March for Science

Mark Wein said:
Here is how I see it. In the greater Los Angeles area when I was a kid we had "smog days". The pollution was so bad that we couldn't play outside in the late 70's and early 80's. There was a brown band across the horizon whenever you looked towards the west. Emissions control for vehicles started (here at least) in the mid 60's IIRC and under then Governor of California Ronald Reagan they formed the Air Quality Management Board here in California. We suffer through smog checks, expensive gasoline, the inability to use certain paints and solvents and all kinds of other things but at the end of the day my son (who suffers from Asthma) can actually play outside without the air quality making him sick and we can see downtown without the air looking like a brown blanket. There are no longer the clouds from smudgepots in the fields here and the Kaiser steel plant no longer cranks pollution through our canyon from its old site in Fontana. The fact that politics on both sides drives policy is a shame but unfortunately the fact that politics are now driving the policies of big business and science deniers and we have an administration that seems hell bent on ignoring the scientific community in general and is putting people in charge of departments like the EPA and Energy who are only there to shut them down is a big problem.


My post here is breaking the rules of the forum by bringing politics into it but in this case politics and the current "dialog" on science seems to be to intertwined. All I can see is that we are having all of the progress from a half century or more of administrations on both sides of the aisle being dismantled as quickly as possibly in the name of "THE ECONOMY".

Maybe I'll ban myself this afternoon for this post but thats how I feel. People need to cut the bullshit out. Special interests are ruining this country even faster than before and through social media people who never had an opinion one way or the other because they couldn't be bothered to read a book or a newspaper any farther than the sports page are now driving public policy because even the folks who could counterbalance them are too lazy to vote. So for me, the march for science really is about politics and not science because of this.
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:ban:
 
mikesr1963 said:
You're about as much as a scientist as a rat turd. Funding shit because everyone thinks it good and your to much of a coward to say no is bullshit. You big spenders better figure out what you're going to do because soon there won't be enough of you to fund jack shit.
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Nothing says "I have no argument" like an instant, ill-informed personal attack.

So is the "soon there won't be enough of you to fund jack shit" a threat? What exactly is going to happen to all the "big spenders"? I'm trembling in my boots at the thought of it!
:embarrassed:
Seriously, get back on your med's.
 
Tig said:
Unlike religion and political agendas, science doesn't care if you believe in it or not.





ra,relaxed_fit,x2000,101010:01c5ca27c6,front-c,295,163,750,1000-bg,f8f8f8.lite-1u2.jpg
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:thu:
 
Tig said:
Nothing says "I have no argument" like an instant, ill-informed personal attack.

So is the "soon there won't be enough of you to fund jack shit" a threat? What exactly is going to happen to all the "big spenders"? I'm trembling in my boots at the thought of it!
:embarrassed:
Seriously, get back on your med's.
Click to expand...

Big spiders will eat all the big spenders. Big spiders caused by SCIENCE!!!
 
The Earth is flat.

So say an ever-increasing number of people who can't wrap their brains around the fact it is indeed a sphere. In the 21st century, an amazing number of idiots are actually dumber than their ancestors. YouTube has become their platform.

I find it intriguing, maddening and entertaining as hell.
 
I love the idea proposed that because one didn't follow up on one's reading in the area of the ozone layer that this is somehow the failure of science as some sort of giant political scheme. Try using the fucking internet to look up the information (science invented it for this, among other things). The International science community has been tracking it extensively since the 70's. There are tens of thousands of primary scientific publications on the subject. NASA even published a nice summary PDF booklet a few years ago if you don't want to look up the primary articles (https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozoneholeposter/Ozone-Booklet_woLesson.pdf). It is written for high school students but provides a decent summary of the issues. There are quite a few nice images and graphs showing you what is up with the ozone layer hole, how NASA measures this with a fleet of satellites, and why it matters. The fact that you stopped paying attention, or the local news stopped telling you about it, doesn't mean the issue is gone or not important. Feel free to substitute 'ozone layer' with every other science fact you ever heard and then stopped paying attention to.

