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The Most Important Science To Fund Is The Hardest To Explain

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The recent budget proposal floated by the Trump administration included deep cuts to critical science-funding agencies. Some of this seems clearly politically-motivated, most obviously zeroing out funding for research on climate, while other parts seem to be just short-sighted penny-pinching, like the deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health. The whole package, though, was deeply anxiety-inducing for scientists who depend on those agencies to fund their research. It's prompted a lot of hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and, sadly, no small amount of name-calling on the part of people who support more robust science policy.

The problem, of course, is that the case for a lot of the research funded by NIH and the National Science Foundation and the various other federal granting agencies can be a difficult one to make. There's a long and unfortunate tradition in American politics of trolling through the titles and abstracts of government research grants and picking out ones that sound funny to denounce as a waste of taxpayer money. The most infamous example was the "Golden Fleece Awards", a long-running publicity stunt on the part of Senator William Proxmire, but plenty of others have played the same game. It's not hard to make most basic areas of science sound ridiculous, if that's your goal, and the ridiculous version is generally much simpler to explain than the more nuanced story of why the research is genuinely valid and important. Scientists trying to defend their work often end up sounding like they're either hopelessly out-of-touch or complete weasels, neither of which are good from a rhetorical or political standpoint.

The most maddening part about this situation, from the standpoint of a scientist, is that the stuff that's easiest to ridicule is often the stuff that's most important for the government to fund. The go-to counter-arguments against cuts to science center on science topics with direct and obvious applications, such as curing diseases. The counter-counter-argument, though, is that stuff with such direct applications can and should be funded by the private sector, because if some company develops a cure for cancer, that will be like a license to print money for at least the length of the patent on that particular treatment.

There really isn't a great response to that, aside from some attempts to portray the pharmaceutical industry as inhuman monsters who would deliberately suppress actual treatments in favor of keeping people hooked on drugs that only partly do the job, which is veering off into tinfoil-hat territory. It's absolutely true, as far as it goes: we have a trillion-dollar global pharmaceutical industry that's working really hard on finding actual commercial products to treat diseases. And the same is true in lots of other areas: energy, computing, telecommunications, etc.. We don't need the NIH to fund the last steps in getting a promising new drug from the lab to the market, or an upgraded computer chip ready to go into the next generation Android phone: those applied technologies are worth billions if not trillions of dollars, and plenty of private companies will step up to invest in them.

The problem, though, is that the step from the research lab to omnipresent commercials during the next major sporting event is the very last one in a long chain that often begins with easily-ridiculed basic science. The most important work being funded by the NIH right now isn't going to come with an obviously-important title like "Testing a Foolproof Vaccine for Strep Throat" (something I would pay a good deal of money for, as the parent of two elementary-school kids). The most important work NIH is funding right now is going to involve the sequencing of genes for some protein in the nuclear membrane of a species of algae that live in hot springs in Kazakhstan, or something equally abstract-sounding, because that will turn out, ten or twenty years from now, to have been the first step in the chain leading to the technology that will enable cryogenic suspension and thus human colonization of distant planets, or some such.

That's not work that private industry is going to fund, not in the current what-have-you-done-for-our-stock-price-this-quarter economic culture. (Back in the mid-to-late 20th century, there was a bit of this, but the conditions that led to the glory days of Bell Labs haven't existed for decades, and aren't likely to come back.) There's just too much of it, the vast majority of which won't actually lead to any direct payoff, and there's no reliable means to pick out the tiny fraction of studies that will lead to enormous payoff down the road.

This is, however, exactly what government funding of science is for. Or supposed to be for, anyway. There's a vast amount of basic research to be done, with little direct economic impact, but the actual cost is not all that significant on the scale of government budgets. And the cost of any individual research grant is absolutely trivial at governmental scale. Governments can readily provide the necessary capital to take the first, really basic steps that provide the essential prerequisites for the commercialization that will come much, much later.

It's really hard to make this case resonate with the general voting public, though, because it's necessarily an indirect and nuanced argument. It's made still harder by decades of public embrace of innumeracy, which leaves lots of voters uncomfortable with the kind of arguments that scientists automatically reach for. And even within science, this is not necessarily convincing-- I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN as if that automatically justifies funding absolutely anything that particle physicists want to do for the rest of time.

It's a case that needs to be made, though, precisely because of the long-term nature of the research funded by the government. Just as the practical benefits of basic research may take years to show up, even short-term cuts made right now will do damage that lasts for years.

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