[Senate Hearing 115-203]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 115-203
BROKEN BEAKERS: FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH
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HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FEDERAL SPENDING
OVERSIGHT AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
of the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 18, 2017
__________
Available via http://www.fdsys.gov
Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin, Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
RAND PAUL, Kentucky JON TESTER, Montana
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
JOHN HOEVEN, North Dakota MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire
STEVE DAINES, Montana KAMALA D. HARRIS, California
Christopher R. Hixon, Staff Director
Margaret E. Daum, Minority Staff Director
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Bonni Dinerstein, Hearing Clerk
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FEDERAL SPENDING OVERSIGHT AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
RAND PAUL, Kentucky, Chairman
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire
JOHN HOEVEN, Montana KAMALA D. HARRIS, California
Greg McNeill, Staff Director
Zachary Schram, Minority Staff Director
Kate Kielceski, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statement:
Page
Senator Paul................................................. 1
Senator Peters............................................... 3
Senator Harris............................................... 14
Senator Lankford............................................. 15
Senator Hassan............................................... 17
Prepared statement:
Senator Paul................................................. 21
Senator Peters............................................... 23
WITNESSES
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Brian A. Nosek, Ph.D., Executive Director, Center for Open
Science and Professor, Department of Psychology, University of
Virginia....................................................... 5
Terence Kealey, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Visiting Research Fellow,
Cato Institute................................................. 7
Rebecca Cunningham, M.D., Associate Vice President for Research,
Health Sciences, University of Michigan, Office of Research.... 9
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Cunningham, Rebecca M.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 37
Kealey, Terence, M.D., Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 30
Nosek, Brian A. Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 25
APPENDIX
Water Research Foundation prepared statement submitted for the
Record......................................................... 45
Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from:
Dr. Nosek.................................................... 48
Dr. Cunningham............................................... 51
BROKEN BEAKERS: FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR RESEARCH
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2017
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Federal Spending,
Oversight and Emergency Management,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:20 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Rand Paul,
Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Paul, Lankford, Peters, Hassan, and
Harris.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAUL\1\
Senator Paul. The hearing will come to order, and I want to
thank everybody for getting here sort of in a rush. We are
going to have to go vote a little after 3:00 p.m., but we
wanted to get as much done as possible because I think there
are six votes and there may not be a resumption of the hearing.
So we are going to be efficient and get to it and have a good
discussion.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Paul appears in the Appendix
on page 21.
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Today we are going to look at the Federal Government's role
in funding research. I am concerned that the government system
of supporting research is inefficient and often incentivizes
the wrong things, which leads to bad science and wasted
taxpayer dollars.
We have published examples, like this National Science
Foundation (NSF) study, which had money being spent on Ugandan
gambling habits. I just see no reason at all taxpayer money
would go to that, period. And we do it year after year after
year.
Senator Lankford found an National Institutes of Health
(NIH) study, $2 million, investigating if kids do not like food
that has been sneezed on. Are you more or less likely to eat
the food in front of you in the buffet line if someone sneezes
on it? That is absurd.
And who could forget the shrimp on a treadmill found by
Senator Coburn?
So how does this happen? More accurately, how does this
continue to happen? I remember as a kid in the 1970s seeing
Senator William Proxmire describe waste such as this as he gave
his Golden Fleece Awards, and here we are 40 years later still
with the same kind of questions.
Part of the problem is the old adage, ``Publish or
perish.'' Researchers that publish are more likely to get
Federal funding, and unique research is more publishable. So
how do unique projects get funded to begin with? At some
agencies, grant applicants themselves can actually recommend
who should review and make the recommendations on their grant.
So the people getting the money can recommend who approves
giving them the money. That is right. Researchers get to pick
the people who approve their funding. It does not sound very
objective.
Some grantsmanship books advise applicants to recommend
reviewers who will be champions for your work, while agency
guidelines suggest disqualifying those who have scientific
disagreement with you. So we teach people how to get grants,
and we say, ``Find people who agree with you and get them on
the committee. If you know anyone already disagrees with you,
make sure you keep them off the committee.''
This is baking in bias, and it is unacceptable. I have
introduced legislation that will prohibit this practice and
further require impartiality on grant review panels.
Another problem we found is downstream funding or taking
original grant money and giving it to other researchers for
projects that are often not consistent with the original grant.
The Federal Government gives someone money to do research. That
person then gives it to someone else, who even may give it to a
third or a fourth party. None of this is published in public
government databases.
One example of this problem was a study that its intent was
what makes for the perfect first date. But this is the subject
of the study: ``What makes for a perfect first date?'' The
original grant, to study how scientists collaborate on
scientific research. They were going to study collaboration on
scientific research. They somehow got to what makes for a
perfect first date.
It is difficult to discover how much these studies cost
because they are cobbled together from multiple sub-grants. My
bill would curtail this by requiring that all sub-grants, no
matter how removed from the original grant, be fully reported,
approved, and made public.
We also found that many grants are issued for rational but
broad research subjects and then are used for ridiculous
ancillary projects. For example, one researcher took money from
NIH to study drug and alcohol abuse and then published a paper
on how to select the best wines for your palate. I am not sure
how this prevents alcoholism, but I am pretty sure it must have
been interesting to the journal editors.
Our bill creates a special Inspector General (IG) to
oversee this and make sure that we are spending our money
wisely. Why should we do this? Well, we spend $700 billion more
than we take in every year, and we have a $20 trillion debt. It
is inexcusable just to keep shoveling good money after bad
without paying attention to how we spend it.
In our bill we also ask for something called a ``taxpayer
advocate for research'' that can look into these matters,
provide rigorous oversight, and report to Congress about such
follies.
Our bill also requires that committees reviewing grants
have at least one researcher from a scientific field unrelated
to the subject area to further remove personal bias. The idea
is to have a scientist from important areas of research, such
as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, sit in on
review committees that would review grants for wine tasting.