The need to not fund 'ridiculous science' is another insane Fox News crowd quality argument. I have a friend that measures how far fruit flies can fly. I'm sure this is precisely the kind of 'junk science' the right wing infotainment machine would complain about as a waste of tax payer money. Except if one bothered to download the grant you would see it is a genetic model of human multiple sclerosis and my friend has a drug that will likely be in the clinic in ten years to treat MS. Fruit flies are not so silly after all when one bothers to look into the details and understand the science. We can't develop MS drugs without model systems, and we obviously can't go out and actively cultivate humans with MS to study them. So much absolute bullshit float around in the popular media about science. It is often easy to poke fun at the model systems we sometimes use, but no one in science is wasting your tax dollars on shit that isn't important. You might not see the importance from a 20 second blurb on a project but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Scientists dedicate their lives to this shit. Like 80 hours a week for decades. It is a giant slap in the face of all of those dedicated people to suggest that we are working on something silly because you are just too uninformed to 'get it'. Worms, flies, bacteria, yeast, snails, sea slugs, mustard plants, tobacco plants, mice, rats, rabbits, woodchucks, and lots of other organisms are important models we use to understand diseases. We use them as we can't do the kind of science we need to do in humans for ethical and safety reasons. Of course, I'm sure if I googled I could find some imbecile tax savings crusader talking about how science wastes money sequencing worm DNA, or how we are spending cancer research money on woodchuck farms. Of course, the worm DNA thing is the first multicellular organism sequenced and tells us a ton about how genes and cancer work, and the worm model for memory storage and neuronal circuitry is leading the way on Alzheimers disease, or that the woodchucks are a key model for hepatitis virus induced liver cancers...and there are only about half a billion or so people on Earth facing that problem. I want to scream every time I hear some moron ramble on about money wasted on silly science. It isn't silly, you just didn't bother to read enough to get it. Maybe you're slow, maybe you have an anti-science agenda, maybe you are just an idiot, but the facts are out there and 10 minutes of digging on grants.gov would tell you WHY scientists think this is important and what the applications to human health might be. (Oh, and I'm using 'you' in a generic manner here, I'm not referring to a specific person).

I think everyone in science would love to see our tax money spent on important things that impact humanity in a positive way. Why else would be get up and go to work every day? The problem is that no one can predict from where the next big discovery will come. Turns out science is really hard. We have giant buildings full of really bright people thinking about it all day, every day, and we just don't know from where the next break though will come. People studying how bacteria that live in dirt can avoid viruses wound up discovering the CRISPR/CAS system which allows for us to edit the human genome and literally correct for genetic diseases and cancers. This shit is in people in clinical trials in China right now. Another group of bozos were trying to figure out why cross breeding petunias didn't produce the correct genetic pattern of Mendelian inheritance. Those idiots uncovered the siRNA machinery, a tool which allows scientists to silence to expression of any gene we want. There are at least a dozen cancer drugs and antiviral compounds in later clinical trials right now based on those fucking petunias. These are two examples of thousands I could give that are Nobel prize level discoveries that will alleviate countless human suffering, and the original goal of these projects was certainly NOT to change the world of medicine. This is why you fund a diverse big pile of science, as one simply cannot predict where the discoveries will arise. Maybe we should have told those petunia and soil bacteria scientists, and my fly friend, to fuck off so we could put our money into your nebulous 'cure cancer' research plan. BTW, we tried the 'cure cancer' plan, with Nixon's Cancer Act initiative in 1971. We have invested billions in understanding, treating, curing, and preventing cancer. The fact that we haven't solved the most complex biological problem facing all of life on Earth in the past 50 or so years doesn't mean we are lazy. It is just really, really hard. The two discoveries I mentioned in this paragraph would never be funded in today's science climate, despite that both will impact cancer and human disease. They just wouldn't be fundable in a climate where 1-2 out of 80 grants survive review and get funded. I'd bet both of these original projects would be mentioned as 'silly science' and tax waste on the right wing blogosphere sites, the TV, and talk radio. I guess no one has any comments now that the tools have developed into actual cancer drugs.

I may be a turd, but I absolutely am a scientist, and we can compare academic credentials if you would like. I'm happy to post my information here if it satisfies anyone's need to know that I am not some bozo on the internet. Well, not JUST some bozo on the internet. It is nice that you think you should somehow be in charge of how science funding is allocated, what are important science issues, and what isn't relevant research. Maybe you should post your credentials too. Some of mine include serving on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, USAMRIID, Science Canada, the Medical Research Council UK, The Wellcome Trust UK, the Swiss Cancer League, INSERM, Institute Pasteur, and so on....so I'm actually one of the people that decides how that science money gets wasted. I can't wait for the retort that I am some type of insider trying to get more grant funding, you know, part of the conspiracy. Well, I just resigned my own NIH grant money as I am moving to an industry position outside of the US, and I still feel the same way about all this.

