visas
Microsoft, Google, along with Oracle, Intel, Genentech and many others, belong to an organization called “Compete America,” which according to its website, lobbies for increased immigration for skilled workers into the Unites States in the STEM fields. These efforts have also garnered the support of 13 state governors who recently contacted senate and house leaders urging increased recruitment of highly qualified immigrants so that US states can “remain world leaders in innovation”.

These like-minded American-based technology companies assert that the United States does not produce enough highly qualified scientists and engineers and that to stay competitive in a global economy, technology companies must look to highly qualified immigrants. To enter the United States, such highly qualified individuals must obtain H-1B visas which allow them to legally work and remain here for up to six years. Estimates of the number of H-1B visa employees, many of whom hold advanced degrees, currently in the United States varies from 260,000 to 400,000, but technology companies seek even greater numbers of entrants. This was starkly demonstrated early this year when the US Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration received more than 150,000 applications for 85,000 available visas. As a result, the agency, for the first time, conducted a lottery for these H-1B slots and about half of the 2008 applicants were left waiting.

It is widely accepted that foreign born science and engineering graduates often desire work in the United States. Equally, there is no dispute that many highly successful hi-tech US companies such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, Intel were founded by immigrants. According to companies seeking super-qualified engineers and scientists, the United States simply does not produce enough of its own and if an insufficient number of qualified H-1B scientists and engineers become unavailable, companies will be forced to look for qualified personnel offshore.

In view of the failure to resolve the issue, on Thursday July 5, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would shortly open a new office in Vancouver, Canada to develop software programs and locate new talent. Microsoft’s reasons include Canada’s “more liberal immigration laws than [those of] the US” and increased demand for information technology and technical training personnel as a result of the decreased number of graduates from North American universities in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). In testimony before the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee a few months earlier, Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates urged the United States to push for an increase in the country’s technological competitiveness by improving the math and science skills of American students and teachers, increasing the country’s research spending and revising immigration laws, especially H1-B visas, to allow more foreign scientists and engineers to be hired.

Fewer Science Career Opportunities
The push for additional foreign scientists is countered by advocates who argue that there is no need for the US to issue additional H-1B visas. They claim that a reservoir of qualified American scientists is being bypassed by technology companies in favor of H-IB-holding scientists for various nefarious reasons, primarily because these immigrants command lower salaries and fewer company benefits. Furthermore, with an increased workforce on H-1B visas, the country becomes more vulnerable to cutting off the supply of such professionals and foreign born scientists often return to their native countries taking their expertise with them. The more serious point raised by this community is that the US is increasingly failing to produce suitable career opportunities for highly qualified scientists and that increasing H-1B visas will further exacerbate a very difficult situation where fewer and fewer positions are available to American postgraduates.

One very deep source of frustration to everyone involved in this debate is the current depressed research funding climate in the country. The situation is so dire that, as reported by the NIH, currently the average age at which an investigator first obtains independent (R01) funding has increased by five to six years to age 42 for PhD degree holders and age 44 for MD and MD/PhD degree holders. Moreover, the proportion of independent R01 grants going to new investigators has remained at approximately 6% of the total number of R01s awarded. While some of this funding slack has been picked up by venture capital, and industry funding has substantially grown relative to public funding, some fear that this trend threatens the independence of basic research while others see this as a sign of the health of scientific enterprise.

Solutions
A report describing risks to America’s future economic prosperity and security entitled “Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?” was recently released by Norman Augustine who is chairman of the National Academies Committee that produced the 2005 report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm“. The 2005 report issued thoughtful and ambitious recommendations addressing all of the concerns being expressed on these issues with the goal of rescuing the U.S. from its complacency regarding its competitiveness and preeminence in science and technology. The Report generated four main goals and more detailed recommendation for achieving them, including:

“1) Increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 science and mathematics education; 2) Sustain and strengthen the nation’s traditional commitment to long-term basic research that has the potential to be transformational to maintain the flow of new ideas that fuel the economy, provide security, and enhance the quality of life; 3) Make the United States the most attractive setting in which to study and perform research so that we can develop, recruit, and retain the best and brightest students, scientists, and engineers from within the United States and throughout the world; and 4) Ensure that the United States is the premier place in the world to innovate; invest in downstream activities such as manufacturing and marketing; and create high-paying jobs that are based on innovation by modernizing the patent system, realigning tax policies to encourage innovation, and ensuring affordable broadband access.”

While these recommendations were formulated more than three years ago, they are still entirely relevant. Now is the time for the entire community to commit to supporting and creating sensible change.

Ms. Steinhauer is Counsel in the New York office of Hunton & Williams LLP. The views expressed here are the personal views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of her firm or the firm’s clients.

ShareThis