The Scientist is running an excerpt (H/T: Science Progress) from the forthcoming memoir of Dr. Harold Varmus, former National Institutes of Health Director, Nobel laureate, and future co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.  The book will be called The Art and Politics of Science, and covers the bulk of his career.  The excerpt focuses on the funding challenges – particularly in setting research priorities – that any NIH Director faces.  While Varmus doesn’t use the language, the excerpt describes several instances where advocates for particular trees (diseases) weren’t concerned with the other parts of the forest that could help fight their cause.  Pieces of the excerpt after the jump.

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The House Democrat Steering Policy Committee held a forum today on the proposed economic recovery plan.  Participants included the chairs of the Science and Technology, Energy and Commerce, Transportation and Infrastructure, Budget, Appropriations, and Ways and Means committees.  The panelists were (H/T The Gavel and ScienceInsider):

Norman R. Augustine, Author of the Gathering Storm

Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research

Robert Reich, Former Secretary of Labor and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley

Dr. Mark M. Zandi, Chief economist and cofounder of Moody’s Economy.com

Maria Zuber, E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

While the panel certainly has the right kind of people to make the case, and the ScienceInsider reporting is optimistic, a closer read suggests that any science research funding provided through this bailout is not going to be particularly transformative.  Funding will likely be additions to existing programs, so the output of our research enterprise will increase.  There’s no indication that the package will pay much heed to the outcomes of our research enterprise, or how that enterprise can better support the new policy goals of the new administration and economic needs.  Couple this with the lackluster record of Democratic leadership support of research funding (they didn’t exactly fight for fully funding COMPETES), and I’m not that excited.

There’s another potential problem, something that will need to be argued early, often, and loud.  This particular round of funding has a time limit.  Within a few years (probably no more than 3) it will be gone, and funding will return to pre-bailout levels, or possibly to the levels set out by the COMPETES Act, should Congress bother to fund it.  I’m guessing we will see a lot of the same problems that came in the wake of the NIH doubling should researchers and research administrators fail to learn their history (sadly, a very strong possibility).  This is a budget surge, to plan as though it were permanent is irresponsible to the point of negligence.  Ask a random postdoc in the biological sciences how they’re doing these days.  They are the victims of our last round of ‘good fortune.;

A concern I have with some of the jockeying over the economic stimulus package is the potential to frame funding as a series of either/or propositions.  The headline of this ScienceInsider piece – “Economic Stimulus: U.S. House Could Call for Test Tubes As Well As Pavement” – hints at what I mean.  While this particular example is not framed strictly as an either/or proposition, it does consider research as something separate, independent, and perhaps better than other worthy investments. The focus is a bit narrow.  Take a look at this other ScienceInsider piece describing the recent round of funding for the Technology Innovation Program.  This funding supports infrastructure research.  While the research may not be ‘fundamental’ in the traditional sense, the projects are often trying to demonstrate proof of concept.

Couldn’t the needs of the research community leverage the investment needs of the country?  Science advocacy communities appear too focused on ‘basic’ research funding to be making the argument, but they are the people that need to make the case.  Since doubling research funding in the sciences is listed as part of the Obama-Biden economic plan, I think the concern that research funding will be overlooked is a bit overstated.  But I think getting additional resources will stand a better chance of success if they can be found in service of other national needs.  This is perhaps the kind of comprehensive thinking that David Goldston encouraged in his Wired piece.

While scientists and their advocates in the U.S. are hoping the new administration will fully fund the COMPETES Act and double the research budgets of the DOE Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, South Korea aims to do more.  According to a post on the Science magazine science policy blog, South Korea aims to become one of the top seven R&D countries in the world.  They currently consider themselve number 12, spending 3.23% of GDP on R&D in 2006 (the U.S. spends a smaller percentage of its GDP), and 25.6% of their research budget on basic and fundamental research.  They plan to boost the GDP percentage to 5% and the share of research budget on basic and fundamental research to 50%.

I’m not as convinced as the blog poster that the South Korean plan will make the country more of a science powerhouse and not just a tech giant, since the boosts in even basic and fundamental research planned will probably be focused heavily on the seven tech areas targeted by the country.  I also have my doubts that government tax incentives will really persuade the country’s businesses to contribute three-quarters of all R&D spending (however, that might be my American bias).  Even if they do, current trends in industrial R&D suggest that a very small r and an enormous D in that figure.  It isn’t clear if that will allow for the enormous boosts in research grants that are part of the plan.  All said, it’s still nice to see a government trying an aggressive plan rather than passing a bill with little funding to support it.

