Politicians Don't Understand Research, Period.

Politician DO NOT understand the process of research.

 This is a subject that infuriates me on a daily basis.  In brief rant, I will cover a few of those infuriations.

Academia

 Most people don't understand where most research is actually done.  Well, let me inform you:  most research is done in universities by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows (that is, people who have a Ph.D. but seek experience in order to enter the elite "Principle Investigator" status job).  Long lived Ph.D. principle investigators (PIs) lead groups of said folks in discovering whatever it is that they are interested in.  Graduate students and post-docs are typically expected to learn what is known in the field and what is known in the lab and build a project to further the knowledge of said field.

Funding

 Funding of academic research is based on a panel of peer scientists chosen yearly for their prowess in the field of choise and their understanding of the studies in question.  NO overseeing gov't body has anything to do with it for NIH.  The DoD grants however, are overseen by the DoD.  Anyway, most biomedical grants are NIH or a similar group.  The review process of grants for research are reviewed by peers in the field of question, people who are deemed exceptional in the field of question.  There is no Bush administration party present, ever.

Topics

 Topics of research vary so much that I could not express it in words.  Academic research covers just about everything that could ever go wrong or right with your body.  I study a virus, so I'll focus on the "wrong" side of it.  Again, there is NO such thing as pork spending in biomedical sience.  How many times can I say that in one essay?

 There can be any number of topics of research.  I've seen studies of pig viruses that have down-right changed everything we think about a certain human virus.  In fact, my personal competitor studies a pig virus instead of the human virus that we study in an effort to discover similar things in a BL1 environment while we are struggling to show a similar thing in a BL2 environment.

 The Media will say "So-and-so is spending millions to study a virus that only infects chickens."  Meanwhile, the virus is Rous Sarcoma Virus (RSV) which is so close to HIV that researchers have called them homologues.  They are studying  RSV because HIV requies a Biosafety Level 3 lab (BL3) to study and RSV is a BL1 SIMILAR virus.  They value the lives of their researchers, but the media says they are pork??  BS.

 The same goes for vaccines.  People seem to think that vaccines are made by "Big Pharma" companies.  This is not often the case.  Most vaccines are developed or at least envisioned by basic scientists with no material benefit from the discovery.  Don't get me wrong, some are defintitely made by companies, but they still base their research on academioc recourses.  

BTW, Vaccines have risks.  For sure.  BUT, they are FAR fewer than the risks of not getting vaccinated.  FAR fewer.   Get your kids vaccinated or get ready to face several viruses that will eigther kill or destroy the funtioning of your child. The risk outwieghs the danger by 98%.

Doc_M says...

Earmarks vary so much is it not fair to say they fund this or that. EVERY administration has them and they fund every administration differentlly. I immagine that GWB had plenty of earmarks in defense and I imagine that those will continue with either candidate. The bad news is that that will mean more war, the good news is that that might mean a shorter war and that that might mean some substantial technological advances for us and the world as it has been in the past. In other words, every time NASA has had a deadline, it has produced technologies that we use in our houses (globaly) every freaking day.

If we never funded defense funding, we'd still be using swords. We are using more and more specific weapons. There may be a day when we can appoint a weapon to a specific person
and say "go" and it will. THAT is what we want.

As for biomedical earmarks, they are purely political. If a candidate pushes stem cells, in any form, know that he is following his advisers and their peers. None of the candidates understand what stem cells are or what they mean. Likewise goes for viral vectors for medicines.

NetRunner says...

Generally speaking, the President doesn't have any control over earmarks. He can veto bills that contain them, but otherwise it's purely a Congressional thing.

Earmarks allow members of Congress to direct money to projects (usually to one in the state/district they represent), without going through the full appropriations process.

I was mostly thinking about the 2nd most mentioned earmark John McCain lists as pork: a study of the DNA of bears (with a joke about not being sure if it's a criminal or paternal issue).

There's a similar earmark Palin requested for her state: $3.2 million for a study of seal genetics.

In reading the full discussion, a lot of people were saying there isn't any reason to believe there's something wrong with either study (except McCain's grandstanding about it). But then some people claiming to be research scientists said using earmarks for studies is a bad way to get funding for research, since it bypasses the normal peer review process.

Just curious if you'd had experience with seeing something like that bypass the peer review.

Probably those particular ones wouldn't have gone through the DoD at all, though.

With stem cells, I'd be willing to bet the politicians have at least watched a Nova special on them, so they're not totally ignorant. Most of the conversation centers around the ban on creating new stem cell lines, and moral vs. practical considerations of lifting or retaining the ban (a conversation that very much echoes the abortion debate).

Is there something about stem cells that they should know that would change the nature of the debate? (e.g., we don't really need more lines, there's no ethical problem with getting more lines, they're not important to current research, etc.)

Doc_M says...

You can probably guess by now that I am not an abortions supporter for most reasons, so naturally, I don't support production of new embryonic stem cell lines by that method. I think that the advances of adult-derived stem cells are FAR more valuable than any other research of its type. I have friends who study embryonic lines and those who study adult derived lines. I have to confess that that the adult derived lines seem to produce more results and more promising futures than the embryonic lines ironically.

I support a ban on embryonic stem cell line generation simply because there is a significant chance that it is wrong. We don't need them. We have shown that we don't need them. Let's work on something we know to be worth what is spent. I feel similarly about animals; use them only when absolutely needed, and though that is often, use them minimally.
And BTW, Net, 3.2 million is nothing. Talk to me in billions. My lab alone (of thousands) is budgeted a million a year, though lately we haven't been spending that much.

Doc_M says...

However, I will admit, that I don't know what to think of those that are aborted under current law. Since I think the law is faulty and that those abortions are wrong, should I ban use of the cells? Or since they are dead already should I support use of them? The same dilemmas followed the discovery of the Nazi research files following WWII. Should we learn about this or should we burn it with the rest of it? However, I DO support a program where natural child deaths will allow production of informative cell lines. It's like organ donation at that point.

BTW, with a democratic congress, a democratic senate, and a democratic president, an earmark IS a law, period.

Anytime a single party occupies all parts of a government, you can assume that failure with follow. That statement has never failed to date. So I watch the supreme court closely.

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