Maybe someone would say, ``You know what? We really have a lot
of people with Alzheimer's,'' or, ``We really have a lot of
people with heart disease.'' Maybe someone would say, ``Maybe
the shrimp on a treadmill is not something we have to study.''
Or maybe the money could be better spent somewhere else.
The last problem I will discuss is replicability. An
increasing body of work shows that, in an effort to publish, a
lot of research is not reproducible. This means that the study
cannot be duplicated by other scientists to produce
statistically similar results. That is a major problem, and it
goes back to this issue of publishing. Journal readers and
editors do not get excited about negative results, so the bias
is toward funding studies that prove a premise versus studies
that may disprove a premise.
My bill would seek to address this by creating greater
transparency to the whole process so taxpayers can know exactly
how their money is being used. This will allow the scientific
community and the public at large to be able to collectively
review and evaluate taxpayer-funded research. Hopefully, this
will deter study manipulation to prove hypotheses.
Some will say that the general public does not understand
science, but I do not think you need a Ph.D. to understand
people are less likely to choose food that has been sneezed on,
and they do not want that kind of research either.
With that, I would like to recognize our Ranking Member,
Senator Peters, for his opening statement.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS\1\
Senator Peters. Well, thank you, Chairman Paul, for holding
this hearing today. I would like to join Chairman Paul in
thanking our witnesses for taking the time to be with us here
today. I look forward to hearing your testimony.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appears in the
Appendix on page 23.
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One of the essential tasks of this Subcommittee is to
engage in honest evaluations of the public investments that we
make as a Nation and whether or not these investments are
indeed worthwhile. This is a responsibility to the taxpayer
that I personally take very seriously, and I am grateful to
have an opportunity to do so in a collaborative, bipartisan
way.
We are here today to discuss Federal funding for scientific
research, which I believe remains a necessary investment in our
collective future. Scientific research is the seed corn of
innovation and new discoveries, and Federal investments in
research and development (R&D) have led to discoveries that
have had profound impacts on public health, safety, and our
quality of life. Federally funded research has resulted in
widespread adoption of technologies as revolutionary as the
Internet, global posititioning system (GPS) satellites,
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the Human Genome Project
(HGP). This research results in economic growth in every State
and leads to the creation of tens of thousands of jobs in
entirely new sectors of the economy. It inspires the next
generation of Americans to believe that the sky is the limit
and that no challenge is impossible.
Even as the share of Federal investment remains at a
historic low as a percentage of overall gross domestic product
(GDP), supporting federally funded research remains as
important as ever to maintain America's competitive edge in an
increasingly competitive global economy.
Targeted Federal investments in research can accelerate,
catalyze, and encourage private sector innovation that may not
have otherwise occurred.
We should recognize that the Federal and private
contributions to the research and development enterprise are
not perfect substitutes for one another, but instead work in
tandem with each other, focusing on different stages in the R&D
cycle.
Last year, I was proud to introduce bipartisan legislation
with Senators Gardner, Thune, and Nelson known as the
``American Innovation and Competitiveness Act,'' which was
signed into law in January of this year. The bill was the
product of a year-long effort that began with a series of
roundtable discussions with representatives from science, from
education, business, and economic development communities on
how to improve the American research and innovation ecosystem.
Our legislation reauthorized a number of important programs
that promote research and scientific inquiry, strengthen
innovation and advance manufacturing, grow our skilled
workforce, and enhance American competitiveness around the
world.
The bill included a number of provisions that aim to reduce
regulatory and administrative burdens on academic researchers
so that they can spend more of their time on research and less
on paperwork.
Our bill also reaffirmed the independent merit review
process that guides NSF funding decisions and ensures that
research proposals are judged independently on their merits by
peers in the scientific community and without bias.
While certain basic research projects that receive Federal
funding certainly have some very silly sounding titles, further
examination may reveal the true scientific merit and potential
broader impacts of that work.
Before a proposal gets one penny of funding, reviewers have
to consider it based on criteria that include whether the
proposal increases economic competitiveness, advances public
health and welfare, or supports the national defense. It is
worth noting that only one in five proposals receive NSF
funding at all and that NSF is required to justify to the
public why these proposals were lucky enough to receive
funding.
Even as research begins with a clear question in mind, it
can be hard to quantify or predict exactly where the science
will lead. Rather than inject politics into this process, our
discussion today should instead concentrate on how to safeguard
the often unexpected process of discovery inherent in
scientific inquiry while ensuring that Federal dollars spent on
research remain completely and fully accountable to taxpayers.
Part of the solution may lie in breaking down barriers.
Rather than remain ensconced in the ivory tower of academia,
scientists should be prepared to engage in a robust exchange of
information with the general public about the goals and
benefits of their research.
The discussion we are having today is an important one. Our
country faces critical environmental, public health, and
economic challenges in the years ahead, but we must not shy
away from facing head on by leveraging the power of our
research enterprise to create a better tomorrow for each and
everyone.
Thank you again to our witnesses for your time today. I
look forward to the discussion.
Senator Paul. Thank you, Senator Peters.
With that, I will begin by introducing our first witness,
Brian Nosek. Dr. Nosek is the co-founder and executive director
of the Center for Open Science at the University of Virginia,
which works to increase the openness, integrity, and
reproducibility of scholarly research. Dr. Nosek holds a Ph.D.
from Yale and is professor of psychology at the University of
Virginia.
We are happy to have you here and to get your thoughts on
these critical issues. Dr. Nosek.
TESTIMONY OF BRIAN A. NOSEK, PH.D.,\1\ EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
CENTER FOR OPEN SCIENCE, AND PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF
PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
Mr. Nosek. Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, Members of
the Subcommittee, on behalf of myself and the Center for Open
Science, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the funding
of scientific research and the role of transparency and
reproducibility to maximize the return on those investments.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Nosek appears in the Appendix on
page 25.
