If McCain wins, science loses.

I'm a post-doctoral fellow at a large medical school in the U.S. I'm looking for a 'permanent' position for me to conduct research. These positions largely don't exist.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the largest organization for funding basic biomedical research in the United States. If you want basic research done, these are the folks who pay for it. The NIH budget hasn't been keeping up with inflation over the last few years. The purchasing power of the NIH has decreased every year. That said, funding rates for new grants are going down. My wife's advisor, who is one of the top 3 scientists in his field, failed to get a grant renewed that he has had for nearly 20 years. It's a tough funding situation, and basic scientists are the first to feel the crunch.

Here's the way getting a job as an assistant professor usually works: After successfully interviewing for a position, the department offers you a startup package. This startup package is money that belongs to the department, and in my field, ranges from $500,000 to $1 million. For the department, this represents a fairly substantial investment in you (for which they will expect returns). The money is used to buy new equipment and hire people to work for you while you try to get grant support from the NIH (or any other organization that is hiring). The department will get a cut from your grant, so this is why it is an investment for them.

Currently, many universities see this as too big a gamble. The funding situation is so bad, that many new investigators will fail to get a grant, and the departments know it. So to hedge their bets, many new research positions are requiring that you have a grant before you apply for the position. But, the NIH doesn't allow temporary trainees (post-docs) to apply for grant money. But universities are mostly only hiring people who have a grant. But you need a permanent position to get a grant.

That's some catch, that Catch-22.

Here's where things get even trickier. I'm currently paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. They will only pay post-docs for 6 years. So in January, I'm out of a job. I need to find a permanent position in the next 10 months. Anyone who is nearing the end of a post-doc position is this funding era will have a *very* hard time finding an academic job.

So, what does this have to do with McCain? Clinton and Obama both have explicit science policies that they describe on their web pages. Here's the first three of Clinton's science points:

1. Establish a $50-billion Strategic Energy Fund.

2. Increase the basic research budgets 50% over 10 years at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Defense Department.

3. Increase the NIH budget by 50% over 5 years and aim to double it over 10 years.

Here's a short excerpt of Obama's:

Double federal science and research funding for clean energy projects, relying on the resources and ability of our national laboratories, universities and land grant colleges.

Barack Obama supports doubling federal funding for basic research, changing the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.

Here's McCain's:








Oh. He doesn't have one.

If John McCain wins, and we continue starving the NIH, there will be a whole generation of post-docs who will complete their training to find no jobs available for them. And all of their ideas, and all of the science they would have done will be moved elsewhere (either to other countries, or into industry). All of the biotech companies that would have been started, all of the basic science that could be done, and all of the young, fresh ideas that could be hatched will be moved elsewhere.

Peace is Dangerous - wait, WTF?

I try to keep the Factory out of politics (not always successfully). I'm not always successful in that regard, especially since I read some political blogs, and I just can't stand it when they lie.

Take Red State for example. They have a recent blog post suggesting that peace is dangerous, and the recent combat fatalities in Iraq are actually *not that bad*:

In the peaceful year of 1980, 2,392 servicemen died while on duty defending our country. In 2003, the start of the Iraq War, only 1,228 servicemen and women died. In 2004, the number was 1,874, it went up to 1,942 in 2005, and it dropped to 1,858 in 2006. [my bold]

Wow. More deaths in peacetime than during all out combat? That doesn't compute, but maybe it's true...

In fact, only during the Clinton years of 1996 into the Bush years of 2001 and 2002, during a period of time when the Clinton policy of refusing to defend our national interest was in place, do we see the number of military deaths fall below 1000 annually.

Wait, so if you exclude the most peaceful years of the last 25 years, then you can conclude that peace is dangerous? I'm rather reminded of the Princess Bride quote:

Humperdinck: Tomorrow morning [my guards] will escort us to Florin Channel, where every ship in my armada waits to accompany us on our honeymoon.

Buttercup: Every ship but your four fastest, you mean. Every ship but the four you sent.

Humperdinck: Yes. Yes of course. Naturally not those four.

Of course, if you exclude the peaciest years, then peace might have some bad points. But let's actually examine the data, shall we? (They're available here for those who want to dig them up).

Click on the graph to see it in nauseating detail, but there are really 3 data sets that I want you to look at. One is the total deaths, and that is in light blue. The folks at Red State aren't lying when they say that there were more deaths in the military in 1980 than in 2005. They're just being completely disingenuous. Underneath that, in red, is the number of accidental deaths (vehicle accidents, training accidents, plane crashes, etc). That has been more or less steadily decreasing over the last 25 years. That accounts for the vast majority of the decrease in deaths in the military, and has remained relatively stable throughout the Iraq conflict. Now look at combat deaths. That's in black. Combat deaths have spiked, account for the enormous jump in military deaths (as you might expect).

So they're comparing the early 1980s, when accidental deaths were a huge number of deaths, which through whatever means have been brought down to much lower levels, and saying that the military deaths now are "only" in the thousands.

Now, let's examine one more bit of disingenuousneses of their claim. How much of not a big deal is the fact that for every fatality, there are 7.6 people that are wounded and saved by modern technology. Compare this to the Viet Nam War, where 2.6 people were wounded for every death. This is because many more people are being saved.

Expressed another way, if America were fighting in Iraq using Viet Nam era medical technology, many of those wounded would be dead. Instead of 3000 American deaths in Iraq, it would be closer to 9000 deaths. But that's really not a big deal to the folks at Red State, who would have you believe that the deaths in Iraq are no big deal. (I'm going to save for another time the discussions of civilian dead in Iraq, which are a *much* huger deal). Or as they say:

The moral of the story is that peace is dangerous.

No, the moral of the story is that if you ignore trends in data, you are dishonest.

Democrats and quarks?

What are the political implications to liberals of gravity? What does the Big Bang contribute to communism? Does the libertarian party have concerns about DNA being the genetic material? Should Democrats make their social policies to suit the existence of quarks?

I'm writing these questions to point out the silliness in asking the question:

Does Darwinian theory undermine conservative notions of religion and morality or does it actually support conservative philosophy?

The New York Times asked this question in an article, published yesterday, lending a layer of credibility to the question.

Three of ten Republicans at the recent presidential debate said that they don't "believe" in evolution. (Never mind that I find believing in a theory to be silly. Belief is for churches. Science deals in evidence for and against. And in the case of evolution, the 150 years of evidence has piled up, and the results are in. Evolution is the best description of the origin of species that we have). Perhaps a followup question could have been "How many of you believe the earth is flat?". This country has the best scientific enterprise in the world, and yet presidential candidates are professing anti-scientific sentiments (in public, no less).

Let's just usher those folks off the stage, shall we? You're not qualified to be president. Buh-bye.