The country has not been communist for a long time and there are strong arguments supporting idea that they truly were never communist in the first place

I don't know, I think the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are quintessential examples of communism in action, and had nearly nothing in common with capitalist systems.

Isn't it phantastic when science and engineering can profit from stupidity and narrow-minded nationalism? If only that were always the case!

Sadly, it's the case very often - just about anything that can be classified as a "dual-use" technology gets a great deal of funding when perceived to be strategically important. In addition to the obvious example of the space race, the development of radar and digital computers was heavily driven by WWII, and we've also made some major advances in medical care thanks to a number of wars that almost no one is proud of.

The US and countries friendly to the US control most of the shipping lanes and ports near China. South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Taiwan are all right in China's way. They desperately need North Korea and as much control of other shipping lanes as they can muster.

Why do the the Chinese need to control the shipping lanes? It's not like they have any problem exporting their products.

They're not being assholes about Tibet and Taiwan; they're trying to defend themselves and stay alive.

How is control of Taiwan vital to Chinese defense? And for that matter, if seizing Taiwan is seen as a matter of self-defence, shouldn't the citizens of South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines be very nervous right now?

To paraphrase "Scientists are too lazy to ensure integrity in their community unless the error is really bad or they have a personal issue".

It's not about laziness, it's about setting priorities in the context of our current incentive system. We are not being paid to police the literature, nor do we get any credit for this from journals or funding agencies like we do for reviewing articles or grant proposals; we are being paid to do original research, which already consumes more of our lives than would be considered reasonable in non-academic jobs. Frankly, on an intellectual level, proving that some shitty paper in Journal of Western Blots was faked is not terribly difficult, compared to actually doing real experiments. Arguing with other scientists and journal editors, on the other hand, is just about as involved, and the professional (or intellectual) rewards are minimal. Most of the people who really care are more interested in changing their field to avoid such problems in the future, because that's actually a genuinely interesting problem and potentially career-advancing.

Most journals will accept Letters or "Matters Arising", but very few are published. The journal's editors have an even higher bar for publishing a letter that disproves a published work than the bar they place on the published work itself. It's more difficult to refute bullshit than to publish bullshit.

Agreed, and I would add that the entire process is very time-consuming, which discourages scientists from investing time unless it's an especially egregious example or they feel personally wronged. I know of many examples in my field where the central evidence for a paper obviously does not support the published conclusions, but I don't bother pursuing them because a) that's not what I'm paid for, and b) I don't have any personal interest in the subjects (only the methods). And these aren't even subjective interpretations on my part, the papers would likely be retracted if I followed up, but it's still too cumbersome a process for me to get involved.

If cancer was insta-kill instead of the slow-death-money-milking disease that it is

This ignores a basic fact about cancer treatment: standard chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery aren't very profitable for pharmaceutical companies, and for many cancers, that's all we have. They may be profitable for other sectors of the medical system, but these are also a huge drain on the economies of rich-world countries, who have a big incentive to keep costs down. If you get one of the cancers for which there isn't a $100,000/year drug, your only option is a quick course of debilitating treatment aimed at eliminating metastases, which will either work and leave you cancer free (if you're "lucky" and have one of the less aggressive types of cancer, and/or catch it early), or not work, and you'll die in a relatively short time. Or, if you're especially unlucky, the therapy itself will kill you. No pharma company is getting rich off these patients.

If you do get to take the $100,000/year drug, there's a good chance you'll only add a few years to your lifespan anyway. Which is part of the reason why these drugs are so expensive, of course. On the other hand, a drug that could either a) eliminate cancer outright, or b) suppress cancer permanently for as long as it's taken, would be worth an incredible amount of money, either up-front or over the course of decades. And insurance companies and governments would be much happier shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a treatment that might actually "cure" the patient in some meaningful sense (and enable him or her to keep paying taxes and/or insurance premiums!), rather than a treatment that probably isn't going to work over the long term.

If a company finds a cure for all cancers (emphasis on the plural form, cancer is not just one disease) they could demand any price at all and people would pay it.

It's even bigger than that. The best statement I've ever seen on the subject came from a Slashdot poster, and since I can't remember the specific post (or user, sorry!), I'll just paraphrase:

"Curing cancer" implies an incredibly high level of technical competence, so advanced that anything you touch would turn to gold. You could start to treat aging as a chronic disease.

This should ring true to anyone who understands the biological basis for "cancer". To start with: it's not one disease, it's many, they just all happen to take the form of uncontrolled cell proliferation, which can have many different triggers. Attacking specific molecular mechanisms is difficult because there are so many to choose from (and the targets tend to further mutate over time within each patient anyway, decreasing the efficacy of drugs). Also difficult: killing cancer cells without killing the rest of the patient. To actually treat all cancers at once - without lethal side effects - would require extraordinarily advanced knowledge of human biology and most likely a degree of personalization beyond anything we've experienced. It's the stuff of science fiction.

The supposed "cures" that are being suppressed are either poorly tested experimental leads (pharma companies have more than enough of these already), or dodgy experimental therapies that haven't undergone real testing either, some of which may be outright scams.

please drive past the Exxon station, and fill up at a more responsible company.