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Science may be humanity's most important long-term
investment. The effort to accumulate knowledge has profound
consequences for growing the economy, security, and well-being
of American society. Some of the impact of scientific
investments are directly anticipated in the project aims. But
much of the impact is indirect. Research often leads to
unexpected insights and applications that are only appreciated
after the discovery, and these unexpected directions can
produce returns that are many orders of magnitude larger than
the original investment.
Simultaneously, there are opportunities to nudge the
culture of incentives in science to be even better stewards of
taxpayer support.
In 2002, I became a professor at the University of Virginia
in the Department of Psychology. My group does fundamental
research on implicit social cognition--thoughts and feelings
that occur outside of conscious awareness or conscious
control--and my lab has had Federal support from NIH and NSF.
Since 2013, I have been on extended leave from the
university because a graduate student and I spun out a
technology and culture change company from my lab called ``The
Center for Open Science.'' The center has a mission to increase
openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research and has
received support from NIH, NSF, Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), and Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Activity (IARPA).
Transparency and reproducibility are core values of science
because they are how science advances knowledge. When I make a
claim, you could believe it based my authority as an expert or
how confident I seem making it. But these are not sufficient
for scientific claims. For credibility of scientific claims, I
need to show you how I arrived at the claim. By showing you my
methodology, the data I collected, and how I analyzed and
interpreted that data, you can make an independent assessment.
You might recognize a flaw, think of an alternative
interpretation, or have an idea about how to extend what I did
to learn more. Moreover, by sharing how I arrived at that
claim, I give you the opportunity to reproduce the evidence. If
you can independently obtain similar results, then our
confidence in the claim increases. The challenge, and the
reason for the Center for Open Science's existence, is that the
culture of incentives for scientists sometimes undercuts the
core values of transparency and reproducibility.
The culture rewards novel, positive, clean results, and
there are few incentives for being open or reproducible. As a
consequence, we may be producing exciting results at the cost
of credibility of those results. And some evidence suggests
that the reproducibility of the published literature is lower
than desirable or expected. Federal research funding agencies
are aware of this problem and only have taken initial steps to
address it. This can change. If transparency and
reproducibility are incorporated into the policies and
incentives shaping researchers' behavior, we may reduce waste
and increase the pace and efficiency of discovery and
ultimately earn even greater returns on investment of taxpayer
dollars.
I will close with a specific suggestion that the Committee
could pursue to help further the efficiency in scientific
research, and that is to set the default to open for papers,
data, and materials. In 2013, Federal agencies were asked by
the White House to make a plan for improving the management and
accessibility of data and materials for the research that they
fund. Most agencies have completed this work. Congress could
take the next logical step and require each Federal research
funding agency to develop policies that require the research
data and materials generated by Federal dollars to be made
publicly accessible by default upon the publication of the
findings or completion of the grant period. Changing the
default from closed to open would alter cultural expectations
and behavior. Instead of needing to generate reasons to share
data, researchers would need to provide justification for delay
or to not share at all due to proprietary or privacy concerns.
Public investment in science leads to solutions, cures, and
entirely unexpected advancements that benefit American society.
Changing the default to open for scientific research data would
transform science, dramatically increase the return on
investment (ROI) from publicly funded research, and accelerate
progress. This is not a difficult proposition and concept, but
it does require a mandate. This one action would dramatically
increase the public benefit from our investments in science.
Thank you, Members of the Committee, for your continuing
support of science and for the opportunity to speak with you
today.
Senator Paul. Thank you, Dr. Nosek.
Our next witness is Terence Kealey. He is a senior research
fellow at the Cato Institute. Prior to joining Cato in 2014, he
served as president of the University of Buckingham, the only
university in Britain to be financially independent from the
government. He has also lectured in clinical biochemistry at
the University of Cambridge and is the author of ``The Economic
Laws of Scientific Research.'' Dr. Kealey holds an M.D. from
the University of London and a Ph.D. in metabolic chemistry
from Oxford. During his laboratory career, he focused on the
study of inflammatory skin conditions.
Thank you for being here, and we look forward to your
opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF TERENCE KEALEY, M.D., PH.D.,\1\ SENIOR VISITING
RESEARCH FELLOW, CATO INSTITUTE
Dr. Kealey. Thank you very much for having invited me.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Kealey appears in the Appendix on
page 30.
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I am very glad to be speaking after Dr. Nosek because in a
sense my five minutes is about addressing how we got to a
situation where Brian Nosek's research became so important.
In my testimony I provide the evidence and, with great
respect to Senator Peters, I have to say that there is, I am
afraid, simply no evidence that economic growth or
technological growth that leads into economic growth is in any
way benefited by the Federal funding of science. It is widely
believed that government should fund science. It is based on a
model of what science is that I regret is unscientific, and in
my testimony I hope I have shown pretty clearly that the
government in this country and no other government needs fund
science, at least for economic reasons.
Nonetheless, I am going to take the testimony as read. I am
not going to revisit it. I am just going to accept that that is
what governments do. They fund science. And what they do in
consequence is they impose a particular model on science, which
is called ``the linear model,'' which actually has a history of
400 years. It was first described by Francis Bacon 400 years
ago in England. And the model says, very much as Senator Peters
suggested and very much as Dr. Nosek suggested, that what you
need is you need a group of scientists doing pure research in
universities and similar research institutions where they are
free to follow their own curiosity and to follow where the
science takes them. And then as a consequence of that,
knowledge leaks out to the rest of the world and is then turned
into technological and other forms of sociological advance.
That is not how science happens in the free market. In the
market, scientists who are embedded within companies and
industry are embedded very tightly with technologists, with
other members of the company, even with marketing. They are
part of a commercial enterprise. The result, therefore, is that
there are two ways of judging scientists, and in industry,
scientists are ultimately judged by their technology. How does
a scientist's research ultimately lead to technology that is of
benefit, of course, immediately to the company and to the
stockholders but to society at large that way?
