US President Barack Obama has shown us the money, again. A year after the stimulus package provided a windfall $10 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, the budget proposal for FY11 holds strong and somewhat steady for science and medical research. There are proposed increases nearly across the board and include a $1 billion boost (to $32.1 billion) in NIH funding.
Working backward from the apt observation by physicist Ernest Rutherford—“We haven’t the money, so we have to think”—we might ask: Are there pitfalls to these buckets of cash?
Stimulus Funds Harbor Hidden Costs
It can be difficult to imagine money as a bad thing. Indeed, many US scientists think of the late 1990s as “the glory days,” when the NIH budget doubled within 10 years, translating to ...
