(This piece was originally posted at ScientificAmerican.com. It was spurred, in part, by Tim F.’s writing on this)
Just before any predictable disaster hits, it’s almost impossible to take even a medium term view. With the sequester bearing down on us in a couple of days, identifying the immediate consequences is terrifying enough. Just check out the Obama administration’s state-by-state tally for the grim weeks ahead.
The picture derived from that tally is evil enough, as we all (or should) know by now. In broad strokes, it will slow the recovery, cut economic growth, and act as a persistent drag on ordinary folks’ attempts to make a better life — hell, to pay the rent on the first of the month. But there is a sense, I think, that however crappy conditions may get for the weeks or months before some resolution emerges, matters will return to normal in reasonably short order.
But that’s wrong, at least when it comes to the future of science in the United States. The federal government is by far the lead funder for basic scientific research. [PDF; see p. 5] When the funding stream dries up, even briefly, work doesn’t just pause for a bit; instead, the blow cuts deeper, past fat, through muscle and into bone. There’s been some coverage of this over the last week or so. For example, in an interview conducted by Dylan Matthews, former NIH director Elias Zerhouni said:
“I think the suddenness of it and the depth of it would be a disaster for research, which is not an activity that you can turn on and off from year to year. It’s an activity that takes time. The most impacted are the young, new investigator scientists, who are coming into science, and will now abandon the field of science. There will be a generational gap created.
An average grant is five years long, because science is like that. So think: That means that every one year, only 20 percent of the grants come to their end. So any one year, NIH only has 20 percent of its money available for new grants. At NIH, about half of the grants get terminated at five years, but the rest get to be continued, as you don’t want to throw away good research. So the half of it that’s left has to go to very promising areas of science, and you have 10 percent left.
If you take 8 percent of that 10 percent, it’s going to come from new science, new people, young investigators; we are going to maim our innovation capabilities if you do these abrupt deep cuts at NIH. It will impact science for generations to come.”
“New science, new people, young investigators.” That’s the rub. But the issue involves more than the sequester itself. Rather, for at least a large slice of the basic research community, the killing force of the current plan comes from the way it piles on to an already ailing enterprise. Last week I contacted my colleague, Marc Kastner, a physicist, former head of the physics department, and now Dean of the School of Science at MIT — which makes him the leader of a some-hundreds of million dollars/year basic research enterprise. The story he told me ain’t pretty.
For MIT itself the effects, Kastner says, will hurt — a lot. The hit to the annual research budget will be about $40 million — falling most heavily on the School of Science, which gets 95% of its research budget from the federal government. The effects won’t be felt equally across the board. If you run a big lab then you have some room to manouver, Kastner acknowledges. “Is Eric Lander ever going to slow down? He’ll find a way.” But, he says, “The rich survive and the poor get devastated. The real question is the next generation.”
That is: the sequester wreaks its havoc by striking hardest at particular points in the life cycle of a university researcher. New tenure-line faculty are actually somewhat insulated from the very worst of the pressure. “Every agency has set aside money for young investigators,” he says,”some from private foundations, and a lot from the feds.” Cuts in budget strike those dependent on other people’s grants — graduate students, post docs and soft-money research scientists — but a new faculty hire has somewhat better prospects than most for the first few years.
The rubber hits the road, though, at tenure. MIT, like other leading research universities, generally tenures faculty at around the seven year mark. Researchers achieve tenure on the basis of strong performance in those first years and then after promotion are expected to advance their program through what should be the heart of their productive lives. The tricky part is that it is already enormously difficult to do so. Once tenured, the researcher competes for grants against the entire population, Nobel laureates, National Academicians and all. There’s a reason that the average age for winning your first R0-1 grant is 42 — that’s up by more than five years since 1980. Add the sequester’s cut on top of that existing semi (or more than)-crisis, and you have a circumstance where early-mid career scientists could become even more at risk to career-blasting loss of research funding.
So, add that up: sequester cuts will strike bluntly across the scientific community. The illustrious can move a bit of money around, but even in large labs, a predictable result will be a reduction in the number of graduate student and post – doc slots available — and as those junior and early-stage researchers do a whole lot of the at-the-bench level research, such cuts will have an immediate effect on research productivity.
