“request the reversal of a policy now being applied by the UK Research Councils. This policy directs funds to projects whose outcomes are specified in advance.”

This reads – at least to this American – that the U.K. is essentially supporting busy work – research that is pointless to conduct since the results are known in advance.  Looking further at the petition, there is this text:

“Where a specific outcome can be predicted with confidence, then there is no research.”

…

“The UK taxpayer should not support investigations with foregone conclusions, however beguiling. UK research must not be guided by wishful thinking, nor relegated to producing footnotes for ground-breaking discoveries made elsewhere.”

There is a bit of a shift in perspective as the text proceeds.

Looking at the first sentence, it seems false to suggest that there is no research in confirming the predictive power of a model or other things that enable the prediction.  Going to the next passage, I’m not sure how foregone conclusions can be beguiling.  The second sentence suggests the real focus of this petition – that somehow the U.K. Research Councils are shifting their support away from groundbreaking discoveries.

In other words, the petitioner has done a lousy job of advancing the kind of argument Vannevar Bush did after World War II to help instill the combination of federal research support and limited management of scientific research that U.S. researchers enjoy.  Nowhere in this position is anything that even hints at Bush’s arguments about seed corn and the necessity of preserving and replenishing those stocks in order to support and benefit other research and development in support of society.

This argument can be reduced to two points: Only basic research matters in producing value and prosperity (something Bush did not even hint at in Science, the Endless Frontier), and groundbreaking discoveries can only be found in basic research.  It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the development of scientific and technological knowledge.  As the petitioner holds a faculty position and manages research in biology and chemistry, he’s more likely being disingenuous than stupid.

There is another petition on the site that better expresses what I think is the underlying concern.  This petition expresses concerns at the switch of U.K. universities to industry research centers, and feels it has restricted academic freedom to conduct basic research.  While it does succumb at the end to this same notion that only basic research can produce breakthroughs,

“that Britain can remain at the forefront of ‘revolutionary’ discoveries instead of dull ‘evolutionary’ science”

it avoids being completely dismissive of work where application is more in mind.  (Both petitioners ought to read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions if they haven’t already).

Unfortunately, the saner petition has only 49 signatures.

Moving foward the Higher Education Funding Council will need to figure out how bibliometrics could be used in a meaningful way.  Otherwise there will be additional pressure to try and bump up citation counts and numbers of publications with little regard to the quality of either.  There are already ways to game the assessment in terms of who and what is selected by institutions to be assessed.  If bibliometric analysis isn’t crafted carefully, the ways to skew results will increase.

If we plan and manage well, this will not be a major factor. The president has plans for a big increase in NSF funding in 2012. By integrating our usual budget increases with the stimulus money we will make this work.

This suggests that the increase Bement mentions will be above and beyond the planned increases from President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the COMPETES Act.  I’ll believe it when I see the President’s FY 2012 request, which will probably come around the same time President Obama will be looking for Director Bement’s replacement (his 6 year term expires sometime in 2010).

How many grants will be rewarded?  According to the press release:

“NIH expects to devote at least $200 million in ARRA funding to Challenge Grants. In addition to the approximately 200 Challenge Grants that will be funded by the NIH Office of the Director, it is likely that more than 200 ARRA-related grants will be funded by NIH Institutes or Centers.”

So, 200 Challenge grants through the Office of the Director, and 200 or more stimulus related grants through other centers.  The acceptance rate is around 1-2 percent.  And this is after Senator Specter’s vote was purchased with a $6.5 billion boost to NIH funding.  It appears that the oversupply of biomedical research grants will keep acceptance rates low regardless of the money thrown at the situation.

“In order to stay globally competitive, the federal government must invest in developing a sustainable and professional technical research workforce to supply research demands at both our nation’s institutes and universities. This could be undertaken by:

• Boosting job stability in this sector by increasing the number of state and federal positions for permanent university research staff
• Restructuring the grant process with an emphasis on personnel and service contracts in conjunction with new equipment
• Sponsoring the creation of university degree programs for technical training in the laboratory sciences.”