Apologies if this is rambling and disjointed, I literally just finished flying half way across the globe over the last couple of weeks, and the jet lag has me up while still not awake. You know, for science. Wasting your tax money on liver cancer and hepatitis viruses.
 
Last edited:
Fuckin' petunias.
Who knew?


Great post, Tiltsta. I understand the overall concept of "we're looking at this because it might help us understand that" but it's great to see specific examples.
 
Tiltsta said:
I love the idea proposed that because one didn't follow up on one's reading in the area of the ozone layer that this is someone the failure of science as some sort of giant political scheme. Try using the fucking internet to look up the information (science invented it for this, among other things). The International science community has been tracking it extensively since the 70's. There are tens of thousands of primary scientific publications on the subject. NASA even published a nice summary PDF booklet a few years ago if you don't want to look up the primary articles (https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozoneholeposter/Ozone-Booklet_woLesson.pdf). It is written for high school students but provides a decent summary of the issues. There are quite a few nice images and graphs showing you what is up with the ozone layer hole, how NASA measures this with a fleet of satellites, and why it matters. The fact that you stopped paying attention, or the local news stopped telling you about it, doesn't mean the issue is gone or not important. Feel free to substitute 'ozone layer' with every other science fact you ever heard and then stopped paying attention to.

The need to not fund 'ridiculous science' is another insane Fox News crowd quality argument. I have a friend that measures how far fruit flies can fly. I'm sure this is precisely the kind of 'junk science' the right wing infotainment machine would complain about as a waste of tax payer money. Except if one bothered to download the grant you would see it is a genetic model of human multiple sclerosis and my friend has a drug that will likely be in the clinic in ten years to treat MS. Fruit flies are not so silly after all when one bothers to look into the details and understand the science. We can't develop MS drugs without model systems, and we obviously can't go out and actively cultivate humans with MS to study them. So much absolute bullshit float around in the popular media about science. It is often easy to poke fun at the model systems we sometimes use, but no one in science is wasting your tax dollars on shit that isn't important. You might not see the importance from a 20 second blurb on a project but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Scientists dedicate their lives to this shit. Like 80 hours a week for decades. It is a giant slap in the face of all of those dedicated people to suggest that we are working on something silly because you are just too uninformed to 'get it'. Worms, flies, bacteria, yeast, snails, sea slugs, mustard plants, tobacco plants, mice, rats, rabbits, woodchucks, and lots of other organisms are important models we use to understand diseases. We use them as we can't do the kind of science we need to do in humans for ethical and safety reasons. Of course, I'm sure if I googled I could find some imbecile tax savings crusader talking about how science wastes money sequencing worm DNA, or how we are spending cancer research money on woodchuck farms. Of course, the worm DNA thing is the first multicellular organism sequenced and tells us a ton about how genes and cancer work, and the won model for memory storage and neuronal circuitry is leading the way on Alzheimers disease, or that the woodchucks are a key model for hepatitis virus induced liver cancers...and there are only about half a billion or so people on Earth facing that problem. I want to scream every time I hear some moron ramble on about money wasted on silly science. It isn't silly, you just didn't bother to read enough to get it. Maybe your slow, maybe you have an anti-science agenda, maybe you are just an idiot, but the facts are out there and 10 minutes of digging on grants.gov would tell you WHY scientists think this is important and what the applications to human health might be. (Oh, and I'm using 'you' in a generic manner here, I'm not referring to a specific person).

