Well, there may not be a moral issue for Republicans but there certainly is a conservative issue. I still do not think that Republicans need to give in and vote to steal more tax payer dollars in order to fund research that can and should be done in the private marketplace. Democrats have staked out the spend-recklessly-on-everything-under-the-sun position... Republicans should at least try and keep the pretense that they are the ones that are looking out for the tax payer.

That's good, and there is no good sense in spending money on research that has to date produced next to nothing while taking away from research (adult stem cells) that has already proven itself.

Snochasr:

That's good, and there is no good sense in spending money on research that has to date produced next to nothing while taking away from research (adult stem cells) that has already proven itself.

Sure there is: in theory, embryonic, placental, and amniotic stem cells ("proto-cells") should be easier to turn into different kinds of cells, especially neurons, than are adult stem cells.

That we haven't yet gotten good therapies out of them doesn't change that basic fact: they hold more promise for curing more difficult problems than do adult stem cells.

Here's another example: consider nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission is well understood; we have some extremely good new reactor designs (Integral Fast reactors that are cooled by liquid sodium, Pebble Bed Modular Reactors that are cooled by inert gases) that we should be building all across the country.

Nevertheless, the amount of energy we can get from fission pales in comparison to the amount we can get with a fusion reactor -- if we can ever break the containment barrier. If we had controllable, steady-state fusion reactors, we simply would not have any energy problems for probably centuries, until our energy needs grew staggeringly larger than we can imagine right now.

So there is no reason to abandon fusion research, though it hasn't paid off yet, even while we pursue the proven benefits of fission.

It's the same with stem cells: we should vigorously pursue the real-world therapies from adult stem cells, but at the same time continue research into the much more promising kinds of stem cell.

And as to why we don't just leave it to the market, it's for the same reason we don't leave space research to the market: the market is excellent at applied research for proven, or at least semi-proven technologies.

But it's not very good for pure research, because you cannot guarantee investor payoff -- not the amount, not the time frame, not the percent chance of success.

Private companies tend to shut down basic (pure) research first thing when they get into financial trouble, which can leave incredibly promising research lying fallow... look what happened to the magnificent Bell Labs in 2001, for example.

Yet we absolutely need pure research to go along with applied research. Many of the great breakthroughs, while achieved by private companies, were done so under federal grants from the AAAS, the NAS, the AMA, or other scientific funding bodies, from federally funded universities, or particularly funded by the DoD (via DARPA, for example).

A fine example is the field of technical ceramics, developed for the space program (especially for the Space Shuttle tiles) but with amazing potential uses that could revolutionize our world (high-temperature ceramic gasoline engines, for instance).

Also superconductor technology, zero-G manufacturing techniques, and of course, everything we have ever learned about particle and high-energy physics from particle accelerators.

Plus all modern astronomy, most archeology, and even mathematics -- nearly all of which is conducted by universities that are either public or else pay for the research with sizable federal grants.

I believe computers were also developed first by universities (under grants) and by the military.

There's no getting around it: some of the great breakthroughs of science and technology of the past 70 years would have occurred without government research funding... but not many. That's one reason the pace of scientific understanding has accelerated so much in recent decades.

There is a downside, of course: "politically correct" science, as we see with globaloney, AIDS research, and the political football that various administrations have played with fusion research funding, for a few examples. Still, we cannot do without government funding of scientific research at this stage of the game.

Dafydd

Dafydd-

A big AMEN!

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