As long as it's not Shell (supported the Nigerian military junta), or Unocal (supported the Burmese military junta). I don't really expect moral purity from oil companies, but it can occasionally be difficult to find one that doesn't have blood on its hands.

Thank the Republicans who hate science and don't want to fund pure research but would rather corporations subsidies

I can't believe I'm defending the Party of Torture, but I think this is unnecessarily harsh towards the GOP. When they took over Congress in 1994 and Gingrich rose to the speakership, my father (who, like me, worked in academic research) was terrified that they'd slash his program and he'd be out of a job. Ironically, he told me years later that what ended up happening was exactly the opposite: Gingrich loved basic research and that's when the funding really boomed (it didn't hurt that the economy was doing reasonably well). Arlen Spector was also a big proponent of NIH funding.

Now, that doesn't mean that Republican candidates like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry won't use this issue for their demagoguery, but it's less of a systematic problem than you might think. It especially doesn't hurt that private corporations like public funding for basic research too, because it takes some of the burden off them, and because most of their employees get their training working in labs funded by public grants. Every time the NIH or DOE needs to reassure Congress that they're still relevant, they get Big Pharma heavyweights to testify. (Which I realize means there's a corporate welfare aspect to this, but Big Pharma doesn't really have any interest in building a $1 billion X-ray generator when they can rent time on the DOE's equipment, which works out well for everyone.)

The current environment is a bit of a weird situation, but let's not forget that the sequester was a bipartisan deal.

If McCarthy was right, it was mostly by accident. The caricature in "The Manchurian Candidate" isn't too far from the truth, except probably not booze-soaked enough.

McCarthy was basically several years late to the game, and was taking advantage of a crises that had already dissipated for his own political ends. There was widespread Communist infiltration of the US government in the 1930s and 1940s - but they were largely purged during the Truman administration once the government realized how bad the problem was.

No pharmaceutical company develops drugs that is not based on other research.

Thanks, Einstein, I never would have guessed this. So do you favor putting financial restrictions on the use of all research that comes out of public funding, no matter how trivial the connection?

More importantly there have been no break through drugs developed by the pharmaceutical industry that justifies their 15 year exclusive patents. All they have done is make allergy medications and penis drugs.

If you think these drugs are so irrelevant, then why get angry about the profits they're making or the lengthy patents? Besides, the pharmaceutical has made plenty of genuinely life-saving drugs; you just don't see ads for these in magazines.

People are much more ignorant now then they were in the 60's and 70's. They have been lied to by media, they think that opinions based on nothing are just as valid as opinion based on facts, they believe a media personality before actual experts, the refuse to undertand the to have good schools again, they need to pay taxes, and so on.

And what makes you think any of these complaints didn't apply in the 60s or 70s? Do you really believe that the media lied less back when we had no internet and the Washington press was even more of an incestuous gentleman's club than it is now?

No, there are not too many PhD recipients. The scientific field is wide enough to handle all we have and many more.

You're right that there is more than enough science that needs to be done, but where is the money going to come from? NIH funding is much higher than it was 20 years ago, but universities been training PhDs on the assumption that it would continue to rise indefinitely. This is either incredibly irresponsible or incredibly cynical. Yes, I realize that if we were over-training investment bankers, the government would immediately cough up billions to keep them employed. That doesn't make it any less illogical.

20 years ago, computer programming was all the rage for everyone -- and that's not exactly brainless work.

We must read different news sources then, because from what I can see it's becoming all the rage now, and people are starting to use phrases like "coding literacy" and discussing whether programming should be part of primary education.

Between the end of WW2 and about a decade after the moon landing, Americans were all about science -- promises of flying cars and robot housekeepers and who knows what else.

That's technology, or more specifically engineering, not necessarily the kind of science this article is talking about. It was heavily driven by the Cold War, when everyone was terrified that the Soviets would out-compete us economically (or reduce us to ashes with space nukes, or something). And I think our perspective may be warped by time and selective reading of sources - do you have any indication that the American public, in general, was more pro-science than today?

The space race of the 21st Century is over. China won, the US lost.

Won how? The US per-capita GDP is still about eight times higher than China's, the US share of Nobel laureates is vastly higher, and NASA is driving a dune buggy on Mars, not the Chinese.

I heard this piece on NPR yesterday, and the thing that kept running through my mind is how the pharmaceutical industry is extorting huge profits based on fundamental research-- with much of that happening under NIH grants. Why not set a tax rate on drug patent royalties and use that to fund the NIH?

Because that's not really how basic research is supposed to work, and because the gap between NIH-funded research (which is indeed hugely important, but not the way you seem to think it is) and actual drugs is enormous. Knowing that specific mutations in "Protein X" are associated with certain forms of cancer does not magically tell you everything you need to design an anti-cancer drug. I forget the exact statistics, but only about 25% of new drugs are directly derived from public-funded research - and by all means let's tax these - but the remainder are developed wholly by pharma companies.

If anything, I would argue the opposite: the fact that the NIH allows the results of its grants to be patented is corrupting the field and holding back innovation. Either the results are free to all, without restriction, or they're locked up in patents and scaring off competition.