The post The Fantastical Beasts of the Deep Gulf of Mexico first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In order to sustain a robust ocean science community, holistic fiscal planning is necessary to maintain a balance of investments between core research programs and infrastructure. To maintain a resolute focus on sustaining core research programs during flat or declining budgets, infrastructure expenses should not be allowed to escalate at the expense of core research programs…[NSF Ocean Sciences] should strive to reduce the costs of its major infrastructure and restore funding to core science…within the next five years…[NSF Ocean Sciences] should initiate an immediate 10% reduction in major infrastructure costs in their next budget, followed by an additional 10-20% decrease over the following five years. Cost savings should be applied directly to strengthening the core science programs, investing in technology development, and funding substantive partnerships to address the decadal science priorities, with the ultimate goal of achieving a rebalancing of major infrastructure costs to core science funding within the next five years.

I could not agree more with this recommendation.  Over the last decade, only 80% of available ship days were supported through funding.  Over the last few years the gap has increasingly widened. Why?

In order to use a research vessel, a scientists largely needs to have a grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the salaries, supplies, travel, and equipment required to conduct science. Ship time is requested but not included in the budget. If a grant is funded then NSF provides the necessary ship days through an arrangement with UNOLS (the U.S. Research Fleet).  The problem is that NSF is on average only funding scientists, no matter the research area, at rates less than 5% and in some areas this is closer to 3%.  When I wrote my first grant in 2000 the rates were closer to 15-20%.  With less grants funded less scientists are doing research and requiring ship time and the infrastructure.

However, the report falls considerably and disappointedly short in addressing the proverbial 300-pound elephant in the room.

the committee was asked to assume that the [NSF Ocean Science] budget is unlikely to grow significantly over the next decade, and given that cost inflation will continue at recent historical rates (~2%/year)

Across the board NSF funding as remained stable or declined, especially in the face of inflation.  This is problem is exacerbated with an overall larger research community (because universities/departments measure success on how many Ph.D. students they graduate annually) and increasing percentages of university cuts.  The last requires further explanation.  Universities tack on an additional percentage (indirect costs) to every grant to cover university administration and infrastructure.  The reasoning is the funds provide the equipment, buildings, and salaries of the administrative and facilities personnel to support the researcher.  In 2000 this percentage was near 20-25% of the total grant request.  Now most universities are over 50% and in extreme cases are well over 75%. This is a problem at the National Institute of health as well.

Overhead payments to universities conducting federally sponsored medical research have been increasing faster than grant values, cutting the efficiency of taxpayer support for scientific discovery, Congressional auditors warned last week.

Because of a lack of transparency about how these funds are actually spent, most researchers have concerns about these increases.  Perhaps rightly so. Federal auditors also think universities are over charging.

My recommendation: Any discussion of the funding of ocean science must tackle systemic and institutionalized practices within universities on the spending of grant dollars and growth of graduate programs.

In part, scientists are really discussing how to disperse bread crumbs among us all. In general, science in the U.S. is poorly funded; while the total number of dollars spent here is large, we only rank 6th in world in the proportion of gross domestic product invested into research. Yet, 85% of Americans express concerns about stagnant research funding and 77% feel we are losing our edge in science.

My recommendation: An increased federal commitment to funding science.

Yeah it’s that simple.   There is much to be gained from increased funding for science Every dollar we commit to science returns $2.21 in goods and services. Meeting the scientific, technological, logistical, and administrative demands of scientific exploration creates jobs and requires substantial personnel beyond just scientists and engineers. The materials purchased for this cause support even further employment and economic growth. Meeting scientific challenges will also disseminate ideas, knowledge, applications, and technology to the rest of society. This knowledge gained from basic research will form the backbone for applied research and economic gain later.

Overall, we need a major restructuring in how much we fund science, including ocean science, and how we spend those hard won dollars.

