Funding
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007And by "it", I don't mean the good stuff. Harvard dean Theda Skocpol has announced a new initiative to improve undergraduate teaching at Harvard. I'll believe it when I see it--which means it will never happen. Here's why.
The short version is that every year (give or take), some prestigious university announces that they are going to improve teaching. And then it never happens. At this point, it's not cynical to assume the worst, it's cynical to announce a 'new teaching initiative.' In response to this announcement, Aspazia and Steve Gimbel both describe how teaching isn't rewarded…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use:
The spike in hepatitis C, an illness most often spread by drug needles tainted with the virus, emerges during a period of epidemic heroin use in Massachusetts.
That is almost certainly no coincidence, said John Auerbach , the state's public health commissioner. "I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," Auerbach said. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very…
purepedantry | April 23, 2007Excellent analysis from an article in Science on the recent funding woes (sadly behind a subscription wall). Money quote:
Meanwhile, research institutions everywhere were breaking ground on new facilities and expanding their faculty. In a 2002 survey, AAMC found that new construction at medical schools had exploded: From 1990 to 1997, schools invested $2.2 billion in new construction, compared to $3.9 billion from 1998 to 2002. But that paled in comparison to what was to come: an expected $7.4 billion in new construction from 2002 to 2007. AAMC has not yet confirmed whether these plans were…
purepedantry | April 17, 2007I have talked about funding a couple of times (here and here), and I get the impression from the comments about those posts that my views are at the minimum somewhat iconoclastic. Basically, while I would prefer the government to give more to research, at the moment I don't think that the primary issue is that the government isn't giving enough.
In this area, The Health Care Renewal Blog has a great post on the funding problems facing researchers in medical schools. Here's a clue -- they don't have to do with the government's but rather the medical school's priorities:
[Dr Goldman was asked…
mikethemadbiologist | April 16, 2007I found two good posts about taxes: one describes why we need them, and the other describes how much of your taxes go to pay for something you probably don't even think about.
First, the 'mystery' budget item: servicing the interest payments on the federal debt. From hilzoy (italics mine):
Total Receipts: 2,407
Total Outlays: 2654
Total Deficit: 248
Total Spent On Debt Service: 405.9
-- Yes, that's right: had we simply paid our bills on time, more or less, we would not only not be running a deficit, we would have $157.9 billion dollars to either refund to taxpayers or spend on some new…
mikethemadbiologist | April 14, 2007After reading Mike Dunford's letter to his representatives about the occupation of Iraq, I decided to write my own. Hopefully, it will have more influence than the other letters I've written...
I recently read the following written by the husband of an Army officer currently deployed in Iraq, Michael Dunford, who supports the emergency war funding legislation that included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and is requesting of his senators and representative that they take an additional step and require that any additional funding for the current conflict be paid for through a tax increase…
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2007No, not those hideous boots! The Ug99 black stem rust fungus, a strain of Puccinia graminis. It doesn't kill people directly, but it could wipe out much of the world's wheat crop. As always, the developing world will probably be hit the hardest. And it's a potential failure of surveillance.
First, what the Ug99 fungus is:
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties…
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2007...we might want to issue them rifles. From the NY Times:
"We're behind the power curve, and we can't piddle around," Maj. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, commander of the Oklahoma National Guard, said in an interview. He added that one-third of his soldiers lacked the M-4 rifles preferred by active-duty soldiers and that there were also shortfalls in night vision goggles and other equipment. If his unit is going to be sent to Iraq next year, he said, "We expect the Army to resource the Guard at the same level as active-duty units."
...Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas…
purepedantry | January 24, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason has an interesting theory: Federal funding drives out private funding for research resulting in a net loss (or at least no change) for researchers. His best example is what has happened during the ban on Federal money for embryonic stem cell research. Since the Federal funding has dried up, the researchers involved have been being supplemented by private funding.
Money quote:
When Bush first restricted federal funding to embryonic stem lines derived before his nationally televised speech on the subject in 2001, researchers feared that such limits would send a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2007This is from a speech given by Adam Werbach, former head of the Sierra Club. It's an interesting speech, and worth thinking about, but this quote about funders cracks me up (italics mine):
On a blustery day in New York City two years ago, I sat across the table at a noodle shop from Peter Teague, the director of the Environment Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. It was a restaurant that only New York could produce with perfect, spicy food on the table and a strange stickiness on the walls. I was just getting to know Peter, in the way that grant-seekers get to know grant-makers. These…
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 2007There's an interesting article about the norovirus outbreak in Boston (it also seems to be nationwide). At this point, over half a percent of all the residents of Boston have gone to the emergency room due to this virus--which means even more have been sick.
