U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable' Prominent Researchers Warn 135
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The U.S. biomedical science system 'is on an unsustainable path' and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should 'confront the dangers at hand,' the authors write, and 'rethink' how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding."
The problem is that too much of it is state based (Score:5, Interesting)
Government funding is like this... Rather then getting a feedback loop where research generates profits which pay for expansions which lead to more jobs. What you instead have is a static grant being offered by the government. When that is consumed there is no more and the government not making any money on the process can't afford to engage in a feedback system.
Now, a private system is going to have its own issues but those issues will not be an over production of researchers competing for finite grant money.
And before anyone tells me this is a bad idea or that we need the government to do all this stuff... understand where I am coming from here. We had tens of thousands of engineers working for the military industrial complex and then the cold war ended... result? Many of them were out of a job. And guess where many of them lived? California. It was and still is a big defense contractor state. And what did those engineers do? Most of them found jobs in the private sector and to a large extent their technical contribution made the tech explosion in California happen. Suddenly business had access to a glut of engineers. And that is what we got out of it.
So... consider that we might do well to push a lot of these bio medical researchers at the private sector... It might do them well, it might do their fields well, and it might do the nation well.
And hey, the US Federal government might actually see a monetary return through their tax recipes. So... everyone wins.
Re:Another thing (Score:5, Interesting)
> The Western world decided to shift from a growth system, where women bear and raise children and the able bodied population slowly increases, to a system where the women enter the work force and children are few in number.
I will try to give a greater context than what a reading of actuary tables might give a young insurance agent. The roots of the current condition are far deeper than any single social revolution of any generation.
Yes, women entering the work force had an effect of natural decline in population growth. They were a sort of reserve capacity. Yes, this eventually will have a depressing effect on the economy. We still have some more reserve capacity, namely, expanding the work years of the population in reasonable ways by creating new opportunities for the elderly to be productive and remain engaged in society and be dependent for fewer years. After exhausting that last bit of reserve, we will perhaps truly stagnate.
However, relying on population growth is no longer sustainable. The human population has not slowly increased in the last few centuries, it had *exploded*. UK, for instance, increased its population by 2x in 1500 years (0-1500) and 20x in the 500 years after. While I am not suggesting that it should implode, it must go into a decline for centuries to come if we expect to thrive on this planet, long term. The environmental pressure and resource drainage initiated by your generation, and continued by ours, is spectacular. The difference between the environmental footprint of poor rural nations and the most prosperous nations today is 100-150x.
The western (and especially US) experience of abundance since WWII is also anomalous. It relied on the huge productivity differentials from the rest of the world. Now the world is slowly equalizing as the other populations also tap into their reserve capacities. So once again, to expect beyond the prosperity of your generation, baring another fundamental technology revolution, is not reasonable.
We will stagnate. But in context of what humanity went through, through our history (wars, disease, famine, ignorance), current "stagnation", which may last for centuries, is not that horrible, just mildly annoying. So we won't have even larger houses, trinkets and whatever that we don't really need. Is it really that natural or sustainable for everyone to want vacations on the other side of the planet? We still will lead relatively secure, healthy & engaged lives and that's enough.
The world was stagnant for much of its history. The growth spurt, the adolescence of mankind, from the industrial revolution onward, will have to slow at some point. The economists are simply wrong to target growth to the exclusion or detriment of everything else (in human growth terms - its wishing for Gigantism or taking steroids: ultimately the piper needs to be paid). It is OK for humans to settle down at this standard of living. We can think of growth once again, after it is viable to leave this planet. Now, more than ever, it is important for humanity to understand satisfaction.
Re:Another thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Real actuary speaking here. Societies generally put resources into producing things that the society wants. They put more resources into things that they want more of *relative to other things that they don't want as badly*. It is that relative allocation that is important. If we didn't want to live longer lives, we would spend our resources on present day consumption rather than on medical services. The fact that the cost of health care keeps going up and up is merely a reflection of the fact that (in the 1st world) we have (more than) enough food, adequate shelter, and plenty of shiny things to keep us happy, so what we really want to spend money on is a pill that keeps our bodies younger for longer. So unless we "unlearn" all the things that give us this phenomenal productivity (through natural catastrophe, war, plague, etc.), we don't have to worry about decline.
One lecturer put it well by saying that he couldn't wait until we are spending 99% of GDP on health care, because at that point all of our wants and needs for food, shelter, entertainment, intellectual challenge, etc will be satisfied for pocket change so the only thing actually worth putting society's resources into is extending life.