Wed
Mar
18
“ Grants generate more than scientific knowledge: they generate new researchers. Graduate students and postdocs, who do most of the hands-on research, are apprentices, and most of them hope to run their own laboratories someday. To do more research, professors need more hands, which means taking on more trainees. Under this system, producing more science is inseparable from producing a growing population of scientists, who will also need future support.
This explosion of human infrastructure makes the research enterprise highly sensitive to any slowdown in funding.
Brilliant column by Olivia Judson on how to avoid “the Malthusian boom-and-bust cycle” of funding-then-not-funding science: Set up a “Research for America” foundation where young people — including those who do not plan to become scientists — can participate in scientific work by doing the cool hands-on work in experiments, gathering data, etc.