I think everyone in science would love to see our tax money spent on important things that impact humanity in a positive way. Why else would be get up and go to work every day? The problem is that no one can predict from where the next big discovery will come. Turns out science is really hard. We have giant buildings full of really bright people thinking about it all day, every day, and we just don't know from where the next break though will come. People studying how bacteria that live in dirt can avoid viruses wound up discovering the CRISPR/CAS system which allows for us to edit the human genome and literally correct for genetic diseases and cancers. This shit is in people in clinical trials in China right now. Another group of bozos were trying to figure out why cross breeding petunias didn't produce the correct genetic pattern of Mendelian inheritance. Those idiots uncovered the siRNA machinery, a tool which allows scientists to silence to expression of any gene we want. There are at least a dozen cancer drugs and antiviral compounds in later clinical trials right now based on those fucking petunias. These are two examples of thousands I could give that are Nobel prize level discoveries that will alleviate countless human suffering, and the original goal of these projects was certainly NOT to change the world of medicine. This is why you fund a diverse big pile of science, as one simply cannot predict where the discoveries will arise. Maybe we should have told those petunia and soil bacteria scientists, and my fly friend, to fuck off so we could put our money into your nebulous 'cure cancer' research plan. BTW, we tried the 'cure cancer' plan, with Nixon's Cancer Act initiative in 1971. We have invested billions in understanding, treating, curing, and preventing cancer. The fact that we haven't solved the most complex biological problem facing all of life on Earth in the past 50 or so years doesn't mean we are lazy. It is just really, really hard. The two discoveries I mentioned in this paragraph would never be funded in today's science climate, despite that both will impact cancer and human disease. They just wouldn't be fundable in a climate where 1-2 out of 80 grants survive review and get funded. I'd bet both of these original projects would be mentioned as 'silly science' and tax waste on the right wing blogosphere sites, the TV, and talk radio. I guess no one has any comments now that the tools have developed into actual cancer drugs.

I may be a turd, but I absolutely am a scientist, and we can compare academic credentials if you would like. I'm happy to post my information here if it satisfies anyone's need to know that I am not some bozo on the internet. Well, not JUST some bozo on the internet. It is nice that you think you should somehow be in charge of how science funding is allocated, what are important science issues, and what isn't relevant research. Maybe you should post your credentials too. Some of mine include serving on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, USAMRIID, Science Canada, the Medical Research Council UK, The Wellcome Trust UK, the Swiss Cancer League, INSERM, Institute Pasteur, and so on....so I'm actually one of the people that decides how that science money gets wasted. I can't wait for the retort that I am some type of insider trying to get more grant funding, you know, part of the conspiracy. Well, I just resigned my own NIH grant money as I am moving to an industry position outside of the US, and I still feel the same way about all this.

Apologies if this is rambling and disjointed, I literally just finished flying half way across the globe over the last couple of weeks, and the jet lag has me up while still not awake. You know, for science. Wasting your tax money on liver cancer and hepatitis viruses.
Click to expand...


I mean, I knew scientists wasted their lives, but geez!






























 
Tiltsta said:
I love the idea proposed that because one didn't follow up on one's reading in the area of the ozone layer that this is someone the failure of science as some sort of giant political scheme. Try using the fucking internet to look up the information (science invented it for this, among other things). The International science community has been tracking it extensively since the 70's. There are tens of thousands of primary scientific publications on the subject. NASA even published a nice summary PDF booklet a few years ago if you don't want to look up the primary articles (https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozoneholeposter/Ozone-Booklet_woLesson.pdf). It is written for high school students but provides a decent summary of the issues. There are quite a few nice images and graphs showing you what is up with the ozone layer hole, how NASA measures this with a fleet of satellites, and why it matters. The fact that you stopped paying attention, or the local news stopped telling you about it, doesn't mean the issue is gone or not important. Feel free to substitute 'ozone layer' with every other science fact you ever heard and then stopped paying attention to.

The need to not fund 'ridiculous science' is another insane Fox News crowd quality argument. I have a friend that measures how far fruit flies can fly. I'm sure this is precisely the kind of 'junk science' the right wing infotainment machine would complain about as a waste of tax payer money. Except if one bothered to download the grant you would see it is a genetic model of human multiple sclerosis and my friend has a drug that will likely be in the clinic in ten years to treat MS. Fruit flies are not so silly after all when one bothers to look into the details and understand the science. We can't develop MS drugs without model systems, and we obviously can't go out and actively cultivate humans with MS to study them. So much absolute bullshit float around in the popular media about science. It is often easy to poke fun at the model systems we sometimes use, but no one in science is wasting your tax dollars on shit that isn't important. You might not see the importance from a 20 second blurb on a project but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Scientists dedicate their lives to this shit. Like 80 hours a week for decades. It is a giant slap in the face of all of those dedicated people to suggest that we are working on something silly because you are just too uninformed to 'get it'. Worms, flies, bacteria, yeast, snails, sea slugs, mustard plants, tobacco plants, mice, rats, rabbits, woodchucks, and lots of other organisms are important models we use to understand diseases. We use them as we can't do the kind of science we need to do in humans for ethical and safety reasons. Of course, I'm sure if I googled I could find some imbecile tax savings crusader talking about how science wastes money sequencing worm DNA, or how we are spending cancer research money on woodchuck farms. Of course, the worm DNA thing is the first multicellular organism sequenced and tells us a ton about how genes and cancer work, and the won model for memory storage and neuronal circuitry is leading the way on Alzheimers disease, or that the woodchucks are a key model for hepatitis virus induced liver cancers...and there are only about half a billion or so people on Earth facing that problem. I want to scream every time I hear some moron ramble on about money wasted on silly science. It isn't silly, you just didn't bother to read enough to get it. Maybe your slow, maybe you have an anti-science agenda, maybe you are just an idiot, but the facts are out there and 10 minutes of digging on grants.gov would tell you WHY scientists think this is important and what the applications to human health might be. (Oh, and I'm using 'you' in a generic manner here, I'm not referring to a specific person).