The longer term risk is obvious too: fewer students and post-docs mean on an ongoing drop from baseline in the amount of work to be done year over year, and given that industry has reduced its demand for research-trained Ph.Ds, a plausible consequence is that some, many perhaps, those with capacity to do leading edge science — no dummies they — will simply never enter the pipeline, shifting instead to some other career that does not demand six years and more of poorly paid training to find that there are no jobs.
But that mid-career trap is at least as troubling: By the time you have a scientist who has done well enough to earn tenure at a research institution, someone — the taxpayer, to a very large extent — has invested a ton of money, often well into seven figures, into her training and early professional life. If she ends up without that crucial next grant, that money is at risk. The work we’ve all been paying for doesn’t come to a conclusion, and, if our brilliant, mid-thirties investigator finds something else to do, all her time and all that cash are sunk costs, irrecoverable even if Congress relaxes the sequester’s bite after a while.
The immediate situation is thus one in which the overall research effort in basic science in the US risks a loss of talent from at least two inflection points in the normal course of a research career. But that’s not all. In Kastner’s genuinely grim account, a certain heedlessness in our leading research institutions, especially among those who’ve gone all-in on biomedical work, is going to make the problem worse. Over the last several years NIH budgets have doubled, allowing more basic biology and applied bio-medical researchers to get in the game.
Institutions have grabbed the opportunity, and because of the rules about what you can actually charge against overhead on research grants, some borrowed money to build the very expensive buildings in which such work is done. Servicing the loans turns on filling the lab space with grant-getting researchers; the imperative is so stringent that you hear charming phrases like the “dollar density” of research. (Those researchers insufficiently cash dense get squeezed of space, stuffed into basements and the like.)
The whole scheme turns on continued substantial NIH budget growth. Factor in the sequester — and you can bet that there are a number of institutions for whom loss of grants will have a multiplier effect, because of the need to find new cash to pay for debt service on underutilized space. Less institutional cushion means still fewer resources for students and post docs; it limits the possibilities of new hires and so on — and the numbers continue to roll in the wrong direction.
Now add one more datum. If you look at the history of US funding [pdf, fig. 2, p. 5] for science over the last fifty years, you see that with the exception of the Apollo years, it remained more or less constant as a percentage of GDP to the 1980s, after which it has experienced a slow decline. Looking at the federal budget going forward, the reality is that as long as health care spending looks to consume its increasing share of both GDP and national budgets, then basic science, like everything else in the federal discretionary budget, is going to remain under pressure. Thus, even without the sequester, there is no shower of gold ready to rain down on the research community.
In that larger frame, Kastner argues, we are now confronting a problem that’s been mounting for decades. The meat-axe poised over the biological sciences struck his own field of physics back in the seventies: “That was when you heard about theoretical physicists driving cabs.” The response? “Groups got smaller and post-docs got treated better.” (Sic! Even now, physics post docs at national labs get significantly higher pay than new Ph.D post docs in biology, Kastner says.) Something similar is likely in prospect now: “Maybe what we need is simply to have fewer graduate students.” The issue, brought into focus by the battle over the sequester is that for any of the gambles individual centers may have chanced, ultimately the decision about how much science the U.S. chooses to pursue is a civic one. Right now, Kastner says, “we have over-produced scientists given the investment we are willing to make as a society.”
In sum: “the reality is that I think the sequester will have a rolling effect on science research” Kastner says, “but it’s hard to tell as there are no controls.” Thinking parochially for a moment, MIT and similarly well-off, internationally recognized universities will hold up. Not perfectly, not without pain, but still, they’ll persist. And certainly, science as a human enterprise isn’t going to go away. But that’s not the same thing as saying that America’s scientific pre-eminence is invulnerable. “There are places around the world which will fill the gap,” Kastner tells me as our conversation winds down. They’re just not necessarily here in the U.S.