As Daniel Sarewitz of the University of Arizona said in a
very influential essay last year, it is technology that keeps
science honest. But the government funding of science makes
scientists answerable not to technology, not to stockholders,
but to fellow scientists. And that leads directly to the two
problems that Senator Paul indicated.
First, the problem with peer review is that you end up with
a group of people all agreeing with each other on which
particular paradigm they wish to support, and often
unconsciously--scientists are profoundly honest people, but,
nonetheless, they have their own interests, and unconsciously
supporting paradigms that, if they were tested against the
technological market, would never have survived for nearly as
long as they do survive in the academic world. Such an example
might be the 40-year history of governments telling us not to
eat fat, which was based on a group of scientists telling
another group of scientists that they should not eat fat and
all agreeing with each other. It was, of course, wrong.
But the other problem, again, as Dr. Nosek and Senator Paul
indicated, is that scientists are not judged by what they
achieve. They are judged by the numbers of papers they publish,
at least in part, and they are judged by which journals they
are published in. So to be savage about this, scientists are
not judged by what they achieve; they are judged by what they
write. The consequence of that is that scientists are
encouraged to do the sort of things that Brian Nosek has picked
up, such as produce papers that are not easily reproduced. The
reason they produce such papers is the benchmark for success is
having the paper accepted, not making an important advance for
humanity.
So, to conclude, this country has engaged since 1950, when
the NSF was created, in an interesting experiment of the
Federal Government funding science. It has had no impact on
fundamental rates of economic growth. What it has done, it has
created a micro-climate or a niche where scientific pathologies
have proliferated, and the answer actually is to question anew
whether government should be funding science at all.
Thank you.
Senator Peters. Well, I have the great pleasure to
introduce a fellow Michigander, Dr. Rebecca Cunningham, who is
representing not only the State of Michigan but a great
American university, the University of Michigan. Of course, we
are blessed with a number of great universities in our State,
but it is great to have Dr. Cunningham here. She is the
Associate Vice President for Health Sciences Research for the
University, Professor for the University of Michigan's
Department of Emergency Medicine, and a Professor in Health
Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan
School of Public Health.
Dr. Cunningham has a very distinguished career in
conducting clinical trials focused on public health
interventions in health settings, such as the emergency
department. Her past clinical trials have focused on
interventions in the emergency room using technology to
overcome barriers to reaching youth, to prevent alcohol and
prescription opioid misuse. This is a matter, of course, of
great interest to this Committee, and I applaud all of your
efforts in that area.
Her federally funded research over the last 18 years has
focused on improving the health of children and young adults
and those seeking emergency health services. Also, notably, Dr.
Cunningham started her career as an attending physician at
Hurley Hospital in Flint, Michigan.
Thank you, Dr. Cunningham, for your service, and thank you
for testifying here today and representing us all very well.
TESTIMONY OF REBECCA CUNNINGHAM, M.D.,\1\ ASSOCIATE VICE
PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH--HEALTH SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
OFFICE OF RESEARCH
Dr. Cunningham. Thank you for that introduction. Good
afternoon, Chairman Paul, Ranking Member Peters, and Members of
the Subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to speak with you
today about the value of federally funded research. I also want
to give special thanks to Ranking Member Peters for his work on
crafting and securing passage of the American Innovation and
Competitiveness Act which serves to support the critical
Federal research enterprise that I am here to talk with you
about today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Dr. Cunningham appears in the
Appendix on page 37.
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Our great Nation is what it is today because of Federal
investments in research. We are leaders in innovation because
of these investments, our economy is strong because of these
investments, and our top research institutions are the envy of
the world because of these investments.
This investment has supported--and must continue to
support--basic, curiosity-driven research alongside applied
research and engineering. The knowledge that we derive from
fundamental research is the seed to innovations like self-
driving cars and life-saving drugs. Another example is the
iPad; without Federal research investments to deepen our
understanding of basic scientific principles across many
agencies, engineers never would have been able to design the
core software and components that made the iPad such a ground-
breaking device. This is just one example of the possibilities
that come out of fundamental research: innovations that our
imaginations cannot always comprehend.
I have seen the benefits of these innovations firsthand. As
an emergency physician, I have seen the success of drugs and
new medical technologies that allow patients to walk out of the
hospital today who would have died when I was a medical
student. I have sat with the spouses, parents, and children of
those who have fallen victim to the epidemic of opioid overdose
in our Nation. Over the past 20 years, funded by the NIH and
the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), I and our research team
and lab have worked to develop interventions for the treatment
of children impacted by substance abuse or trauma who flood our
emergency rooms, and such research has prevented many more from
needing our care.
For example, I am partnering with scientists and community
leaders to address the opioid epidemic that is impacting every
community across our Nation. Translating the underlying science
of opioids into policy solutions relies on fundamental
research. From synthetic chemistry funded by the NSF to basic
neuroscience funded by the NIH, policies based on sound
fundamental science and life-saving medical breakthroughs will
ultimately lead to the solutions that we cannot yet imagine but
need for the opioid crisis.
Federal support for research has been part of our country's
fabric dating back to the start of the Republic in the 1700s.
In the past 70 years alone, the role of funding in game-
changing innovations has been tremendous. For example, the
development of the GPS, supercomputing, the visible light-
emitting diode (LED), the technology behind the MRI machine
that aids many of my patients in diagnosis of brain disease
daily, all have their roots in Federal investments in public
sector researchers.
Federal investments in research also help drive our economy
and train our future Science, Technology, Engineering and Math
(STEM) workforce. At the University of Michigan, there were 444
new inventions last year and 12 startup companies launched
based on technologies developed by our researchers. Federally
funded research supports local economies all across the Nation
by providing billions of dollars each year to vendors--from
small businesses to biotech companies--who are making devices,
software, and other equipment needed to perform research.
