We Should Have Funded Coronavirus Research Instead of a Climate Change Musical.
The National Science Foundation needs to re-order its grant-making priorities.
By Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D. | May 14, 2021
I’ve been a science nerd all my adult life. As an undergraduate, I did research in a couple of university labs, and in grad school was the co-discoverer of a bacterial enzyme essential to DNA replication and of a key enzyme in the influenza virus. I have written more than a thousand articles concerned with science and technology and their regulation. I’m convinced that America’s prosperity is based on post-WWII preeminence in science and technology, much of it financed by federal funding.
You’d think, therefore, that I’d be thrilled to learn that the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives wants to more than double the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF) over the next five years, from $8.5 billion to $18.3 billion, and that the Senate is working on a companion bill. That is good news—or it would be, if we could be sure that increasing NSF’s budget wouldn’t maintain, or even expand, some of the dubious, wasteful pursuits funded by that government behemoth. However, at least as currently conceived by the Senate, the legislation will explicitly maintain NSF’s “unity of structure” and protect NSF’s existing programs.
And there’s the rub.
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https://humanevents.com/2021/05/14/we-should-have-funded-coronavirus-research-instead-of-a-climate-change-musical/