Describing what may well become a necessary strategy of making lemonade out of lemons, Knowledge@Wharton offers an article about disruptive innovation.  It may be seen as a fancy word for opportunism, but disruptive innovation is a concept in the business literature (which rarely mixes with the scientific literature, perhaps by mutual agreement) where outside circumstances – disruptions – can provide cover for businesses to instigate radical changes in what they do and how they do it.  The idea last gained traction through Clayton Christensen’s work, including The Innovator’s Dilemma As is typical in separated spheres of academic work, the debt to the economist Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction is at best implicit.

While the article is focused on businesses, there’s nothing at first glance that would prevent government or universities from taking the same kinds of chances for innovation.  The proposed infrastructure investments being discussed are one possible way governments can effect transformative innovation.  But what about universities?  In what ways could they change the way they operate – in any sense of the word – to become more innovative in the services they provide (research, service, teaching and outreach).  I am concerned that, conservative institutions that they are, that universities may be too risk-averse to take chances and innovate.

How might universities perform transformative innovations?

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Innovation/technology policy in the United States is frequently focused, if not obsessed, with firsts, bests, and mosts.  It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about patents, inventions, innovations or people, there’s always the policy equivalent of those foam “We’re #1″ fingers lurking about.  Paul Romer, one of the economists who led the charge to incorporate technology and growth into economics, has criticized this system from a human resources perspective.  He considers it an Olympic-class system that ignores that vast majority of people in it.  The same point could be made about other parts of our innovation system.  While it is important to encourage the best, there’s a risk of thinking that the bleeding edge is the only place where innovation happens.

A researcher advancing an extreme version of this point is Amar Bhidé of the Columbia Business School.  In a recent New York Times article promoting his new book, Bhidé argues that ‘mid-level innovation’ deserves a lot more attention than it receives.  While I don’t subscribe to his criticisms of current policies towards innovation as doing more harm than good, I do agree with him that innovation can be had anywhere science and technology is developed or used.  Where Bhidé thinks it’s acceptable that research can be handled overseas if it is commercialized here, I have a hard time seeing such a complete severing of research from commercialization as productive or practical.  Not all knowledge is global, much of it is actually local.

I don’t want his perception of innovation as some zero-sum game between new ideas and ground level adaptations to diminish the reception of his most important point – that innovation happens all around us.  Policies may focus on the high-tech and bleeding edge aspects of it because they are easiser to measure and sexier, but they don’t have to.  Having Olympic-caliber talent is great, but ignoring the many people and parts of the system that help produce that talent is negligent, if not stupid.

In a recent FYI issued by the American Institute of Physics, there is some hope that any additional stimulus bill will include some funding for science agencies.  The source of this optimism is a bill introduced in the Senate last week by Majority Leader Reid (D-Nevada) and outgoing Appropriations Committee Chair Byrd (D-West Virginia).  The bill, S. 3689 (which you can read through the THOMAS website), as currently written includes additional funding for NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Geological Survey.  I am cautiously optimistic.  However, legislation that is signed into law may have little in common with the bill that is introduced, so there needs to be a fight for these resources to even hope they survive the legislative process.  If the science funding provisions do not survive this bill, the process would have to start over come January 3rd, with a different Appropriations Committee Chair, likely Senator Inouye of Hawaii.

Back in July, Science Magazine published a Policy Forum advocating the consolidation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the US Geological Survey (USGS), into a single Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA). The primary rationale for the argument, formulated by several authors with considerable experience in the management of federally funded science, is that such an agency would be better equipped to deliver the “well-conceived, science-based, simultaneous responses on multiple scales, from global and national, to regional and local,” required for the “unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead.” I recommend reading the entire piece.

Last week, Science printed a response to that article, which, to our disappointment, was not the one submitted by Roger Pielke, Dan Sarewitz, Lisa Dilling, and me. So, after consulting with the original authors, we have decided to use Prometheus as a venue for continuing this discussion. I will include our unpublished letter below, and hope that Jim Baker will post their response in the comments, and we can go from there.

The short version of our response is that: 1.) there is no reason to think that the proposed consolidation would be good for science, and 2.) whether or not consolidation turns out to be good for science is irrelevant to the question of how best to orient scientific research so that it helps to address larger societal problems.

Here is our letter:

In a July 4 Policy Forum (1), a formidable group of experts on environmental research policy proposes the creation of an Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA) by combining NOAA and USGS.

