!Re: OT: Kevorkian who?

[Sarah Fox]

Hi Horace,

> That's the tip of the iceberg.  The proposal has stunning support from the
> folks who will be the most directly and negatively affected.  Further,
just
> looking at NIH (National Institutes of Health), since the early 1990's,
the
> portion of the NIH budget previously set aside for "pure" (i.e., "not
> immediately profitable") research has been reduced by between 8 and 10%
per
> year.  It is now well under $1B.  (FYI, this is the basic, underlying
> research work, based essentially on the intelligence and genius of
> individual researchers that provides the basis for the profit-driven stuff
> to even happen...rather like shooting yourself in the foot, and then
> reloading.)

Unfortunately it's even worse than that.  When I finally packed my bags and
left academia in 1995, only 3% of grant proposals were being funded in my
(relatively well funded) field.  I wasn't part of that more
fortunate/influential 3%.  Neither was my postdoctoral sponsor, who was
arguably the world's foremost researcher in his field.  He finally accepted
a foreign grant to find ways to eradicate an imported species of snake,
abandoning his real research.  Meanwhile, I worked on a collaborative
project of very high priority/importance with the expectation that surely
*that* project would be funded.  It was to preserve/digitize the nation's
second largest biological sounds archive, upon which a almost a century of
research is based.  (Tape degrades and falls apart.  Think evolution.  Think
extinction.  Think new analysis techniques, e.g. fourier analyses, applied
to old data.  Think replication.)  We were mistaken.  No funding for us, and
no funding for Cornell (which has the largest archive).  Disgusted, I just
left, merely a postdoctoral fledgling, because it no longer seemed "worth
it."  This story is commonplace throughout American academia.

Peace,
Sarah