What's the deal with earmarks that are going to fund studies? Are those bypassing the peer review panel process?

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.

If Obama doubles the NIH budget as he says he will, we'll all shout a proper hurray for sure, but we will not forget what that cost us.

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.)

Am curious what you think about research limitations imposed in the fields of stem cell research Doc_M?

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.

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.