Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."
It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent.
We are all very lucky that Berners-Lee was in a time and place that gave the young engineer some latitude to pursue his vague but creative idea, one that would ultimately change the world. If Berners-Lee submitted that idea to government funding agencies for support, who knows where the Internet would be today?
In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
But there is a hidden trick that betters your chances of funding. “Everyone familiar with NIH operations knows that it is extremely difficult to obtain funding for groundbreaking, high-risk research,” writes Professor Andrew Marks, director of the Center for Molecular Cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center. “Indeed, the unwritten rule, often said tongue-in-cheek, is that when applying for NIH funding, one should only propose experiments that one has already done and for which one can show convincing preliminary data.”
Instead of proposing risky, creative ideas when looking for research funds, scientists now tend to pitch ideas that are safer and already proven.
If Republicans have their way, a Harvard University anthropologist would not be using tax dollars to study the impact of China’s one-child policy. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist would not have the money to research how Medicare changes might shape seniors’ political attitudes. And a Brown University archeologist would not be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars examining textiles from the Viking Age.
Kornberg would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2006 for that work. Yet he told The Washington Post that he’s convinced his groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning idea would never have been funded today.
"If the work that you propose to do isn't virtually certain of success, then it won't be funded,” he said. “Of course, the kind of work that we would most like to see take place, which is groundbreaking and innovative, lies at the other extreme."
Science, especially basic research, has been under attack in this country for a long time. That attack reinforces the biases against basic science research and innovative, untested theories. Why invite attacks from the scientifically ignorant but politically powerful to your funding? Much easier to simply go with the safest choices and ignore potentially ground breaking advances.