From the Texas Tribune: CPRIT Operations Moratorium Lifted Following Reforms

Another item we covered in 2306 when we read through Article 3 of the Texas Constitution is in the news:

State leadership decided on Wednesday that the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has restored enough public trust to resume grant operations and finalize remaining contracts following a review of the agency’s processes and major reforms passed in the last legislative session.

On Wednesday, Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus lifted a moratorium on new grants placed on the agency in December 2012.

In 2007, Texas voters approved the use of $3 billion in bonds to create CPRIT and finance cancer research and the development of cancer treatments and prevention programs for 10 years. The institute came under scrutiny last year when a state audit revealed in January that $56 million in grants had been approved without the proper peer review process. Lawmakers grilled former members of the CPRIT oversight committee during the 83rd legislative session and eventually approved Senate Bill 149, which adds more checks and balances to the agency’s grant-making processes to ensure adequate peer review. Lawmakers also budgeted $595 million for the institute in the 2014-15 biennium

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Note the following appointees to the oversight committee:

State leadership has appointed new members to a CPRIT oversight committee, which guides the work of the institute and approves all grant applications. Perry and Dewhurst have each made their three appointments to the committee. Straus has made two and still has one pending appointment.

Perry appointed Angelos Angelou, founder and principal executive of AngelouEconomics and former vice president of the Austin Chamber of Commerce; Gerry Geistweidt, an attorney who has argued cases before the Texas Supreme Court, among others; and Dr. William Rice, senior vice president of clinical innovation for St. David’s Healthcare and the Central and West Texas Division of the Hospital Corporation of America.

Dewhurst appointed Ned Holmes, a businessman with experience in finance and real estate; Dr. Craig Rosenfeld, a physician and chief executive of Collaborative Medical Development, which develops treatments for neurogenerative and psychiatric diseases; and Amy Mitchell, a cancer survivor and attorney at Fulbright and Jaworski.

Straus appointed Pete Geren, president of the Sid W. Richardson Foundation, which provides grants to educational, health, human service and cultural nonprofit organizations in Texas, and Dr. Cynthia Mulrow, senior deputy editor of Annals of Internal Medicine and a member of the prestigious Institute of Medicine.

From the Texas Monthly: How Texas Lost the World's Largest Super Collider

When we walked through Article 3 in the Texas Constitution we stumbled across this sad, relic:

It relates to Texas' successful effort to lure this large national scientific project to the state. Quickly afterwards, the project was terminated due to concerns over costs and the looming deficit. This didn't take into consideration the future benefits than could result due to the basic research that would occur in the facility - all that is happening in Europe now.

A writer reminds us of what could have happened here:

Five-thousand miles southwest of Geneva, just outside Waxahachie, Texas, are the remnants of a super collider whose energy and circumference—true to American sensibility—would have dwarfed those of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Nobody doubts that the 40 TeV Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have discovered the Higgs boson a decade before CERN. The collider’s tunnel would have entrenched Waxahachie in a topographical oval that curved east before the southern Dallas County line, then running southwest under Bardwell Lake and curving north at Onion Creek. Since Congress canceled the project twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Waxahachie has witnessed the bizarre and disquieting history of its failure.

Giving the bureaucracy a break

A lot of what seems silly makes sense the closer one looks.

Legislative criticism of the bureaucracy may be misplaced, or simply politically motivated:

. . . members of Congress love picking through federal grants to find dubious-sounding research funded by the National Institutes of Health or other agencies. In a report titled “The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope,” Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma promised to identify “over $3 billion in mismanagement at NSF.” Mostly, the report just mocks research that, superficially, sounds amusing.

Coburn takes gleeful aim at scientists who’ve been running shrimp on treadmills. According to the scientists, the treadmills cost about $1,000 out of a half-million-dollar grant. The point is to determine whether ocean bacteria are weakening shrimp populations, a development that would tip the entire food chain into chaos. Coburn’s attack is particularly dangerous, because it encourages government researchers to conduct science that sounds good rather than science that does good.

It looks like the workings of the bureaucracy will occupy much of our time this mini 3, so expect more along this vein.

Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies

That's the official title of the BRAIN inititiative, which was announced yesterday as a $100 million effort to record and map brain circuits in action and “show how millions of brain cells interact.”

From the NYT:

Three government agencies will be involved: the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. A working group at the N.I.H., described by the officials as a “dream team,” and led by Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University, will be charged with coming up with a plan, a time frame, specific goals and cost estimates for future budgets.

The initiative exists as part of a vast landscape of neuroscience research supported by billions of dollars in federal money. But Dr. Newsome said that he thought a small amount of money applied in the right way could nudge neuroscience in a new direction

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A defense of federal funding for basic research

A research scientist - whose own research of duck genitalia has bee criticized in the media recently - defends it:

Since Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards in the 1970s and 1980s, basic science projects are periodically singled out by people with political agendas to highlight how government “wastes” taxpayer money on seemingly foolish research. These arguments misrepresent the distinction between and the roles of basic and applied science. Basic science is not aimed at solving an immediate practical problem. Basic science is an integral part of scientific progress, but individual projects may sound meaningless when taken out of context. Basic science often ends up solving problems anyway, but it is just not designed for this purpose. Applied science builds upon basic science, so they are inextricably linked. As an example, Geckskin™ is a new adhesive product with myriad applications developed by my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts. Their work is based on several decades of basic research on gecko locomotion.

Whether the government should fund basic research in times of economic crisis is a valid question that deserves well-informed discourse comparing all governmental expenses. As a scientist, my view is that supporting basic and applied research is essential to keep the United States ahead in the global economy. The government cannot afford not to make that investment. In fact, I argue that research spending should increase dramatically for the United States to continue to lead the world in scientific discovery. Investment in the NSF is just over $20 per year per person, while it takes upward of $2,000 per year per person to fund the military. Basic research has to be funded by the government rather than private investors because there are no immediate profits to be derived from it.

Because the NSF budget is so small, and because we have so many well-qualified scientists in need of funds, competition to obtain grants is fierce, and funding rates at the time this research was funded had fallen well below 10 percent. Congress decides the total amount of money that the NSF gets from the budget, but it does not decide which individual projects are funded—and neither does the president or his administration. Funding decisions are made by panels of scientists who are experts in the field and based on peer review by outsiders, often the competitors of the scientists who submitted the proposal. The review panel ranks proposals on their intellectual merits and impacts to society before making a recommendation. This recommendation is then acted upon by program officers and other administrators, who are also scientists, at the NSF.

Click on the link above for a description of his specific research.

And here for the Golden Fleece Awards.

Meet Compressorhead

They can track you down and kill you, do your job better than you for no pay, and now they can kick out the jams better than you too. Great, just great. Expect to see robot teacher in front of the class in a year. Try asking it to accept your late work.

All hail our robot overlords.

From the Atlantic: Amid Partisan Bickering, Everyone Agrees: ARPA-E Is a Fascinating Experiment

ARPA-E is an attempt by the Energy Department to replicate for renewable energy what DARPA did for computing and digital technologies:

In previous decades, the Department of Energy drove basic research by operating giant government-funded labs, but under the leadership of Energy Secretary and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, the agency has transformed itself into something different: the biggest, greenest venture capital firm in the world.

After receiving an unprecedented surge in funding for renewable energy courtesy of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Chu set to work hiring big names from the nation's top research laboratories, in order to staff a new agency called ARPA-E, modeled after DARPA, the R&D wing of the Pentagon. In just three years, ARPA-E has made more than 180 investments in basic research projects in renewable energy, and that's in addition to grants issued by the Department of Energy proper, like the one that funded the Ocean Power Technologies project in Oregon.