Is Science Under Siege? скачать в хорошем качестве

Is Science Under Siege?

Recent proposals by the National Institutes of Health to reduce overhead costs on grants to university scientists has generated a furious storm of controversy and overheated rhetoric. "Science is under siege!" is the claim. But is it true? On 28 February 2025, Cornell University's Department of Science and Technology Studies hosted a round table discussion on the topic: Science Under Siege." Scott Turner, Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars went there to document what the round table had to say. This video is the complete event. What do you think? Does it make the case that science is, in fact, "under siege"? Please post your opinion in the comments section. Maybe we can get a good debate going! Just to kick things off, here are some prompts, and my opinion. 1. Is it science that's under siege, or the science revenue stream? The two aren't equivalent. The participants in the round table were either high level administrators or "studies" scholars. When it's indirect costs that are being proposed for cuts, it's those livelihoods that are at stake. To what extent do they contribute to the enterprise of science? Funding for working scientists would actually increase under the proposed indirect costs cuts. 2. One speaker claimed that the NIH cannot unilaterally set limits on indirect costs. Why not? To what extent can Cornell claim to be a partner when the bulk of its science funding comes from government? 3. Should science serve political ends, or should it be an apolitical search for new knowledge about the natural world? If the bulk of your funding comes from an inherently political source (government), is it even possible to conduct discovery-based science? 4. Why didn't we hear from actual natural scientists? My conversations with fellow academic scientists paint a different picture than what was presented here. 5. Would you say that the speakers represented a balance of political perspectives to their remarks, or were they consistently biased to one? I could not escape the impression that the speakers were uniformly left-wing, and that none would have voted with the winning party in the last election. To what extent does this political bias color the claim that science is "under siege"?