We need a mixture of public and private research.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&_r=0
It is disturbing to me that President Obama feels it necessary to invoking the growth of the economy to justify research into the brain. With a large number of people entering their older years, the number of people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia are expected to grow to large numbers.
From a moral standpoint, the public should help fund research that might help any of us.
By WILLIAM J. BROADMARCH 15, 2014
Last April, President Obama assembled some of the nation’s most august scientific dignitaries in the East Room of the White House. Joking that his grades in physics made him a dubious candidate for “scientist in chief,” he spoke of using technological innovation “to grow our economy” and unveiled “the next great American project”: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.
Along the way, he invoked the government’s leading role in a history of scientific glories, from putting a man on the moon to creating the Internet. The Brain initiative, as he described it, would be a continuation of that grand tradition, an ambitious rebuttal to deep cuts in federal financing for scientific research.
“We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead,” Mr. Obama said. “We have to seize them. I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here.”
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American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.
In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research.
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“the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”
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Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration.
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Fundamentally at stake, the critics say, is the social contract that cultivates science for the common good.
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Public money still accounts for most of America’s best research, as well as its remarkable depth and diversity.
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Initially, Dr. Apple said, he, too, saw the donors as superrich dabblers. Now he believes that they are helping accelerate the overall pace of science. What changed his mind, he said, was watching them persevere, year after year, in pursuit of highly ambitious goals.
“They target polio and go after it until it’s done — no one else can do that,” he said, referring to the global drive to eradicate the disease. “In effect, they have the power to lead where the market and the political will are insufficient.”
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There are also signs of a growing awareness, among some philanthropists, that this influence brings a responsibility to address some of the criticisms leveled at them. Last year, a coalition of leading science foundations announced a campaign to double private spending on basic research over a decade — to $5 billion a year — as a counterweight to money rushing into health and other popular fields.
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“Today, federal funding of basic research is on the decline,” the group said. “The best hope for near-term change lies with American philanthropy.”
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The financial outlook had fallen far and fast. Congress had long reached across party lines to support government research, for its economic and military rewards and because the distribution of billions of dollars plays well come election time. After rising steadily for decades, federal science financing hit a high point in 2009, in the early days of the Obama administration, as Congress, to stimulate the economy amid the global financial crisis, allocated about $40 billion for basic science.
That bipartisan consensus eroded with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections and the budget battles that followed. Spending on basic research has fallen by roughly a quarter, to $30 billion last year, one of the sharpest declines ever.
The cutbacks translate into layoffs: A group of scientific societies recently surveyed 3,700 scientists and technical managers and reported that 55 percent knew of colleagues who had lost jobs or expected to lose them soon.
In an interview, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis S. Collins, called 2013 one of his agency’s darkest years ever, with fewer grants awarded and with jobs and programs cut. In decades past, research financed by the institutes won more than 100 Nobel Prizes. The cutbacks, Dr. Collins said, were “profoundly discouraging.”
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The official reticence about private science may reflect, in part, a fear that conservatives will try to use it to further a small-government agenda. Indeed, some of the donors themselves worry that too much focus on private giving could diminish public support for federal science.
“It’s always been a major worry,” said Robert W. Conn, president of the Kavli Foundation, which has committed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to science and is part of the private effort to increase financing for basic research. “Philanthropy is no substitute for government funding. You can’t say that loud enough.”
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Still, he and other experts are quick to add that the private surge is far too small to replace public financing.
The N.I.H. budget alone runs to about $30 billion — half for basic research. At least for now, said Dr. Press, the board chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, private giving is “still a drop in the bucket.”
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This private war on disease has resulted not only in significant advances in treatment, but also in what experts describe as a major breakthrough in how biomedical research is done. The method opens up blockages that have traditionally kept basic discoveries from being turned into effective treatments — especially for rare diseases that drug companies avoid for lack of potential profit.
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Many of their efforts are rooted deep in personal or family trauma. Sometimes, by sheer force of genetics and demographics, that impulse may risk widening historical racial inequalities in health care and disease research, disparities that decades of studies have shown to contribute to higher rates of disease and death among blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups.
A review of these campaigns finds that, as with cystic fibrosis — which mainly strikes people of Northern European descent — a significant number are devoted to diseases that disproportionately affect white people.
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Of course, the pervasiveness of most diseases means most philanthropists give comfort and medical relief across the lines of race and ethnicity. When Mr. Milken, for example, learned that he had prostate cancer, he set up a foundation to fight it. The charity has raised more than half a billion dollars, helping save not only him but also many black men, since they develop the disease more frequently than white men do.
So, too, the techniques of translational science, inspired by philanthropy, are now being applied in a federal effort against sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder that mainly strikes black people and has long been something of a research orphan.
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Sometimes, private donors go to the government’s aid. When budget cuts threatened to shut down a giant particle accelerator on Long Island in 2006, Dr. Simons, the hedge-fund investor, who lives nearby, raised $13 million to bail it out. As a result, research teams were able to keep exploring subatomic aspects of the blast that brought the universe into existence.
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Shortly before he died, Mr. Mitchell, the telescope man, spoke of his concern that American science was already losing its competitive edge. He cited the discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle seen as imparting mass to the universe. The finding was made at a particle accelerator in Europe after tight budgets shut down a rival machine near Chicago.
“We have no excuse” for losing the lead, Mr. Mitchell said. “We need to fix it.”
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