That’s one view, acquired from the vantage of the leader of one of the world’s most effective basic research centers. Let me add one more thought from my own, much more modest perch.
It’s easy and usually foolish to spin narratives of decline out of a momentary political circumstance. It is true now and looks to remain so for the foreseeable future that the U.S. retains its slot atop the national league tables on all kinds of different measures of power. If the gap between us and the rest of the world is shrinking, compared to the extraordinary circumstances of the post-World War II era, that’s a very good thing: it means that the rest of the world is getting richer, healthier, more comfortable.
But that doesn’t mean that it is impossible to imagine an actual decline in U.S. power and independence of action.
There are lots of reasons to do science. The one you hear most often, I think, is that human beings are obligately curious. You can make the claim we emerged from our evolutionary past to produce our science-infused civilization because of some confluence of traits that included the willingness to accept risk in the face of the unknown, to ask questions.That has the ring of plausibility to me. You don’t become a parent without discovering in your child that drive to find things out.
Then there’s the aesthetic quality to science. There’s so much beauty to be found in the systematic investigation of nature — from the grandeur of Darwin’s tangled bank to the iconic force of the Hubble Space Telescope’s “Pillars of Creation” image, made by Jeff Hester and colleagues — and on and on and on.
Add to that the simple satisfaction that comes from solving puzzles — a reward that motivates more scientists than I first imagined, and that I think may also drive much of the public’s hunger for stories of science that one writes with that scientific detective, Sherlock Holmes, perched at the back of one’s mind.
But to cut through to the hard cash at the core of this whole crisis, the simple truth is that paying for basic research is a bet a society makes on its future. It is also one of the safest wagers around. In the 2007 report linked above, the CBO writes, in predictably dry language, “Federal spending in support of basic research over the years has, on average, had a significantly positive return, according to the best available research.” (p. 15) Or, to put it a more gaudily, it’s estimated that the Human Genome Project delivered a return on investment of 141:1 (so far) — $141 in wealth created for every dollar spent on the job.
No one claims that all basic research posts such glorious rewards, but as MIT president Rafael Reif and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett noted this week in the Financial Times, (registration/subscription required) “A report by the non-partisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates that over those nine years, such cuts would reduce GDP by $200bn – and that estimate compares sequestration to a scenario where R&D merely remains at the 2011 rate. If in those nine years the US instead kept R&D spending constant as a proportion of output, the economy would be $565bn bigger. And if it invested in R&D at the same rate as China, that gap would grow to $860bn.”
Thus the risk posed by the sequester: it magnifies strains in an already constrained scientific enterprise. And from that, it’s not hard to weigh the concept of decline, an actual, lasting erosion of essential national capacity. We can certainly avoid such an unforced error; we can decide to invest more, and more reliably in the future.
But we may not…and that choice has consequences that aren’t too difficult to perceive.
Images:Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding, c. 1567
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, 1632.
Todd
Tax cuts!
schrodinger's cat
Scientific research is one of the areas where the US is truly exceptional and has been #1 since WWII. The Republicans and their brain dead policies are pissing that advantage away.
JPL
@Todd: The Free Market will continue with research because….
The next two years, nothing will be passed, vacancies won’t be filled in the courts and any SEC nominee will be filibustered.
Welcome to wonderland.
bjacques
There’s utterly amazing science hitting my newsfeed every day, now. It’s there because of funding in the past. I want to see more the next few years. We cut off funding now, I won’t.
kerFuFFler
My son is finishing up his PhD. in chemistry and wondering if he is going to be able to use his degree professionally. So much for STEM degrees leading to secure jobs while keeping our country technologically cutting edge……
Mnemosyne
Grifting!
/Timmeh
Mike in NC
As people note here all the time, to Republicans, all the science you need to know can be found in the Bible.
P.S. – reviews for the upcoming History Channel miniseries agree it totally sucks.
ArchTeryx
As my job in molecular virology ends in September, I’m now seriously wondering if my fate is permanent unemployment.
Not a lot of other places want to hire a Ph.D. in a specialty like that, especially in the middle of a jobs recession/depression, and now the sequester on top of it.