I think everyone in science would love to see our tax money spent on important things that impact humanity in a positive way. Why else would be get up and go to work every day? The problem is that no one can predict from where the next big discovery will come. Turns out science is really hard. We have giant buildings full of really bright people thinking about it all day, every day, and we just don't know from where the next break though will come. People studying how bacteria that live in dirt can avoid viruses wound up discovering the CRISPR/CAS system which allows for us to edit the human genome and literally correct for genetic diseases and cancers. This shit is in people in clinical trials in China right now. Another group of bozos were trying to figure out why cross breeding petunias didn't produce the correct genetic pattern of Mendelian inheritance. Those idiots uncovered the siRNA machinery, a tool which allows scientists to silence to expression of any gene we want. There are at least a dozen cancer drugs and antiviral compounds in later clinical trials right now based on those fucking petunias. These are two examples of thousands I could give that are Nobel prize level discoveries that will alleviate countless human suffering, and the original goal of these projects was certainly NOT to change the world of medicine. This is why you fund a diverse big pile of science, as one simply cannot predict where the discoveries will arise. Maybe we should have told those petunia and soil bacteria scientists, and my fly friend, to fuck off so we could put our money into your nebulous 'cure cancer' research plan. BTW, we tried the 'cure cancer' plan, with Nixon's Cancer Act initiative in 1971. We have invested billions in understanding, treating, curing, and preventing cancer. The fact that we haven't solved the most complex biological problem facing all of life on Earth in the past 50 or so years doesn't mean we are lazy. It is just really, really hard. The two discoveries I mentioned in this paragraph would never be funded in today's science climate, despite that both will impact cancer and human disease. They just wouldn't be fundable in a climate where 1-2 out of 80 grants survive review and get funded. I'd bet both of these original projects would be mentioned as 'silly science' and tax waste on the right wing blogosphere sites, the TV, and talk radio. I guess no one has any comments now that the tools have developed into actual cancer drugs.

I may be a turd, but I absolutely am a scientist, and we can compare academic credentials if you would like. I'm happy to post my information here if it satisfies anyone's need to know that I am not some bozo on the internet. Well, not JUST some bozo on the internet. It is nice that you think you should somehow be in charge of how science funding is allocated, what are important science issues, and what isn't relevant research. Maybe you should post your credentials too. Some of mine include serving on grant review panels for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, USAMRIID, Science Canada, the Medical Research Council UK, The Wellcome Trust UK, the Swiss Cancer League, INSERM, Institute Pasteur, and so on....so I'm actually one of the people that decides how that science money gets wasted. I can't wait for the retort that I am some type of insider trying to get more grant funding, you know, part of the conspiracy. Well, I just resigned my own NIH grant money as I am moving to an industry position outside of the US, and I still feel the same way about all this.

Apologies if this is rambling and disjointed, I literally just finished flying half way across the globe over the last couple of weeks, and the jet lag has me up while still not awake. You know, for science. Wasting your tax money on liver cancer and hepatitis viruses.
Click to expand...
Bravo Sir,....bravo!
 
Yes, I used to give lectures on science policy and often ended commenting on Comroe/Dripp´s study on inventions in Clinical medicine. To first take up open heart surgery in the early 60s they needed new smooth pumps that didn´t destroy the blood cells, which they got from industry. But it was also necessary to have basic knowledge about how heart and lungs worked, which they got from basic research on animals - and they didn´t know how useful it should be when they started those animal projects. It was also necessary to build up intensive care units, which came from studies on human Resources/managemnt. Comroe/Dripps concluded that 36% of the innovations in Clinical studies came from true basic research, 24% from clinical oriented basic research, giving the total number 60%. Clinical research without basic charactere was only 20%, and real development work stood for only 15%.
 
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