In the past 15 years, vendor spending to support research
at the University of Michigan has created 221,000 manufacturing
jobs and 641,000 health care jobs. This investment also
supports thousands of employees working in laboratories and
research institutions across the country, many of whom the
largest recipients by far are our students. It is this next
generation of students that will drive and support American
innovation and competitiveness in the future and lead many of
the industries that will take us to success.
Flat funding rates in Federal investments in research--and
in many cases declining funding rates--over the last decade
have already shown impacts on our scientific talent pipeline,
driving away the next generation of leaders and innovators from
careers in research. This decline is happening while other
countries see the clear return on investment in government-
sponsored research and are doubling down on their efforts to
become global leaders. Indeed, several metrics related to
innovation and scientific impact already show that the United
States is losing ground to countries like China.
This trend will only continue at our current level of
research investment, and the consequences will impact the
American economy as well as our national security. For the
United States to remain a global leader, we need to lead in
innovation, science, and research. American industry leaders
recognize that the Federal Government's investment in basic
science is critical in driving innovation, productivity, and
economic growth. For example, hundreds of business leaders
signed the Innovation Imperative statement, which was a call to
action for Federal funding increases in basic scientific
research.
Thank you again for this opportunity to discuss the
importance of Federal investments in research. I would be happy
to answer any questions.
Senator Paul. Thank you all for your testimony.
I was intrigued, Dr. Kealey, by your sort of compare and
contrast of the way industry works versus how we judge science
in universities. Tell me again, what was the name of the author
of the paper you said that talked about technology keeps
scientists honest?
Dr. Kealey. Daniel Sarewitz, in a journal called ``New
Atlantis.'' It is a very good article.
Senator Paul. OK. I was intrigued by the contrast between
how technology keeps scientists honest because it basically has
to work, and the stuff that works in rewarding the stuff that
does not work, may sit around. But it is kind of interesting
because people on the left will say, well, we will never get
any basic science research, serendipity and all of these things
where people put some mold in a dish and discover penicillin
are never going to happen if it is just industry. But I was
thinking of, even in my State, we have Corning, who has been
famous for developing practical uses of science. They developed
something back in the 1960s--they call it now ``Gorilla
Glass,'' but it was a technology for making this glass. They
did not have a use for it for 50 years. But they kept it in
their files. They patented it. And now it is the glass on your
cell phone. And it is an amazing thing. I think it drives their
whole industry. It drives their whole company now, what they
make, the money they make off of this. So I think serendipity
and things can come from industry as well.
But in contrasting that with the university where the
reward is not whether your science is necessarily good or
produces anything of value to society or economic growth, but
whether or not it is published, how many times it is published,
and in what journals.
I guess my question to you, though, would be: In looking at
this contrast, what do you think of the other side's argument
that says, well, we will not get basic science research, we
will not get serendipity, we will not get all these clever
little things that just happen to turn up from being curious if
we had science led by technology and industry?
Dr. Kealey. Well, it is a myth that industry does not
support basic science. Industry is very generous toward basic
science. Because, of course, industry needs basic science. But
the real lesson is historical. Despite Dr. Cunningham's
statement that the Federal Government has supported science
throughout the history of the Republic, actually as recently as
1940 the Federal Government was funding only about 20 percent
of American science or R&D. You became the richest country in
the world in 1890 under a regime of complete laissez-faire, and
you have only got to look at some of the Senate records of the
Senate opposition even to taking the money for the Smithsonian
Institution, which was opposed by a number of Senators, to
realize how long the suspicion has been of American funding of
science by the Federal Government.
The NSF was created as part of the Truman Doctrine. It was
Truman deciding that he was going to forget George Washington's
statement of no foreign entanglements. America was now going to
get involved with foreign entanglements, which meant he needed
defense research to support his defense initiatives.
All that happened as a consequence of that was crowding
out. What people forget is the phenomenon of crowding out. When
the State funds something, the private sector withdraws. Dr.
Cunningham points out that companies like private--the
government funding science. Of course they do. Companies are
very fond of corporate welfare. Crowding out in the phenomenon
that explains why there is no evidence anywhere that the
government funding of science has ever stimulated economic
growth or, indeed, the amount of pure science. Industry cannot
survive without pure science, and it funds it very generously.
Senator Paul. Senator Peters.
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Cunningham, I would like you to expound a little bit on
some of the points that you made. First I want to say that we
know the scientific enterprise and the ability to advance
scientific knowledge is a complex ecosystem, and it is not
mutually exclusive. It is not just private industry. It is not
just in academia. It is about the interaction between all of
these entities working together and churning the innovation
that comes out of the scientific enterprise. So in my mind,
there is a role for Federal research. Certainly private
industry is a big part of it. In fact, most investment in
research is done with private industry today.
But I would like you to speak a little bit just from your
own experience. Can you provide an example of research that you
have done over the many years that you believe just simply
would not have been done if it was not for Federal investment?
Dr. Cunningham. Sure. Thank you. A lot of the work that we
have done has been on looking at ways that we can get
adolescents and teenagers who are at risk for substance use and
opioid misuse to make safer decisions and to be safer after
leaving the emergency department. That is not the type of
research that typically would be of interest to industry, would
have an immediate economic gain to industry. It is of
tremendous help and benefit to the greater public health, and
that type of prevention work is critical to our public safety,
public health, and eventually hopefully to the opioid epidemic
that we face.
Senator Peters. So it is not something you would see
pharmaceutical companies doing?
Dr. Cunningham. That type of prevention work is not done by
pharmaceutical companies.
Senator Peters. I also know that the University of
Michigan, just from my own personal experience, is an
incredible engine of economic growth in our State. I think it
is in no small part because of the tremendous research that is
being done at the University of Michigan as well as our other
research universities that have created intellectual hubs that
spread out throughout the economy, throughout the business
sector.
