More on US Research Funding

I wrote earlier on the landscape of the US research funding for FY2007 and the President's proposed FY2008. In the latter, there is a significant cutbacks for the National Institute of Health, and funding for biophysics/medicine in general (note that in total amount, the NIH budget still dwarfs over the physical science budget). I mentioned that I have mixed feelings about this, especially as someone who has seen how badly treated the physical sciences were while the NIH was rolling in the money.

The current Presidential Science Adviser John Marburger defended the President's trimming of the NIH budget for the upcoming year in an interview with Science (16 February 2007) this week. Essentially, he echoed what I had said earlier:

"I think the overall federal scientific enterprise is well-funded," Marburger says. "But there's been a ramp-up of expensive programs in some areas, while important programs in other areas are underfunded." He notes that the American Competitiveness Initiative, first proposed last year, attempts to correct that imbalance in the physical sciences by boosting the budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, and the core labs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And he says that other agencies can thrive with their current budgets by setting priorities and sticking to them.

There is no way the federal government can ever satisfy the demands created by the doubling of the NIH budget [between 1998 and 2003]. It's led to what I call an unregulated research market, with booms and busts that are beyond the ability of the government to control.

[At the same time,] NIH funding got way out of step with funding for the physical sciences. Biomedical research is funded much closer to the level of its needs than are the physical sciences. And there are imbalances within the biomedical research enterprise in which it's not clear that the pattern of expenditures matches the importance of the research. A lot of its $28 billion budget is aimed at treatments and therapies for specific diseases rather than basic cell biology and molecular biology, which raises the question of whether we're spending enough on basic research.

I think many of us look at the military budget and simply DREAM about what we can do with just a small fraction of it, and we're talking about barely 1% to 2% here. The same can be said about the NIH budget. This, by no means, is not meant to diminish the importance of the work being done, especially when it is very transparent what the application is for. However, for too long of a time, basic physical research areas such as high energy physics and nuclear physics have been treated as the ugly stepchild that do not deserve even a decent level of funding. It boggles the mind that, in my lifetime, there's a very strong possibility that all high energy physics collider experiment in the US will be gone by the end of 2009! It is utter destruction of a field of study in the US. All the while, Europe, Japan, and especially China, are ramping up their activities in this field and anticipating some of the most exciting times in the history of this area.

I have said before that the effects of our neglect on basic science won't be felt right away. In fact, by the time we can see the symptoms of neglect, it might almost be too late, and it will take a lot of effort to dig ourselves back out. It would be sad to consider that we are now starting to see the beginning of those symptoms. One can only hope that we have diverted a major disaster with the recovery of the FY2007 budget within the continuing resolution. However, we are still not out of the woods yet, especially when there is still a battle brewing for the FY2008 budget.

Will people suddenly wake up and see what damage they have done to the physical sciences?

Zz.