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.

-Politicians trying to control the results of what they do, to the point where the scientific integrity is at risk
-Govt's muzzling you because they don't want pesky things like facts to get in the way of their ideology

These issues honestly aren't that big of a problem for all but a handful of people; certainly not for anyone in the biomedical sciences.

-Idiot reporters who completely, constantly, and continually misrepresent your research (should it make the presses)

That's certainly true, but I would add that university PR departments are just as awful, and scientists willingly submit to that.

Doing scientific research is hard enough as it is, without having to deal with the current environment of anti-intellectualism. I'm honestly surprised that scientists arn't yet being marched into concentration camps at gunpoint.

What makes you think the current environment is anything new? Do you think that Americans (or any other nationality) were somehow less ignorant and anti-intellectual 30 years ago, or 100? The only thing that's definitely worse is that electronic media have made it so much easier for us to read all the awful things that Joe Public says about us. At the same time, there are more people working in science than ever before, it's much more ethnically diverse (our imported Chinese laborers are treated very well compared to the men who built railroads in the late 1800s), and the opportunities for women keep getting better. We also have something resembling a real community of scientists that can advocate for common interests, instead of being merely a handful of aristocrats who could afford to tinker in labs.

I don't want to sound too idealistic, because I agree with the basic premise of the article, but I'm obsessed with the recurring theme of social decay and lamentations for some fantasy golden age that never really existed. The real problem isn't that society has turned against us, it's that policy makers, university bureaucrats, and senior scientists have deliberately generated an over-supply of PhD recipients, and we've simultaneously become utterly dependent on a pool of government funding that is not infinitely growable. I am not happy about any of this, since it is painfully obvious that I picked the wrong career 15 years ago, but I'm not going to blame Middle America for my shitty job prospects. (And I say this as someone who is not usually shy about expressing my elitist disdain for the ignorance of Middle America.)

America is fast becoming a Design and Services Economy, best to leave the real innovation to China and others.

Except China hasn't done any particularly innovative research yet, at least in the biomedical sciences. Its biggest success story is BGI (Beijing Genomics Institute, although they rarely use the full name), which is sort of like the Foxconn of genomics. I don't mean that in a bad way, because they've been very productive (and their employees seem to be better-paid and less suicidal), but they're basically just a sequence factory. Ironically, all of the tech they're using was developed in the US and UK. Their approach to developing their own sequencing technology? Buy a US company (Complete Genomics).

Although you're partly right about "move to China" being the solution - they've been trying to repatriate leading expat scientists for years (with some success), but now they've started luring non-Chinese too. (Most of whom don't actually move to China, but maintain joint appointments, because you'd have to be absolutely insane to leave California for China if you weren't native Chinese.) Still, anyone in that position is usually going to be in the top tier of researchers already (one is a Nobel laureate), not the hypothetical junior faculty member worrying about tenure.

we're likely the hungriest among rich nations.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with Monsanto or GMOs. It's basic economics and politics, and banning GMOs would have absolutely no effect.

I really hate when there's some smug asshole in the movie who spends the first half of the film whining about playing God and 'toying with things you don't understand' and whatnot, and then gets vindicated when the monster inevitably attacks

I forget where I read this, but one writer pointed out that "Jurassic Park" was especially obnoxious in this regard. In the book, Ian Malcolm (the Jeff Goldblum character) keeps trying to explain that they've built a system that is far too complex and has far too many failure points to stay under their control - and of course he's right. In the movie, Malcolm is reduced to moralizing about the arrogance of scientists playing God.

(Ironically, if Michael Chricton had written the book 15 years later, it probably would have been closer to the movie.)

The reason: because bureaucrats do not understand science, they and their managers are being rewarded for successful science which they fund.

This isn't actually the way science funding works in the US. NIH has plenty of career bureaucrats, yes, but many of them came up the traditional scientific ladder, not the get-a-union-backed-government-job ladder. But in any case, the specific funding decisions that most academic scientists depend on are mostly up to peer review panels: professors (etc.) receiving NIH funding get to serve on committees that read through piles of grants and score them.

Now, the issue with this is that a) it is susceptible to groupthink and other forms of academic politics, b) the criteria for grant acceptance (and, to some degree, inherent conservatism of peer reviewers) still tend to rule out wildly risky projects, and c) nobody at the NIH wants to be hauled before a Congressional panel to explain why they gave $2 million to a project they knew was risky. But it isn't simply an issue of career bureaucrats who don't understand science. The people who make the funding decisions actually understand science very well, they're just working under too many limitations (their own, and those imposed upon them).

The Apollo program was successful because it had a clear goal. . . and a hard deadline

And strategic significance (and potential dual-use technology) at a time when we were competing with another nuclear-armed superpower for global domination.

Does it ever bother you that you're contributing to a show that derives most of its jokes from the stereotype of scientists (especially male scientists) as pathologically awkward, abrasive, and antisocial? Do you ever worry that this risks marginalizing the profession and perpetuating the already-poor representation of women in science? How do you think a teenage girl will react to a sitcom where the one "normal" woman is a waitress, and the female scientists are mousy, nerdy, nearsighted, almost as awkward as their male companions, and, worst of all, dating complete dorks?

(From the perspective of the nerdy teenage guy, of course, the message is "you can be an abrasive, antisocial geek and still score a relatively attractive nerdy girl, or if you're slightly less antisocial, a total babe." So at least it's not scaring away future male scientists.)