Considering your role in the Office of Research, could you
provide some examples of basic research at the University of
Michigan that you believe has led to significant economic
growth?
Dr. Cunningham. Yes, thank you. The University of Michigan
is a tremendous--there is tremendous spillover throughout the
State. First of all, I can say, as I mentioned, the 444 new
inventions last year and the 12 new startup companies in
technologies based on our researchers. A new startup happens
about every four weeks out of the university research alone.
Recently, a company, Neurable, was created by University of
Michigan scientists who were studying foundational questions
around brain waves. They have then gone on to develop a cap
that can help you think about making things move just by
wearing the cap. That will likely go on to have great economic
benefits down the road. That is really in its early stages
right now, but came from foundational research and foundational
science.
I think also the spillover effect in terms of training
cannot be overlooked. For example, a researcher that did
foundational work on semiconductors that went on to being part
of Samsung screens came out of the University of Michigan, has
had big implications for cheaper and more efficient solar
cells, which have impacted our economy, also influenced
national security. And really importantly to think about is
while that researcher was doing that federally funded research,
they also trained 27 post-docs and 52 Ph.D. students, many of
whom went on to be faculty and leaders and eventually leaders
of companies and leaders of industry. They were trained with
this foundational research. That type of spillover effect is
really critical.
Also, when we talk about benefits to the economy, it is
important to think about that type of linear model has been
rethought more recently by many scholars in terms of an
innovation ecosystem. Really, we do not see it anymore as a
linear model of pure science happening at the institutional
level that eventually trickles down in a linear way to industry
and to the economy. Instead, we really see much more of what we
call ``tire track model'' where there is a lot of interaction
back and forth even at early levels between basic scientists
and industry and basic scientists and the public sector. Those
inform each other, and they train each other. In the end we
wind up with an innovation ecosystem that is a lot stronger.
I think the university as well as other academics have also
come to see that we can do better in moving this pipeline
faster down the road, and some federally funded programs have
helped that. For example, the University of Michigan has what
is called the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CSTSA)
program, which is designed specifically to take early stage
work and help investigators move it quicker down a pipeline by
connecting basic scientists who often cannot speak outside of
their field because they are very much experts in a particular
field with folks who have applied and practiced in industry
work, to be able to have that interaction happen faster and
really be synergistic.
Senator Peters. Partially in response to criticism from
Members of Congress about silly sounding research grants--we
heard some examples of those here earlier today--the NSF issued
guidance in 2013 to researchers on how to write titles and
abstracts in a way that enhances public understanding of
scientific research. It encourages researchers to explain the
significance of their projects in a non-technical manner. This
change may seem insignificant, but I think it really
underscores the importance of building connections between the
scientific community and the general public, while certainly
reminding Americans that scientific innovation and research
benefits the whole country in many ways.
I am curious about the panel's thoughts on what scientists
can do to better communicate the importance of their research
to the public and to dispel some of these misconceptions about
silly sounding research. I will start with you, Dr. Cunningham,
and then I think we will only have time for Dr. Nosek. If you
would follow up, I would appreciate it. Dr. Cunningham.
Dr. Cunningham. I think we all have a responsibility to
communicate our science better. I think although silly sounding
science to non-scientists may be difficult to understand the
ultimate meaning behind, we are responsible for communicating
better. There are a number of ways that that can happen. Our
CDC center that I currently direct takes each of our science
publications that comes out and works with communications
staff, specifically pairing scientists with non-scientists in
that realm to help create one-page sheets that can be easily
understood for the public on exactly what it is we are doing
and how that might inform our public practice and health. I
think that is one manner.
There are a number of other programs that are like that at
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the
Center for Public Engagement in Technology, a Science Policy
Fellows Program that is working to engage scientists in
communicating that information better to the public.
Senator Paul. Thank you.
We are going to go to Senator Harris, and I apologize, but
we are going to do five minutes so we can try to get through
everybody, because we are getting ready to have to go vote.
Senator Harris.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HARRIS
Senator Harris. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will tell you, this issue is very personal to me. My
mother was a scientist, an endocrinologist. She advised NIH.
She did her research at a number of places, but most recently
before passing, at UC-Berkeley she maintained a lab for years.
In fact, my first job was cleaning pipettes in my mother's lab.
I was awful. She fired me. But there you go.
Being from California, we take a certain level of pride,
perhaps--and please forgive any bravado--but Google's search
engine, its foundational tool, came from federally funded
research at Stanford; the nicotine patch that has helped
millions of people quit smoking came from federally funded
research at UCLA; augmented reality, military training, from
federally funded research at USC; the hepatitis B vaccine, from
federally funded research at UCSF; and image sensory
technology, which is in our cell phones, from federally funded
research at CalTech. So I add that list to the list of those
discoveries that you, Dr. Cunningham, have outlined.
My question then is: As we recognize all of that, can you
also talk a bit about the concern that many of us have that
were it not for federally funded research, the research that
would be conducted would be motivated by what is profitable and
not necessarily what impacts the largest number of people? In
particular, my concern is for cures that we need for rare
diseases as an example, those diseases that may impact a few
number of people, and so the benefit will be to a few number of
people and, therefore, will not necessarily be capable of being
marketed and purchased by a lot of people. What can you say
about that concern? And I will use as examples of those kinds
of diseases that also impact specific racial or ethnic groups,
and that can be anything from lupus to sickle cell to Tay-
Sachs. What is your perspective on that?
Dr. Cunningham. Thank you for asking that question. It is
really important that the research that is funded by the
Federal Government often has a long timeline to show a result.
So that shorter timeline, which is really important to industry
and to industry-funded studies is not going to be profitable,
as you say, for these rare diseases or for diseases that are
prevention-focused or really focused on a greater public good
necessarily, but will not show an immediate return on
investment. These are the types of long-term investments that
we need to make at the Federal level. That is the kind of
investment that Federal research has shown to be able to do to
invest in things that may be curiosity-driven at this time but
might lead to an end result, which is a cure for a rare
disease.
