Stimulus for science?

NPR had a nice story yesterday about NIH's hope for funding from the stimulus bill. Sounds like they'd like to lower the "funding line" percentile (sorry, I forget the actual term); they have NIH's acting director who claims that these proposals are "shovel-ready" in this quote here:

"Raynard Kington, the NIH's acting director, says those labs are also well-positioned to absorb a jolt of financial stimulus quickly. "We have literally 14,000 applications that have been peer reviewed, that have been found to be scientifically meritorious and that have been approved for funding — but that we don't have funds to support," he says."

While I'm sympathetic to the plight of the scientists, I'm going to guess that these are projects that are less scientifically meritorious than the ones that had been already funded. I don't know the state of NIH funding right now, but I don't think it's all that great. So, no argument from me.

A couple caveats: how much stimulus will this produce? Who will be, for lack of a better term, stimulated? Is VWR hurting? Are there out-of-work people in the academy? I suppose we could get postdocs to re-up for a fourth time... Lastly, let's not forget that there will be "leakage": foreign graduate students and postdocs send money home. While I don't really have a problem with that (my own father did it as a grad student in the 70's), that's money that doesn't get spent here.

Far be it from me to suggest that the NIH doesn't deserve more -- my lab got NIH money, as do most others. Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that NIH has funded my high school internship (2 summers), my undergraduate research and my doctoral group. So I like NIH a lot.

However, I believe that NSF and the truly physical sciences have been underfunded over the past ten to fifteen years, as it's much, much easier to get Mom and Pop Congress to cough up more funds to kill cancer (i.e. keep the Baby Boomer generation alive) than it is to convince people that materials science and electrical engineering is the real future. Obama had it right when he funded NSF more (from a percentage POV) than NIH. Here's hoping that he keeps that right.

• Credit for the incredibly hilarious and sad picture: rickz