While I’m a fan of the science masters degrees mentioned in the piece, and think a comparable degree focused on technical equipment makes sense, there’s no discussion of another source of talent – Ph.D.s.  While it is probably too much time spent to go from a Ph.D. to managing lab equipment, I’d be suprised and disappointed if Ph.D.s could not perform the technical support functions needed (or weren’t doing them already as part of their training).  Perhaps after a transition period where the masters degree programs ramped up and started producing graduates this wouldn’t be needed.  However, this is an option that should be included in these discussions.

I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing for government to take on – fill in the gaps in biomedical development that are not currenlty being addressed by the private sector.  Given the costs of pharmaceutical research, companies often focus on diseases or conditions that affect millions of people.  Government can also make any drugs developed for these diseases available relatively cheaply, as they are not motivated by profit in these endeavors.

One way of observing the different perspectives of the various science advocacy groups is to review their budget analyses.  For instance, see which organizations complain about the lack of an NIH boost (even with a $10 billion stimulus shot).  Here are a few after the jump, but feel free to see how your disciplinary society considered the budget request.

AAAS FY 2010 Budget Index

American Institute of Physics Federal Budget Requests – While they do address the NIH, it’s only one institute.

AIP Request Overview

ScienceInsider’s 2010 Budget articles

The Federation of Societies for Experimental Biology’s Federal Science Budget page – as narrowly focused as you might expect.

American Association of Medical Colleges

Association of American Universities

Most organizations tend to ignore the smaller research oriented agencies, or even the research funded through the Department of Defense.  Reasons why may vary from agency to agency, but since dollars manage to motivate most of the science policy activity in Washington, they may well explain why various groups are engaged in certain issues, but not in others.

The plan can be found on a new website, SpecterForTheCure.com.  The domain name should tip you off that this is a campaign website, you can see the copyright notice for Citizens for Arlen Specter.  Nothing wrong with that, I note it because I have a hard time recalling other instances where research as an issue factored in a campaign for office when an initiative or other measure was not also on the ballot.  Specter will introduce legislation soon, if he hasn’t already, but press reports indicate the new agency would be funded at $2 billion under the legislation, and serve as an independent federal agency, like NASA.  It would be outside the NIH or the Health and Human Services Department.

I have my doubts that the bill will go anywhere.  The bill isn’t cheap, and Specter’s former colleagues might feel like blocking any of his bills for his defection.  While translational research could use some additional support, it is unclear that the independent research board and $2 billion per year is the best way for addressing the problem.  And while few at the NIH would object to a permanent $10 billion boost to the agency’s baseline, there would be growing pains that I doubt the agency is in a good position to handle.  That may be proven wrong if NIH handles the stimulus funding well.

As is all too common with this issue, things get blurred pretty quickly.  This funding and associated guidelines are for research conducted on the stem cells, and cannot fund the derivation of human embryos.  The Dickey-Wicker Amendment bans such derivation.  The guidelines also restrict NIH funding to embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created for reproductive purposes that would otherwise be discarded.  Research on adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells can *continue* to be funded by NIH dollars.  As it stands, this is not a free-for-all.  From the announcement of the draft guidelines:

NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from other sources, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis, and/or IVF embryos created for research purposes, is not allowed under these Guidelines.

As I noted, these are draft guidelines, and comments can be submitted to NIH.  The comment period is 30 days from the publication of a notice of rulemaking in the Federal Register, which should happen this week.  Check back to the NIH link I provided above to find the final date for comments, which should be no later than May 24, along with more specifics about how and where to send your comments.

A useful next question here would be whether or not there need to be new incentives developed for the review and use of these failures?  I don’t know whether a nudge or a push is called for, but it seems to me that an era of diminishing returns and constrained resources ought to encourage more mining of the past to find usable knowledge.  That it apparently doesn’t is frustrating.