WIKIMEDIAIn a speech at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) annual meeting this week (April 29), President Obama restated his support for research funding and his trust in the peer-review system, which has come under attack in recent weeks.
“With the pace of technological innovation today, we can't afford to stand still for a year or 2 years or 3 years,” Obama said, according to an NAS press release.
The comments come in response to a recent barrage of questions from republican leaders in Congress regarding the validity of specific grants and the peer-review process in general. Most recently, Republican Representative Lamar Smith from Texas, chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, circulated a proposal that suggested grants approved by the NSF should be certified by the agency director as advancing “national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense,” among other requirements.
Without naming names, the President responded to some of these efforts by saying, “I will keep working to ...