I like the example of the honeybees, which is a silly
sounding science study that was done by NSF, where scientists
were looking into how honeybees found their nectar in a hive
and why that would be relevant, and that was funded many years
ago. Later on, that went on to give the answers to how to do
Web algorithms for the Internet. So the kind of basic science
research that might be funded now might be what gives the cure
for your rare disease in 15 or 20 years from now, and that is
not an investment that anyone could know in the room up front
would cure that disease and is in the greater public good to
take care of looking into that curiosity to understand the
basic science.
Senator Harris. You mentioned return on investment. So
there are a lot of experts that I have read who talk about
every dollar invested in biomedical research funding, for every
dollar the economy gains roughly $2. And it is even greater for
certain projects. For example, the United States invested $3.8
billion in the Human Genome Project, which resulted in nearly
$1 trillion in economic growth, which if you do the math on
that is a 178:1 return on investment. So these types of Federal
R&D investments certainly do help support the economy and jobs.
In California, 38,000 Californians have benefited from the
Genome Project that I mentioned.
Can you explain why the private sector might not be willing
to put an investment in biomedical research on projects that
the government has funded? The concern that we have is
nationwide Federal funding of NIH alone supports almost 380,000
jobs and generates about $65 billion in economic activity
across the United States. I see my time is running short, and
we have to take a vote. So perhaps we can talk about that in
the continuing conversation. I will yield to my colleagues.
Senator Paul. Senator Lankford.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD
Senator Lankford. Thank you, and thanks to all of you for
being here and being a part of the dialogue on it.
As we go through some of the research, I am not opposed to
research, and I am grateful every time I pick up my cell phone
or visit a doctor's office for research in the past. The
question is: federally funded research, should the information
be transparent and available to everyone else? How quickly does
that get out? How does that get out? The diversity of the
selection teams, if that ends up being the same teams selecting
over and over again and directing funds, and then the national
benefit of that. And when I get to the national benefit of it,
as Senator Peters mentioned, there are times that I will look
at some studies, as has already been mentioned, studies about
people sneezing on a child's food and are they more or less
likely to be able to take that. But I can go to other studies
that I have had the opportunity to be able to look at. NSF
funded a study on the connection between religion and politics
and cemeteries in Iceland. NSF also did a study on 500-year-old
fish bones to study social structures in Tanzania. There was a
study done on senior dating habits, on how likely seniors are
to date and what their preferences are in dating.
Now, again, senior dating may be fascinating research, but
I am not necessarily assured that it is federally necessary.
Match.com may be very interested in that and lots of other
folks may as a way to be able to partner up seniors, but is
that a national priority?
So the questions that I have circle around how we are doing
selections of this: Who is doing the selection of the funding?
What is fundamental research and what really should be applied
research? Is the Federal Government really focusing in on
fundamental research?
My first question really deals with this issue of who is
making the decision when these grants come? A quick comment on
it, then I want to open this up.
I have talked to researchers at universities that say,
``For the exact same research, I write it one way to apply to
NIH; I write it another way to try to get a grant from NSF. I
really do not care where I get the funding from, but I write
the grant in a way that they want me to write it, trying to
figure out who is going to be able to give me the dollars for
it. Then I will target my research based on whoever will give
me the dollars for it.'' That to me is a red flag. I understand
if you get an NIH grant, you have to tell NSF that you have it.
But if you are applying for both simultaneously, they do not
know what the other one is getting, and I have gone back to be
able to verify that.
Let us start with the basics. The decision of how a grant
is done, these decisionmaking boards, is there diversity in the
boards? Do those boards transition and change over? Or is it
basically the same people doing approvals consistently? And
then what follow up happens from there? So anybody can take
that if they choose to.
Mr. Nosek. Thank you, Senator Lankford, for the question. I
cannot speak to the details of how reviews happen across the
various agencies, except for having been myself on both sides
of it, having been a reviewer of grants and having been a
submitter of grants. In the context of that experience,
agreeing to be a reviewer of a grant, the first step that I go
through is to assess from the initial information that they
provide whether I have the qualifications to review it at all.
If I were to make a wild guess, I would to say if I were to
look at the breadth of NSF-funded grants, probably 90 percent
of them I would not feel like I had the competence to review
myself. There is just too much information that is depth
information that I do not have in insight for how it is to
evaluate that.
The second challenge, I think, of the points that you were
mentioning relating to how the grants are characterized--and
Senator Paul mentioned this as well--I think is a critical one,
which is it is easy to see the title of a grant as indicating
something absurd, like scientists wanted to study shrimp on a
treadmill? What were they thinking in deciding that that was a
reasonable research question. The challenge--and I think Dr.
Cunningham was correct--is the translation challenge that
researchers need to do better at, which is it starts with a
theoretical question, an interest of principles. How is it that
this particular thing works? I do not know this shrimp example,
but I imagine, just guessing, that it was researchers
interested in biomechanics. How is it that biomechanics work in
some way? So they had to come up with how is it that we test
it. How do we operationalize that theoretical question into
something that is meaningful to test? It is the
operationalization that is often very apparent and very easy to
sort of misunderstand as something silly when it is actually
testing something deeper. That deeper question, the theoretical
question, I think researchers need to do a much better job of
surfacing as the point of the research so that taxpayers can
recognize what the value is of----
Senator Lankford. All right. Let me make just a quick
comment on this, because I would love to be able to work in a
bipartisan way on this, because I think there is a lot of
common agreement on it. Science that is paid for by the Federal
tax dollars should not be then retained by individuals saying,
``I am going to hang onto that.'' If it was done for the public
good, it needs to be publicly available as that science. I
think that should be a given. That is not always so at this
point.
