Should we Spend Billions on Silly Research Science?

Republicans in Congress are looking at the National Science Foundation and what it does, and they feel that the research science conducted there is just a waste of time. Are they right? Is the NSF really wasting taxpayer dollars for research that makes no sense?

There is always a little truth to most allegations usually, and these allegations by the Republican review board are no exception. Some money allotted to research science projects conducted by the NSF really has been applied wrongly. Their Antarctic research station apparently has a problem with porn-addicted scientists; and the expense reporting some scientists file at the office are apparently for personal romance-related travel. But the government criticism goes wrong when they try to criticize the science projects these scientists take up as frivolous. The NSF for instance, had a $1 million project going on at the UCLA to do with the creation of a robot that could do simple chores like the folding of clothes. Another project was aimed at finding out if a general parsing of Twitter updates could bring up something about the way the stock market was going to head. There was another study that went into why some basketball teams win a lot.  There has even been an expensive study to do with how shrimp don't do so well moving about when they're sick.

Are the Congressional panel members right to ridicule this as frivolous research science? Is there any point to this at all? As it would happen, you have to be a real scientist to understand how important these things can be. Twitter for instance, provides behavioral scientists insight into the passing thoughts in people's minds like never before. The stock market prediction study was meant to see if a new behavioral model could be built into predicting human behavior. The robot that was built to fold towels was just a step along the way to building a truly versatile robot. In some cases, like the research aimed at testing how well shrimp walk when they are sick, nonscientists can’t really understand how important it can be that scientists should have ways to understand how the lab creatures are doing when they develop new drugs.

Members of Congress from both parties usually love to criticize science spending. Research science on fruit flies was criticized by Sarah Palin a while ago. Bobby Jindal laughed at and ridiculed volcano monitoring. Politicians tend to look at the news and pick on the story that seems to be ripe for the picking. And they go at it with little understanding of the science involved and the implications thereof.

There's been quite a bit of hysteria whipped up over transparency in funding for research science. “Let the public decide what projects can best serve the public interest”, the politicians seem to say. It is hard to see though why this should be so much concern over funding for research science. The budget of the nation tops $3 trillion. The NSF’s budget out of that is a mere $7 billion. Should we begrudge our research science one half of 1% of our budget?