The post It’s Time to Overhaul the Funding of Ocean Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

YouCut – a first-of-its-kind project – is designed to defeat the permissive culture of runaway spending in Congress. It allows you to vote, both online and on your cell phone, on spending cuts that you want to see the House enact.

As part of the Youcut project, Representatives Adrian Smith and Eric Cantor earlier this month called for everyone to search NSF’s database for questionable grants that should not be funded.  Two representative grants, one supporting “soccer research” and another on “sounds in video games” were offered as examples of wasteful spending.  Dan Vergano at USA Today provides an excellent clarification of the actual research

For example, the soccer study turns out to be computer scientists studying how remotely connected teams form to conduct “nanoscience, environmental engineering, earthquake engineering, chemical sciences, media research and tobacco research.” And the “breaking things” study turns out to be acoustics experts ” pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems,” so that the U.S. military, among others, can create more realistic combat simulators for troops.

Both seem well worth funding.

Equally important is that targeting NSF to reduce wasteful spending is by no means an effective mechanism to reduce government spending.

If we defund NSF entirely it will save 0.69% of the entire budget. Way to go Adrian, you helped a lot a whole 1/100th of 1/100th of 25/1000ths of 1%!!!

While we are looking to save money…the $174,000 salary for 535 members of congress works out to be $93,090,000.  Most members of Congress will also earn between $1,000,000 and $4,000,000 in pension benefits.  But I digress, as we can all think of ways to trim the national budget.  Military spending anyone?  I think despite party affiliation, we all recognize a growing deficit and the pressing need for a balanced budget.

Peer review by the masses?

Interestingly, the collected panties of the science blogosphere were quite ruffled.  Initially, yours truly needed a team of experts, not to worry they were not NSF funded, to help remove my drawers from my highly intellectual ass.

Why should the public peer review my grants?  How dare they think they are experts on my field?  This is nothing short than an attack on NSF and science in general!  We fumed in around the web in our respective collectives loathing the public who dared to judge us.

We came up with witty metaphors to illustrate why this was a bad idea.  “Would we ask random people on the street to advise brain surgery.”

Ironically, the same people suggesting that the public should not evaluate NSF grants and heralding NSF’s peer review system were also recently discarding the expertise requirement and the sanctity of peer review to criticize a recent study’s findings of new arsenic based life form. And speaking of irony, I love the tweet that exclaimed this was the end of publically funded science. Ha the public is removing publically supported science.  How dare they!

At some point as I read through the blogs, I acquired a rather unfortunate and foul taste in my oral cavity.  While lambasting the idea of “allowing” the public to “review” grants, many crossed or approached a dangerous line. Some seem to be arguing that we should fight against the public playing a role in determining science funding.

Do the masses get a say?

Let’s not forget the National Science Foundation, created by a Congressional Act in 1950, is supported by taxpayer dollars.  Therefore, and without question, taxpayers, all of them, get a say in how NSF spends its money.  Just like they should be allowed input into every other facet of our government’s budget.  So the issue should not be, as so many proposed either intentionally or unintentionally by clouding the issue, whether the public can provide input but how the public can provide input.

David Bruggeman states it well and conveys many of my own thoughts (emphasis mine):

The execution of this project is pretty lousy, targeted at political outcomes much, much more than making meaningful policy changes.  Looking at the targeted programs in the YouCut program, most of them are relatively small in terms of funding (this week’s candidates are all under $50 million – a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the federal budget), and many seem to be targets more for political purposes than actual fraud, waste, unnecessary duplication or abuse.  The reporting mechanism is particularly lousy as it won’t be able to collect any meaningful data about grants or programs.  It’s more about what people don’t like, without room for any explanation.  Finally, a program like this, placed on the website of a political operation, makes it really easy to politicize the whole thing, and roll it into some pale imitation of Senator William Proxmire’s grandstandingback in the 1980s.  ‘Great soundbites’ lousy policies.

