Comment from Michael Green
Michael GreenOpposeAcademic
Summary: A Professor Emeritus of Chemistry argues that the proposed regulation would allow political appointees to dictate research funding, potentially suppressing "politically inconvenient" results. The commenter warns that this would cause the United States to fall behind globally in scientific advancement, drawing a comparison to the scientific decline in the Soviet Union.
I am Professor Emeritus (Chemistry), and still publishing. I have in the past received federal funding for research; and still have funding for use of national computer facilities. The proposal that political appointees would decide on what research can be done (no funding = no research) effectively means the end of American science. If research is cut off for continuation of any research that produces results that are considered politically inconvenient, the consequences will be like those in the Soviet Union in which inheritance of acquired characteristics was a required result of genetic research, to fit Stalinist doctrine. After Stalin died, it took more than a generation for Soviet genetics to recover, and the Soviet Union fell far behind the rest of the world in being able to study the central advances in modern biology. If the US follows the Stalinist path, as this proposal requires, we too will fall hopelessly behind the rest of the world, at a time when becoming a scientific backwater will be lethal to any nation that expects to be important in the development of events in the world. This Stalinist proposal must not be adopted.