First, as always, wash your damn hands! Now, onto the public health. What's interesting is that Massachusetts has installed a real-time surveillance system to deal with bioterrorism and biopreparedness (i.e., avian flu--got that, Fumento?). But as the biosecurity 'community'* is beginning to learn, you can't separate biosecurity from…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2007Massachusetts is trying to tackle the problem of hospital-acquired ('nosocomial') infections by adding $1 million dollars in funding to track and monitor hospital compliance with infection control measures. As I've discussed before, nosocomial infections are a huge problem, and may account for roughly a quarter of all hospital costs. From the Boston Globe:
State officials plan to increase scrutiny of hospital-acquired infections in Massachusetts as a way to significantly lower their frequency, and they hope to require all hospitals to report their infection rates to the state by next year.…
mikethemadbiologist | January 9, 2007Mike responds to a post I wrote that questioned Speaker Pelosi's call to increase the military by 30,000 troops.
I agree that given the way the force and its responsibilities (more about those below) are currently structured, the troop rotation schedule is near the breaking point. However, I still disagree with Mike for two reasons. First, I simply don't trust the current administration not to send the troops to Iraq. Nothing the Bush administration has done in the past six years has convinced me that they will do anything other than that, Congress be damned. The only way Bush will not…
mikethemadbiologist | January 8, 2007Did you vote for that? I didn't. It's great that Pelosi said on national television that Bush won't be receiving a blank check. But it's another part of the interview that bothers me. From Crooks and Liars (italics mine):
PELOSI: I'm saying two things. We will always support the troops who are there. If the president wants to expand the mission, that's a conversation he has to have with the Congress of the United States .
But that's not a carte blanche, a blank check to him to do whatever he wishes there.
And I want to make a distinction here. Democrats do support increasing the size of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 2, 2007So Michael Fumento has issued a challenge to put 'odds' on avian influenza, thinking that somehow I've stated that an avian influenza pandemic is likely (he's also accused me, a scientist, of being "anti-scientist" and "alarmist"). Well, I'm not putting odds down because I've never said that a pandemic is likely. Then again, one should hardly be surprised when a professional conservative completely distorts what one says.
In fact, in the post, I wrote:
We can argue about public health priorities (avian flu isn't my top priority personally).
One would think that was clear, but I made the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 21, 2006Revere, over at Effect Measure, has a solid critique of Michael Fumento's opinion piece about avian flu. What the piece shows is just how ignorant of public health Fumento really is:
1) Many of the necessary steps involved in preparing for a flu pandemic, such as surge production capacity, can be used to produce 'ordinary' flu vaccines.
2) Once a surveillance system is developed, it can be 'repurposed' for other threats as needed. This has happened several times, in different countries.
3) As Revere notes, Fumento's real target is government spending. When will we see Fumento's column…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2006One of the constant refrains I always hear is that diarrheal diseases, such as shigellosis, cholera, and other bacterial dysenteries, could be easily solved if there were adequate potable water and sanitation. That's completely correct. It's also completely unrealistic, as a recent editorial by Lorenz von Seidlein in Tropical Medicine & International Health argues.
The problem is that this 'ultimate' solution of massive infrastructure investment often means that foreign governments and NGOs are discouraged from effective, short-term solutions. One such solution is the oral cholera…
mikethemadbiologist | November 17, 2006Actually, the post title is unfair: Romney is quite capable of screwing over thousands of people at once. In order to further his Republican presidential bonafides by cutting spending, any spending, MA Governor Mitt Romney playing bookkeeping games so he could declare a fiscal state of emergency and unilaterally cut budget items.
During the 2006 election, what with all the fuss about Republican Sen. George "Macacawitz" Allen, I never got around to describing what first tipped me off to his being a complete asshole. When Allen was governor of VA, he vetoed all spending for Meals on Wheels…
mikethemadbiologist | September 25, 2006Most microbiologists, you know, the experts , are not very thrilled with the emphasis being placed on bioterrorism. Inspired by Tara's post on the Bioshield initiative, I'm reposting this from the old site.
This week, leading microbiologists are sending an open letter to NIH stating that the politically-based emphasis on bioterrorism is starving other areas of research. For some time now, I've thought that we've been too concerned with bioterrorism, particularly when good ol' influenza regularly kills 32,000 37,000 people per year (that's one World Trade Center per month for those of you…
mikethemadbiologist | September 12, 2006If you haven't read the Science letter by George Mandel and Elliot Vesell, and which was nicely summarized by fellow ScienceBlogling Nick Anthis, you should. It chronicles the coming dissolution of American science.
If you think " the coming dissolution of American science" is too bombastic, I have some very nice 're-sized' levees to sell you. Without repeating the letter or Nick's post, here's some data (and analysis) to chew on:
1) the funding rate of new, unsolicited research grants ("R01" grants) has dropped from 20.1% in 2000 to 9.1% in 2005. Mandel and Vesell write, "Peer review…