Science Under Attack?

Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under Politics, Science |

I was listening to the podcast of NPR’s Science Friday as I was packing chocolate. Last Friday’s show included a discussion about that Louisiana Creationism issue I mentioned last week. The Science Friday Show went well beyond that though.

One interesting bit was about the US losing its lead in Science.

Now fear mongering about this has been going on for a few years now. (I’ll not take the time to provide links - I’m sure you’ve read posts in the past) The big issue is often that other nations are improving in science and science research and the US will lose it’s dominance. That, to me, always struck me as a weird complaint since we ought be trying to get more science in other nations. Further the demand we be dominating always struck me as precisely the kind of cultural imperialism that one would think scientists wouldn’t be engaged in.

The other issue (and the one raised in this podcast) was that there are many attacks on science as a way of knowing. That is many people are trying to convince people to not trust science. If this continues we’ll lose our dominance in science.

Now let me suggest that there is a more than ample supply of scientists out there. So many that the supply vs. demand issue entails scientists don’t get paid much simply because there is a glut of scientists. I think the post-doc situation where scientists spend often years and ridiculously low salaries is an example of this. You have people who want to be professional scientists but because there are so few jobs they hang out in these low paying difficult jobs just to be in the field.

Now funding issues, as I mentioned in the Cancer thread, are big. But while funding has been relatively flat in the post 9/11 years, that’s still rather high. It’s not like we could reasonably expect a doubling. But even if funding were doubled, that still wouldn’t remove the glut of scientists.

So in terms of dominance of science or at least a place in science research I don’t think science teaching in High School is the problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I think science teaching is hugely important but not because of science dominance. Rather I think a basic knowledge and understanding of science is very important for citizenship in the modern world. I think people having a large distrust of science is bad. (And I’m not arguing for a faith in scientists or scientific authoritarianism.) That’s ought be where our focus is.

Comments

7 Responses to “Science Under Attack?”

As I understand it, the problem with the doubling of the budget was the way it had to be spent. Rather than nurturing sustainable growth and helping scientists to keep pace with inflation, the money had to be spent quickly, and then went flat.

On the plus side, NIH is revising the granting system in ways that are supposed to be helpful to scientists early in their career.

That’s a big problem for sure. There’s also the problem of equipment vs. salary. For instance a study that demands a billion dollar supercollider takes more resources than an experiment that keeps 20 scientists doing theory and computer simulations for 5 years.

That’s one reason why just talking funding can be problematic. The particle physics studies but also many large scale health studies are hugely expensive. Further they draw away funds from other studies. (Doubly so for many NASA projects)

So consider someone who cuts NASA dramatically and stops funding supercolliders or tokomak reactors but keeps the funding and puts it into basic research in theoretical physics and mathematics. Have they been devastating to science or beneficial?

There’s another factor in why post-docs put up with low salaries, and it’s sort of implied here but it’s worth spelling out: we really like what we do, so we are willing to put up with low salaries. I could easily skip the post-doc right now and double (or more) my salary overnight by going into the private sector, but that’s not the kind of science that keeps me going.

Good point. Although folks who do it because they like it thereby depress the salaries for everyone else. Although one could argue that classically science was done by the sufficiently well off who could do science because they like it.

5 John Mansfield on June 18th, 2008 7:43 am

As long as we have people who can understand the science that comes out of Europe and Asia, then it is only to the United States’ good that those parts of the would produce more of it.

On the salary issue, scientists flatter themselves that if they wanted to, they could be successful in professions that would pay them a lot more money. Some could, but many others are probably maximizing their earnings path with the job they have. Census figures show that the median income in 1999 for full-time workers in California was $37,267. That year I was a post-doc at UCLA and earning a little more than that. It was plenty to get by with three children at the time, though not enough to really save for the future, and better things within industrial fluid dynamics came later. Numbers of openings seems like an important issue, but I think most grousing over salaries is a fantasy of people who think they could be great tycoons if they only wanted to.

Mansfield, I think the salary issue is going to vary quite a bit between different sciences. The simplest measure is to just look a the job market. I my case, what does a postdoc in pharmacology make, and what does a new PhD who works for Merck make? The difference is huge.

I’d add that I think most people in the hard sciences or hard engineering programs could get out in the world and find that with a little effort they could be very successful.

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