Really don’t want to end my days on some freeway off-ramp, with a sign “will manufacture viruses for food.”
JPL
If things get any crazier in the South, I’ve made plans to move to New Penzance Island.
A friend of mine lives in Paul Broun’s district and delivers meals on wheels. The funding will be cut and those in need will still vote for Broun for Senator.
Anoniminous
@ArchTeryx:
1. Start your own Bio-Weapons Company
2. Come up with a nasty critter
3. Derive a vaccine for nasty critter
4. Release nasty critter
5. PROFIT!
Ted & Hellen
So…I’ll ask: What is Obama doing to be certain the weight of the cuts fall hardest and most viciously upon red states and districts?
Is he too going to go scorched earth and make Republican voters and officials suffer the most?
Or is he going to spread the pain evenly because “I am not a dictator?”
Which, by the way, sounds awfully whiny.
God, this country’s government sucks.
Dee Loralei
You put that “Pillars of Creation” link up as troll bait, didn’t you?
As a country we really need to invest more in basic scientific research.
JPL
@Ted & Hellen: The law is written in such a way that the President can’t do much. My rep is Tom Price and I hope Lockheed Martin gets screwed. Let all those who voted for him enjoy their furlough.
The President did have to sign what time the sequester went into effect. I was hoping he refused to sign it and then the repubs could impeach. Maybe that would wake up the country.
I know you are trolls who think he can just wiggle his nose but that’s not gonna help against these assholes.
Baud
Science needs to start shilling for Malaysia. I hear they pay well.
JCT
@kerFuFFler: My son is a freshman in Neuroscience at UCLA, already working in a lab and everything. My husband and I are both University professors in basic science (husband is a chemist, actually).
I can’t bring myself to discourage my boy, but it is tough to watch.
ArchTeryx
@Anoniminous: So, essentially…repeat the plot of Frank Herbert’s White Plague novel. (This was written shortly after PCR, the most basic of technologies, was invented. His villain, after his family was killed by the IRA, released a virus that was 100% fatal to women. Sadly, most of it concentrated on a Waterworld-style After The End plot and was just as boring. Children of Men handled the utter chaos that such a disease would bring much better).
TL;DR: Don’t tempt me. If I could invent a virus that made only Republican Congresscritters piss lime green, I would do it in a heartbeat.
JPL
Not that I expect much from MSM but I do expect them to explain that the sequester is not across the board cuts. It was designed to cut some areas a lot and others not at all.
By including defense, they knew wise men would not let it take effect but the repubs are not wise men.
daveNYC
@Ted & Hellen: Hell, even if Obama could tweak the cuts somewhat, there’s still the problem that the Deep South isn’t brimming with research universities and university towns tend towards blue. The defense cuts might hammer the south a bit more.
Higgs Boson's Mate
The Army already has fewer horses and mules now than it did at the end of WWI. Don’t these fools realize that the sequester will destroy our military’s cjances to close the Quadruped Gap?
Omnes Omnibus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Fewer bayonets too.
Gravenstone
@ArchTeryx: If you’re feeling particularly vindictive about the whole debacle, might I suggest you page through “The White Plague” by Frank Herbert? If you could somehow craft a virus that only targets Republicans …
Mike G
Repukes hate science, since it inconveniently contradicts the dogma of Republican Jesus, so this is a bonus for them.
Gravenstone
@ArchTeryx: Aaaannddd that’s what I get for not browsing the whole thread before posting.
Suffern ACE
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: So that explains the horse meat plant they’re building in New Mexico.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Suffern ACE:
Stand by for the MacWhinny Value Meal.
mclaren
America’s anti-intellectualism has long been noted by foreign observers, and thus it’s easy to predict that the sequester will prove immensely popular with the general public. At last, the United Snakes of Amnesia will be able to rid itself of those hated pointy-headed intellectual scientists. A real win-win for both American politics and the American people.
mclaren
Better watch out, Tom. Tell too much uncomfortable truth to the infantile self-deluded Balloon Juice commentariat, and they’ll start snarling “Go back to talking about stereos, you fucking douche bag.”
