Battleangel

Well, I try to keep up with recent events in the scientific community. And as far as that goes little can compare with Nature. Unfortunately I’m always lagging behind about one issue for geographical reasons. But enough about that. There were a couple of things in the last issue that really inspired and provoked me. And they were all in some way related to the National Institutes of Health.

If I’m going to bottom line this before I rant on, the NIH has managed to do a lot of things right lately while the US in general keeps going about things the wrong way.

First, and this is kind of apparent, war and fear mongering is costly and among the first to pay the price is the scientific community. Unless you’re researching something that could come in handy for killing people. Suffice it to say, NIH research rarely qualifies for that purpose.
The US Science budget for this year was tight and although it kept R&D spending within more or less the same level as last year, it broke a long standing trend of R&D budget increases. And remaining at essentially the same level does not account for inflation obviously. So basically it’s bad news. According to the AAAS, only DOD, DHS and NASA will be able to keep up in the coming years. Other agencies will see zero growth or even cutbacks. So maybe the NIH and others could need some cutbacks, maybe the NIH doesn’t need a staff of 18.000. I can’t say. But that is not the point. The point is that others remain funded and keep spending it on perhaps not so beneficial projects. Like the DHS developing new forms of duct tape. Just kidding. I don’t know enough about the R&D of the DOD and DHS to comment.

A better example is NASA with their recent setbacks and political goals to do practical things that they in all honesty aren’t very good at. Or perhaps one should be fair and say that practical applications in the field of space exploration are just more error prone than most people realize. One could accuse NASA of wasting money on various esoteric R&D like nuclear propulsion, ion engines, solar sails, “anti-gravity”, space elevators, terraforming, artificial intelligence, robotics, SETI, scramjets etc etc, but the question is if this R&D can be valued any less than frontier missions. And if this is any less likely to fail given the pressure that NASA has been under to succeed. The recent failures, from this perspective, are pretty self-explanatory. The entire structure of NASA has been changed by political goals and that has made them downright sloppy.
One could argue till death about the value of the moon mission.The point is that as NASA is poised for another Moon mission as well as the problematic Mars endeavor, other tasks will have to wait. If they’re lucky they’ll be able to restart the Shuttle flights and resume construction of the Space Station within this year. Not that NASA don’t want to take another stab at the Moon and beyond. I don’t think that NASA has to be forcefully made to comply. But I also think that NASA knows best. And planning for a Mars mission with only a 4.5 percent budget increase doesn’t seem right. It would have been more acceptable if they could have kept their other R&D programs running and at the same time embarked on this highly political venture.
Take Hubble for example. It is expected to fail as early as 2007 unless a repair mission is launched. But NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe has ruled out, for safety reasons, using the space shuttle to replace gyroscopes and batteries aboard Hubble. And the robotic repair is too expensive and wont be completed in time. NASA will instead spend $75 million on destroying the telescope. Money well spent I am sure. They have just decided to quit and to their money on exploration. No debate, and a perfectly good and one-of-a-kind telescope wasted. O’Keefe’s logic behind the safety of repairing the telescope rests on the use of the Space Shuttle. But it doesn’t really explain anything. Obviously NASA plans to resume flights later this year and they’ll need manned space missions if they’re going to go to the Moon and beyond. The whole thing is just a diversion to focus on what the White House has laid out for them. Hubble could be repaired at a bargain price compared to what it cost to build the damn thing. True, its projected 15 year lifespan is at an end, but that is obviously also the reason to repair it, to extend its life and perhaps make the entire project look like less of a loss. It seems like bad business.

Other related events …

NIH and conflicts of interest. With a new management came a new tougher policy on outside interference. One cannot serve two masters and in a series of scandals over the last couple of years it became painfully clear that private corporations had their hands deep in the NIH cookie jar. Many have protested these new regulations which are in many ways a full reversal, and more of the 1995 decision to allow NIH staff to have so extensive financial dealings with the outside world. As it stands, the agency’s scientists are banned from taking compensation from the biomedical industry. The NIH has even gone a step further, trying to use their influence to put an end to this troubling trend, which they feel is plaguing American medical research in general. And not just American research. I need not go further than the local university to pick up on the same disturbing development.
Critics can complain all they want but this is a big step in the right direction. Researchers should be kept separate from mercantile interests at all costs. They should not be able to patent or influence the work that goes on in universities around the world. Period. If they want to gracefully donate money, fine, but never to individual scientists and never with any strings attached. If they want R&D they can set up their own structures and stop leeching.

NIH and Open-access. Another controversial decision from the NIH that I wrote about a while back. The NIH has now gone ahead with its plans for an open/public-access database of publications. Bottom line, if you’re funded by the NIH they want you to make your work publicly available. The publishing seems to be voluntary as it stands now, but only for a limited period of time.

The new policy, effective May 2, 2005, “requests” that scientists voluntarily deposit electronic copies of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts with NIH’s PubMed Central database “as soon as possible” after acceptance for publication. Authors can specify when their manuscripts would be publicly released, anywhere from immediately to 12 months after publication. The policy also places the burden on scientists to resolve any copyright disputes with journal publishers.

It’s a big step in the right direction even though it is unfortunate NIH didn’t go all the way. As it stands, those that profit from the publication and copyright mongering of scientific papers have something to think about. NIH’s decision while force the opening of a previously closed field. If the publishers try and screw the researcher with copyright tricks, they will most likely have the NIH breathing down their necks as such they will most likely comply.
There are however many aspects to this. One is that the articles in the PubMed database will most likely be unedited. That may or may not benefit authors in this field but I see a lot of promise for other, more ideologically charged fields. As for the articles being in two places I don’t think that will be a problem. No one will ever pick up a copy of the journals again once the information is available for free on the internet. So much for that problem.
Critics also claimed that one could have set up a search engine to poll existing journals for articles. That is all very nice, but would the journals in question have just allowed their copyrighted information to flow free. I don’t think so. Furthermore, not many articles are published each month and the PubMed initiative is meant to store ALL NIH sponsored research results.
We should also see this in a larger perspective. The desired end result would be if all research, everywhere, would be accumulated into one large database. In order to do this, each academic unit, university would have to organize and later submit their own results. And that is what NIH is doing here. None of the journals can see this happening of course because they wouldn’t dream of giving the papers away. And even if they would, that is a big if, it would be a pretty much useless system with a gigantic bottleneck. Not that we really expected the journals to think outside the box. After all it’s their livelihood to prevent the dissemination of information.