So here's a story. Dude reaches out to Heather Heying and provides a pretty compelling sob story about missing federal grants for medical research.
He is right in the line of fire of the now terminated grants to Harvard, rightly pretty salty about Trump disrupting his Very Important Research etc. I'm sure some of what goes on at any university is valuable, so any sudden move like this will cause troubles and harm innocent bystanders.
...so we get a scalpel-vs-sledgehammer analogy:
"The approach that is currently being taken by the Trump administration is with a sledgehammer rather than with a scalpel." His analogy is a good one. Is a sledgehammer to the entire enterprise the only way to do this? Would a scalpel work? I don’t think so. Scalpels are designed to do detail work—they don’t work at scale. Sledgehammers, on the other hand, can be scaled up. Sledgehammers, wrecking balls, bombs…agents of destructions exist at every scale. Maybe it all needs to be destroyed, before being rebuilt anew. Then the precision work can begin.
"Taxpayer dollars fund American science at a level that is difficult to comprehend, and utterly shocking to many. How science can and should be funded is a tricky question with no easy answers."
But when you make headway in solving one set of problems, be assured that you will create new ones. Now that science is available to more people: How shall it be funded? If it is to be funded by the public, as so much of American science is, who gets to make the decisions?
...and this is the crux of the matter, and why we probably should start over with how to go about doing/producing science:
Letting only “experts” decide—those people who are already intimately familiar with the questions and methods in play—creates the perfect conditions for the same kind of circle jerk we see in peer review. Science becomes a popularity contest, and the most fashionable ideas, rather than the ones with the most promise, get funded.
In closing, here's a stupid, silly, obvious observation:
Harvard, being a hedge fund with some educational activities on the side, certainly does have the funds to just blanket fund $2bn worth of suddenly terminated grants (endowment, while partially locked up, is in the $50+ billions—some arguments to the contrary in this CNN article). If they don't/refuse, isn't that them saying that the research these billions are funding isn't really too important...?
Like, it's not the Trump admin attacking "science"... it's withdrawing support, fine, but the hedge fund peeps running the Harvard brand agree that the "science" it was running wasn't that important.
What the big deal, brosky...?
