Super Bowl SUNday science
NASA produces 360-degree views of the sun; releases them today for the purposes of making a bad pun.
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Bureaucratic scrum at the NIH
For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, the NIH is Congressionally prohibited from containing more than 27 Institutes and Centers. Francis Collins wants to disband the current, vaguely named Natioanl Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to make room for organizing a new institute, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Feedback is being solicited here to find new bureaucratic homes for the current NCRR’s various programs and sub-projects.
Any estimates on the total cost of all the rebranding, reprinting, re-logo-ing, and reorganizing this change will create? How long do the current employees get to defend their programs and jockey for position via a glorified comments thread?
Here’s the NCRR mission statement:
The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provides laboratory scientists and clinical researchers with the tools and training they need to understand, detect, treat and prevent a wide range of diseases. NCRR supports all aspects of clinical and translational research, connecting researchers, patients and communities across the nation. This support enables discoveries made at a molecular and cellular level to move to animal-based studies, and then to patient-oriented clinical research, ultimately leading to improved patient care. Through programs such as the Clinical and Translational Science Awards, NCRR convenes innovative research teams and equips them with essential tools and critical resources needed to tackle the nation’s complex health problems.
Whereas NCATS will be:
It is a facilitator of translational research across the NIH and complementary to translational research already being conducted and supported on a large scale in the individual NIH Institutes and Centers. NCATS will seek ways to leverage science to bring new ideas and materials to the attention of industry by demonstrating their value.
[...]
The new Center will bring several existing efforts together in new ways to enhance the ability of all NIH Institutes and Centers to perform research that leads to the development of drugs, diagnostics, devices, vaccines, and strategies for prevention.
Compared to the somewhat breathless coverage about this proposal, both in the popular and scientist-oriented news (NYT, Science), does this sound like an innovative new way of using federal resources to develop clinically accessible treatments, or does it sound like a game of bureaucratic musical chairs?
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from either US corporate subsidies or US science funding? (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/01/filkins-afghanistan.html)
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on the model of the NYAS, AAAS, Nobel Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, American Academy in Berlin, Royal Society, HHMI, Harvard Society of Fellows, and other nonprofits to manage investments and support groundbreaking research of worldwide relevance at all levels, from Ph.D. students to research leaders? Why rely on academic institutions, with their departmental political biases, and national governments, with their narrow priorities, to support scientific careers? Initially such a structure could support legitimate research by those unable to obtain tenure and at risk of switching careers, or to tide over temporary grant losses, and could be funded by donations, licensing, and publications in addition to risk-averse (inflation-indexed, diversified, science-centric) asset management…
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The Times has stumbled upon a report from a group of researchers at Berkeley observing the attrition of women from scientific careers before and after a Ph.D. (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/keeping-women-in-science-on-a-tenure-track/). How do the sorts of family-friendly policies recommended to keep women from leaving science, measure up at our institution? Poorly. Raising children is doable, but simply out of tradition and rarity, few graduate students and assistant professors put much emphasis on any outside interests including family commitments. Ignoring outside interests might simply increase the intensity of production here at Columbia, while contributing to systematic limitations on the overall persistence of women in science more generally. Filling up the research pipeline with single-minded, male, and visa-indentured foreigners would seem to bias data towards quantity rather than quality. This is already a problem with the way tenure decisions depend excessively on publication volume rather than creativity or other measures of competence. The exclusion of subgroups like women and minorities is a symptom of a broken system, and band-aids like targeted grants don’t change the fundamental ways that science makes poor sense as a career choice for women, minorities, and anyone whose idea of self-interest includes anything other than their work.
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Books
might be going digital, but even so kudos to our fellow student Carl (http://carlschoonover.com/#) for creating a worthy collection of neuroscience-related images for broad public consumption. Wouldn’t it be great if every thesis included a bestselling mass-publication component?
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Columbia students free to leak
Columbia University Reverses Anti-Wikileaks Guidance:
Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.
“Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,” the Office of Career Services wrote.
[...]
“If anyone is a master’s student in international relations and they haven’t heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don’t deserve to be a graduate student in international relations,” [SIPA professor Gary] Sick told Wired.com in an interview.
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Efficiency
It strikes me that Columbia creates huge amounts of unnecessary waste in daily functioning of the research enterprise. In the last year, a professional auditor has been engaged- and yet the only changes involve a small-scale, gradual phasing in of #5 plastic recycling, and rumors of energy metering. There are no sincere or creative efforts at obvious energy savings, like putting lights on timers.
I’d hazard to guess that minor efforts could easily halve infrastructure costs. Unfortunately, no one seems to be in a position of sufficient competence and responsibility.
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On the usefulness of emeriti
Without extensive comment, I’m just going to pass this along: Emeritus Issues (from the same person who writes the always interesting Female Science Professor blog).
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Science is globalizing
And The Economist noticed:
Twenty years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world’s science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. [...] The size of Asia’s population leads UNESCO to conclude that it will become the “dominant scientific continent in the coming years”. [...] For science’s aristos, then, much of this suggests the tumbrels await.
Oh no, not the tumbrels!
I’m happy to see science make its way out of the confines of the western military-industrial complexes and become more equally distributed globally.
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