They’ll whine and whimper about your “constant doom and gloom.” Time to look on the bright side! Don’t worry, be happy!
lojasmo
@Ted & Hellen:
Fixed that for you, asshole.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: I see that you feel one of your turns coming on. Do you feel cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum?
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Your theme song is playing, the 1983 pop hit Obsession:
Baud
@mclaren:
Great song!
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: I wasn’t in a pop phase back in ’83.
Anne Laurie
@Ted & Hellen: Worst country on earth, except for 90% of the rest. And I’m not gonna give up my homeland just because half my fellow citizens are below average.
The School of Eeyore is not an easy philosophy, but its followers are seldom disappointed.
raven
@lojasmo: You know some of us have a pie filter so we DON”T have to read that shit.
mclaren
@lojasmo:
Ted & Helen’s question is indeed silly, because as the law is written there’s not much Obama can do. There’s a myth that the president has discretion in which services or funds to cut in different departments or different parts of the country, but that’s just not the way it works. The sequester mandates 9% cuts across the board, everywhere, in every department, in every government service. (With a tiny handful of exceptions like pay for active military personnel. We must slash worthless luxuries like scientific R&D to cure chronic diseases, but heaven forfend America stops paying its soldiers to rape and murder third world children.)
In fact, congress tried just in the last few days to pass a bogus bill that would have given the president such discretion. Obama promised to veto it, for the obvious reason that it was a transparently failed and infantile effort by the Republicans to shift the blame for this self-created disaster onto the executive branch from where it properly belongs…the legislative branch.
raven
@mclaren: you took the words right out of my mouth, douche bag.
beltane
@mclaren: I remember that song! I always thought it was by Human League but it is not.
eemom
@mclaren:
holy shit, what’s come over you? You’re talking sense.
mclaren
@raven:
Shorter raven: Browser add-ons allow me to filter out uncomfortable truths because I find thinking about and debating substantive issue unutterably wearisome.
ArchTeryx
@Gravenstone: Look at the bright side: great minds think alike!
I wouldn’t invent something that would be so vindictive as to kill Republicans. Their districts would replace them with even more aggressively stupid people. But give them something harmless, but that’d scare the living crap out of them, and that they had no cure for? Suddenly, Shit Would Get Real.
That’s why the “piss lime green” idea is far more appealing them just killing ’em.
mclaren
@beltane:
Little-known fact: Obsession was actually written by the (now-forgotten) songwriting duo of Holly Knight and Michael Des Barres for the (now-forgotten) movie A Night In Heaven in 1983 starring the (now-forgotten) actress Lesley Ann Warren.
The version of the song everyone rememebers, though, was re-recorded in 1984 by the group Animotion, and that’s the one that became a huge hit.
mclaren
@eemom:
Criticism of Obama does not mean that the sociopathic Republicans aren’t much worse. The obots often make good points and sometimes support good policies; the essential problem is that the obots’ uncritical support gives the Democratic party carte blanche to drift infinitely far to the right as the Republicans get increasingly crazy.
Our overall goal as progressives should be to turn America around and get progressive policies in place on the ground rather than supporting “our team” over “their team.” As Doug J. relentlessly points out, this “my team is better than your team” horse-race thinking is a deadly trap because it focuses on the cult of personality and rah-rah score-keeping instead of the essential goal of moving public policy back toward policies that actually work in the real world, which tend overwhelmingly to be liberal progressive policies.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@mclaren: Leslie And Warren! One of my favorite Sesame Street episodes.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@mclaren:
That is one the most supercilious comments in the history of B-J. The only uncomfortable thing about T&H’s comments is the combination of assholery and masochism that they convey. Yes, I pie out T&H for the same reason that I pied out BOB and She Who Will Not Be Named; some people aren’t adding to the discourse, they’re just trolling.
Rafer Janders
@ArchTeryx:
Eh. You can always go to work for some international terrorist organization or a repressive third world dictatorship.
Omnes Omnibus
@Rafer Janders: Becoming a Bond supervillian is another option.
mclaren
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Ted and Helen’s comments in this thread have been way off base. T&H’s comments in other threads have sometimes been keenly insightful.
