Quote:
Originally Posted by MadBlaster
See, already taxed many times over. So, how much of the part you posted would have gone to fund the wild BBQs parties and pretty interns on short term contracts I wonder?
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hahaha, serves me right for telling jokes about my career
To clarify, the pretty STUDENTs are unpaid. The BBQ parties are not very wild, outside working hours, and rely upon steaks and beer paid for out of modest scientist salaries
Quote:
Originally Posted by MadBlaster
hum dee dum. Go back and google the marlboro man. that was a long time ago. they have been stretching this thing all that time. get a clue.  The antacid thing, just another $50 light-bulb scheme.
Research is fine, but it should be subject to rules of cost/benefit. Not guise for money grab to fix irresponsible state spending. wait, what??? |
But actually you make a good point. I often wonder in Australia, what would happen if we just stopped research? Some research seems to show diminishing returns. We (scientists) have to convince society that we are worth funding, so health gets a big proportion. My society (and hence govt) kind of accidently then puts a perverse incentive on what we do. We must do something that is totally groundbreaking, but has a very high chance of success (which is a paradox). The successful high level scientists (not me
) must generate grant proposals that SOUND groundbreaking but are ACTUALLY rather incremental. To their credit, there is then the possibility to do groundbreaking, risky work on the "down low" on equipments already paid for to do kind of boring stuff. At one point I knew of two researchers running cold fusion in their spare time after it was majorly discredited. I never heard anything new so it musn't have gone anywhere.
Some health research has gone down this path imo. But society likes to have the tools to respond to big problems when they arrive, and a competent scientist group is a pretty good one, even with the BBQ situation. For example, it is not well known that an antibiotic crisis is relatively likely in the near future. This is due to unregulated capitalism...the ubiquitous pointless unregulated use of front line antibiotics in Asia and the ability to use antibiotics to get 0.1%s of extra profit margin from livestock growth for food production.
When a healthy young member of your family dies in a US city hospital getting a minor wound dressed (from antibiotic resistant bacteria), and many other families are having the same experience, the scientist currently fattening rats and knocking them on the head to study diabetes has a rather useful set of skills.
camber