There should be diverse selection teams. If it is the same
team selecting the same type, they are going to select the same
type of research year after year from the same universities
year after year. If you are one of those universities that
benefits from that, you will always want that to stay status
quo. But I think it is not how we get diverse backgrounds on
it, and I think we need to make sure it actually has national
benefit and is fundamental research, not something that does
not have national benefit. I think we can find agreement on
that, and I would love to be able to finish that work.
Senator Paul. A quick comment. There is a possibility these
studies are not silly and we need better titles so they are not
silly, or there is a possibility they are silly. Tasting wine
and studying alcoholism. Silly. Sneezing on food, should we eat
it? It is not the problem with the title or translating good
research into a bad title. Maybe the research should not be
done. Senator Hassan.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN
Senator Hassan. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and to our
Ranking Member as well. And thank you, witnesses, for being
here. I apologize because as soon as I get done asking
questions, I think we are all going to bolt, and I apologize
for that, but we have a vote.
I will just make a quick comment as well. I still remember
one of the early public health challenges I dealt with in
public life was the onset of Triple E, which is a kind of
mosquito-borne illness that is rare but happened to occur in my
portion of my State of New Hampshire when I was in the State
Senate. There was not any private sector interest in developing
a vaccination for Triple E because it is so rare that the
investment in doing it would not be paid back in any way given
the rarity of the disease. So I watched constituents deeply
debilitated by this disease and who lost their lives to this
disease, in part because there was no economic incentive for
developing the kind of treatment. So I think it is really
important to remember the public purpose.
I did to that point want to ask Dr. Cunningham a question
based on your testimony. You discussed your personal
experiences dealing with the heroin, fentanyl, and opioid
crisis, an epidemic which is having a truly devastating impact
on communities in New Hampshire and across the country. I would
like to highlight the important connection you made in your
testimony between addressing the epidemic and federally funded
research.
Another example comes once again from my home State of New
Hampshire. In order to fight this epidemic, it is critical that
we understand the current trends of the crisis across the
United States. The National Drug Early Warning System is an
important system that helps us monitor emerging drug trends to
enable health experts, researchers, and concerned citizens
across the country to respond quickly to potential outbreaks.
This surveillance system is supported by grants from the
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
Last year, the National Drug Early Warning System released
a critical report based on research conducted by Dr. Lisa
Marsch at Dartmouth, as well as New Hampshire public health
experts at High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), and
the State Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. This report
brings us closer to understanding the patterns, causes, and
effect of heroin, fentanyl, and opioid misuse in our
communities, and it is my understanding that NIH and the
National Institute on Drug Abuse are expanding their funding
for additional research in New Hampshire to continue to help
improve our response to this epidemic.
Dr. Cunningham, do you agree that this kind of Federal
funding is critical to help public health researchers such as
yourself determine how we can best respond to the ongoing
substance misuse crisis?
Dr. Cunningham. Thank you for the question. The Federal
research is completely critical. We have a horrific epidemic on
our hands with opioid and heroin overdose. Before we throw and
waste Federal dollars at programs that may or may not work, we
need to understand which programs are actually going to make a
difference and decrease and save lives. We will do that by
rigorous behavioral research being done by NIDA and the CDC and
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA),
that are well designed, well reviewed by our peers, with very
diverse panels of people from all across the country to try to
understand how those are going to be the best solutions so that
eventually, when we then go to implement the solutions into
local communities with local values, we know that they will
work and we will know that those solutions that we are throwing
out there will not actually do harm because they have not been
rigorously tested by scientists. Thank you.
Senator Hassan. Well, thank you very much. In the interest
of getting us to our vote, I will conclude. Thanks. Thank you
again, witnesses.
Senator Paul. Thank you.
Senator Peters, do you have a statement that you would like
to make?
Senator Peters. I think we are ready to vote.
Senator Paul. OK. Well, thanks, everybody, for appearing. I
apologize a little bit for the rushed schedule, but we never
know when we are going to vote until about 20 minutes before we
vote, and we have a series of votes coming up.
I think the testimony was good. From my point of view, I
would just say that we do have a problem, and we need to admit
we have a problem. It is not that we do not have silly research
going on. We do have silly research going on. It is not just
the title, and cleverly changing the title to obscure the
silliness of the project will not make it any less silly. What
we need to do is have less silly research so we take our
precious dollars that we have and they are spent more wisely.
I think if we look at the way they are approved, I think we
ought to consider that you should not get to pick the people
approving your money. That makes obvious sense to me. I cannot
imagine how anybody would think that the person applying for a
grant should get to pick the people on the committee or have
any influence on the people on the committee.
I also personally think that there should be people on the
committee who have nothing to do with that subject, who are
well intentioned, people educated enough to understand a
scientific project being explained to them, but that have no
dog in that fight. They are not going to have to turn around
next week and ask for approval from the same people in these
committees. It is a circle back and forth, and, I think really
we need some people independent. I would put a taxpayer
advocate on the committees. I would put a scientist who is not
involved with that research on the committee. So there are a
lot of things we could do.
But the bottom line is what William Proxmire pointed out in
the 1970s, the Golden Fleece Awards for this crazy research,
sneezing on food, senior dating, gambling in Uganda, just
bizarre stuff that everybody agrees that government should not
fund. Let us not say that it is not silly. It is silly. Let us
quit doing it and let us fix it, because I tell you, the danger
is if you do not fix it and you are part of the receiving folks
in this branch of government, this fourth branch of government,
there is going to be a day on which people are going to get
made and there is not going to be any more money. People are
going to get mad and finally say enough is enough.
So if you like the gravy train, I would recommend that we
fix it so we are not funding really crummy research. I think it
is still out there. It may be the exception rather than the
rule, but there is enough of it that every year we come up with
dozens of them. I would suggest that the scientific community
needs to get together and admit we have a problem and fix it.
Thank you all.
[Whereupon, at 3:19 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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