We agree that the U.S. faces “unprecedented environmental and economic challenges” at the same time as the environmental sciences have experienced declining national investments and increasing politicization.  But reducing the number of key environmental science agencies from six to five will neither alleviate the challenges of inter-agency coordination, nor create a comprehensive research capacity. Moreover, the politics of ripping NOAA and the USGS out of their home departments (Commerce and Interior) would certainly lead to bruising political battles with unpredictable outcomes.  In a time of budget constraint, consolidation could make the problem worse for science by creating more conspicuous targets for political manipulation and budget cutting (2, 3).

Even more troubling is the “science push” approach that the authors advocate. ESSA’s proposed design puts data acquisition and basic science at the core of efforts to develop decision-relevant information that is then delivered to the outside world.  Decades of experience and scholarship, including a recent NRC assessment of the Nation’s climate science enterprise (4), shows that this approach is good at advancing basic knowledge but largely ineffective at providing useful knowledge for decision makers.

The most successful environmental science programs—including those in the USGS and NOAA—have long ago moved away from a simple linear approach (“do the science, then communicate it”) to embrace an integrated model where research and engagement are tightly linked from the outset, so that research agendas and products are responsive to the needs and capabilities of information users, and users in turn know what they can expect from scientists (5-10).  What makes them successful is not the breadth of their research portfolios, but their approach to research and problem solving. A truly innovative approach to improving society’s capacity to respond to environmental challenges would focus investments on leveraging the experience and resources of agency programs with ongoing decision support and service capacity, such as hazards and water monitoring programs at USGS, and the Coastal Services Center and National Integrated Drought Information Systems at NOAA.  Absent such innovation, bureaucratic reshuffling is unlikely to improve the value of science in addressing society’s most urgent challenges.

1.    M. Schaefer et al., Science 321, 44 (July 4, 2008, 2008).
2.    D. Sarewitz, Issues in Science & Technology 23, 31 (Summer, 2007).
3.    D. Goldston, Nature 451,  (2008).
4.    NRC, “Evaluating Progress of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program:  Methods and Preliminary Results”  (National Academies Press, 2007).
5.    D. W. Cash, J. C. Borck, A. G. Patt, Science Technology Human Values 31, 465 (July 1, 2006, 2006).
6.    H. Meinke et al., Climate Research 33, 101 (2006).
7.    D. Sarewitz, R. A. Pielke, Environmental Science & Policy 10, 5 (2007).
8.    K. Jacobs, G. Garfin, M. Lenart, Environment 47, 6 (2005).
9.    S. Agrawala, K. Broad, D. H. Guston, Science Technology Human Values 26, 454 (October 1, 2001, 2001).
10.    D. Cash et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100, 8086 (2003).

Yes, I have the election on the brain, in part because I spent most of Monday night and all of Tuesday as a poll worker in Maryland.  While ScienceBlogs appears to think that the presidential results were a vote for science (whatever that means), there were many other races and referendums voted on yesterday.  I’ve not yet drilled down through all of the state races, but I have noticed a stem cell research resolution was narrowly approved in Michigan yesterday.  Per this Associated Press article, the measure allows for stem cell research to be conducted on embryos created for fertility treatments but donated for research purposes.  The current stem cell research policy allows such research only on those stem cell lines created in other states.

Presumably part of the intended purpose of this initiative is to circumvent both current state policy and federal policy, which limits federal support to those lines already existing at the time the policy was initiated in 2001.  At least seven other states have established state stem cell research institutes, and perhaps Michigan will follow suit.

I will keep looking for other science and technology related measures approved (or rejected) in this recent election, but readers should feel free to post any examples from this election in the comments.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday about the case of Dr. Ned Feder, an NIH employee who wrote to several publications suggesting that NIH grantees disclose payments they receive from medical companies.  The payments are rarely made public, either in articles published from the associated research or in grant applications.  Given that the results of this research will influence what products are prescribed or used, the conflict of interest – at least the potential for it – should be clear.

However, the NIH does not require disclosure of these payments, or of consulting arrangements between researchers and companies.  The latter usually has to be disclosed to the researchers’ home institutions, but that information remains confidential. Dr. Feder argued for strong public disclosure of any kind of financial relationships between researchers and medical companies as a condition of receiving grant money.  The NIH recently had to deal with incidents where researchers failed to disclose payments from pharmaceutical companies.  It has risen to the point where Senator Grassley has been investigating the matter.  Their response to Dr. Feder was to formally reprimand him, an action that was rescinded after protest.  While I can understand the need for an agency to present a consistent stand on matters of policy, their unwillingness to embrace this kind of open accesss is disappointing.  Dr. Feder is no longer with NIH, and works now for the Project on Government Oversight.

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