Your attitude proves reminiscent of the Republicans. If you encounter something you don’t like, the Republican “solution” is to avoid that source of information entirely and drift off into a la-la-land of alternative information sources like Faux News, rather than critically evaluating the information source.
It’s eerie how the pie filter mirrors the hermetically sealed-off world of Fox News and suchlike conservative “news sources.”
The problem with filtering out sources of info you don’t like is that criticism is the only known way of reliably identifying and correcting errors.
Platypus
Thoughtful commentary as usual, Tom. The fact that even short periods of famine cull the scientific herd should be a strategic concern to Americans, as these cuts will drive many excellent scientists either out of science or out of the country.
The latter is a real possibility as science is an international enterprise and scientists will tend to go where the jobs are. Here in Toronto we worry about our scientific colleagues in the States but, as the same time, see your situation as an golden opportunity for “poaching” the best and the brightest. We’ve been quite successful lately in luring young and mid-career US scientists to Canada, where the funding levels are a better and “hard money” positions are the norm.
Here’s hoping for a quick end to the sequester.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Actually I think the scientists are the guys in the orange jumpsuits in the Bond supervillain’s volcano lair. The guy in charge is just a rich asshole who sits around petting a white cat, not a scientist.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: You have a point. And this is one reason I don’t use a pie filter.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@mclaren:
Well, thanks for the mind reading and for the extrapolation from there. My attitude is that of someone who’s piled on enough years to know that the future is no longer a limitless expanse of time. So, I’m not going to waste time wading through shit because there might be an occasional pony in it.
Tokyokie
@mclaren: But whether it’s being obliterated as NPC collateral damage or meeting a more imaginative and elaborate demise, the prospects for Bond supervillains and their minions are not especially palatable.
Ted & Hellen
@lojasmo:
That’s some weak ass drool, Losjismo.
And you worked so hard on it, too…
Ted & Hellen
@raven:
lol
and it was very important for you to let the class KNOW about your filter, wasn’t it. Tell us more about that, Craven.
TriassicSands
Science?
We don’t need no steenking science.
Citizen_X
[Even if the thread’s dead, what the hell:]
@mclaren:
Yes, the former is far more important than the latter. Unfortunately, the latter is unnecessary only when both parties are capable of proposing and supporting progressive policies. That’s happened before in US history; in the Progressive and Civil Rights eras, for instance.
But nowadays? Forget it. If you want good policy, you must suppress Republican power. That means picking “our team,” with all its idiotic problems.
serena1313
Yesterday afternoon I caught the tail-end of a discussion on NPR about the effects the sequester will have on scientific-medical research. Similar to what Tom discussed, the man, a researcher himself, stressed the long-term effects, the loss of talent & money, but also emphasized that any cuts in funds or grants for research projects currently underway means those projects will end, they are finished, gone, period.
He is not even sure if his own research (into memory loss or some sort of brain damage?) after 5 years will survive. If his claims of being on the verge of a breakthrough are true a lot of people would benefit greatly. But if his annual grant is not renewed his research is DOA. He said it will be another a decade or more before this particular type of research will even begin again (by someone other than himself) and even longer for a cure to be found.
Despite the consequential effects, both long & short term, Republicans have decided that sacrificing other people’s livelihoods, lives & property while putting our economic recovery at risk in return for an insignificant deficit reduction is a trade-off they can live with.
priscianus jr
Of course scientific and medical research is important. But journals and books in these fields tend to be grossly overpriced. Most of them have been taken over by international publishing conglomerates. This has forced libraries in this country to spend a much larger share of their budgets on scientific and medical journals. This has in turn left them with a much smaller share of their budgets to spend on books in the humanities, which has forced publishers of such books to jack up the prices so that they are printed in very small quantities and sold at very high prices, so that individuals can no longer afford them and they are soon out of print.
These publishers are milking the taxpayers an distorting research priorities. Government needs to bring down the costs of scientific literature the way they need to bring down the cost of health care.