That said, I see no reason why the public shouldn’t provide feedback to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its grantees about grant proposals that they think are duplicative or wasteful. It is public money being spent, and if grantees can’t explain their work to the public, I don’t think they’ve earned the right to it. There is the matter of how such feedback is conducted.  Rep. Cantor is doing it the wrong way to achieve meaningful reform (and plenty of people already come up with grants for stuff that seems ridiculous), but he’s shown little evidence that he’s interested in such a thing.  The NSF and other research agencies can make their grant award data more readily accessible (it’s not obviously part of NSF’s Open Government Directive page) and engage the public with why various research grants deserve the funding they receive.  Who knows, you might just nudge scientific understanding communication up a bit.

So maybe it is our own damn fault for piss poor communication.  And I am sorry, you writing a blog that receives a few hundred hits a day and is mainly visited by your parents once a month, a few of your colleagues weekly, and other science bloggers perhaps daily, probably isn’t going to cut it any more (more on that juicy topic later).  Instead of continuously treating the public as the other to be feared, which is mainly what I observed this week, we need to get off our damn academic high horses and be better at bringing them into the fold.

Why we should publically fund science?

Instead of turning this whole Youcut fiasco into an opportunity on why basic science funding is important, many found it an opportunity to further segregate science from the public.  Shame on us all.

To rectify this here is a list of reasons why we should publically support science:

1. By publically funding science, we ensure scientific knowledge belongs to us and not kept in isolation by companies or individuals.
2. The only viable alternative to public funding is private funding.  This would result in the future of science becomes biased at the whim of those motivated by wealth.
3. Even those areas with direct human relevance are often not supported by the private sector. There is no profit in curing a rare tropical disease in a developing country.
4. A shift away from public funding of fundamental research would lead to long-term scientific stagnation.
5. Basic research of all types lays the groundwork for future and potentially more applied research.  It is part of our national infrastructure.
6. Basic research may in itself have unforeseen practical applications.
7. We has a society should continuously strive to expand our knowledge and explore new unknowns. Simply put, we as human beings are curious, and it is sensible to focus some of our collective resources on discovery.
8. Our knowledge is a source of national pride, or lack of it is a source of national disgrace.
9. Funding scientists to do research just doesn’t pay scientists it pays people downstream, e.g. administrative and janitorial support staffs, all the people who produce scientific equipment and supplies, and countless others.

Last, I like this quote I found at the Questionable Authority

The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.

Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Perhaps this article upsets you as a scientist.  Perhaps it will start another of those ultimately pointless blog flame wars amongst the science blogging collective that nobody in the real world gives damn about.  But we have done horrible job justifying why we spend billions of taxpayer dollars annually.  Indeed, I found precious few websites of why we should fund basic science and more on why we shouldn’t fund it.  I challenge you to add to my list above either here in the comments,on Twitter with the hashtag using the tag #YMoney4Sci, or on your blogs.  I pose the question to you: Why should we fund basic science?

The post From the Editor’s Desk: Public Funding of Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

…takes more than a Red Bull.  You got to have the right metabolic pathways.  NSF highlights the work of Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia who studies how microbes survive and thrive in a deep, dark, noxious, oxygen-depleted, super-salty ecosystems that may be like the primordial ooze that life originated from.  This work culminated in a paper a few weeks back in Nature Geoscience.  Joye’s team shows that an active mud volcano and quite brine pool support not only different types of microbes but different types of metabolism.  Both of these contrast to the microbes of the surrounding water and sediment.  Joye, the lead on the paper, hypothesizes this reflect differences in dissolved organic matter from below the sediment surface and the contrasting flow rates in fluids between the two sites.

The NSF Site has video of Samantha Joye discussing these discoveries.

Joye, S., Samarkin, V., Orcutt, B., MacDonald, I., Hinrichs, K., Elvert, M., Teske, A., Lloyd, K., Lever, M., Montoya, J., & Meile, C. (2009). Metabolic variability in seafloor brines revealed by carbon and sulphur dynamics Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo475

The post Thriving In Extreme Conditions first appeared on Deep Sea News.