Comment from Anonymous
Anonymous AnonymousOpposeAcademic
Summary: A researcher argues that the proposed regulation will undermine scientific achievement by subjecting funding to political review rather than scientific merit. They contend that this instability will discourage researchers and cause the United States to lose its leadership in science and technology.
My PhD work was funded in large part by the NIH and NSF, through grants to my advisor. The stable funding environment provided by my advisor’s grants allowed over a dozen new researchers to graduate under his tutelage, substantially enriching areas as disparate as medical science, hurricane and tsunami preparedness, and the underlying mathematics of the simulation techniques we all used in our research. Subjecting such grants to political review rather than evaluating the work to be funded solely on its scientific merits is a recipe for instability, and not knowing where next year’s funding is coming from makes it undesirable to do research or become a researcher in America. The proposed regulation will strike a terrible blow against American scientific achievement, and in the long term will cede leadership in science and technology to America’s competitors.