Salve, citizen. Today I am writing to you from the pristine white sand beaches of an undisclosed private island. I was transported here by my university jet staffed by curvaceous and bendy flight attendants, Hollywood starlets at our beck and call who for obvious reasons must remain anonymous. They fed me grapes and gave me back rubs until we got over international waters, upon which the cabin activities took a turn for the intimate, the details I shall leave to your tender imaginations save to say it was the sort of things they only do once you get over international waters.
Afterwards I dined on unicorn steak and toasted single-malt, the glass filled with chilled diamonds hewn in the shape of dollar signs. Then there were Cuban cigars, taken from Harvard's secret reserve and rolled in the parchment of the U.S. Constitution -- the real one J. Phineas Harvard demanded and received upon founding the institution, not the copy currently on display in the National Archives. Some of the original text was still legible, but everywhere the word "freedom" appeared it was crossed-out and dollar signs were written in its stead. Then, the pilot let me come up front and steer with my feet.
As I gazed out the window of our Gulfstream, empennage festooned with a giant dollar sign, I thought of the little people down there, toiling in the fields and the factories and the food courts. Working their rudimentary lathes, driving their trucks and forklifts, slaving away at their fentoozlers and gronkulators, participating in activities involving sweat.
Fools, I thought. Were it not for the dump trucks filled with grant money the government dumps in my labor-o-tory I too would have to get a real job! And then I cackled, longly, lustfully, evilly, diabolically, and other adverbs I looked up in my thesaurus app.
But not for too long, because someone brought Frogurt.
I'm told there are people who believe this is what university life is really like. Much as I would that it were true, it is time to come clean: I made up this story. Except for the part about the Frogurt (yummy!). And if reading this was the first time you took an interest in hitting the books, then I am well and truly sorry, and not just for leading you on. Then again, if it would help get the national test scores up, maybe we should provide free prostitutes to academics.
The reality of university research is long hours for not very much pay. It breaks homes and kills marriages. There's petty backstabbing and vicious back room bickering. Occasional glimpses of a small prize quickly followed by defeat after crushing defeat. Most days, about the best you can hope for is that your shoddy lab equipment doesn't kill you. And all-the-while, AM radio is calling for your head because Bronze-age musings on cosmology and phylogeny don't quite jive with the data splashing across your oscilloscope.
Academics tolerate this life not for fortune or glory, but because it allows them to do something they love. Which is nice, I guess. Sometimes love is all that stands between another 18-hour experiment and the siren song of the pub. But love doesn't pay the rent. Or buy food. Or trips to the vet. Once upon a time, researchers could expect to draw a university paycheck. But those days seem to have disappeared, which is a right puzzle given the balance sheets seem so heavily weighted in the accounts receivable column. I guess all the 3000% tuition increases just go to pay the lawyers for whatever Nancy Grace is about to uncover in your athletic department this week.
Meanwhile, the supply side of the equation has stagnated, what with hiring freezes and bludgeoning class sizes and armies of adjunct faculty paid in rodent pelts. It makes one pine for that alternate Star Trek universe where Spock had a goatee and you advanced by killing whomever currently had the job you wanted. We academics ain't exactly known for our martial arts prowess.
Which brings us to the mercy of the federales.
Odd how the bluster that defense spending creates jobs in every state of the Union goes silent when asked if NIH or NSF funding wouldn't do the same. Indeed, the jobs that research funding is creating these days are few and far between. This has little to do with recent economic downturn mythology; Congress has always looked for an excuse to short-sheet the academic bed. While it occasionally bubbles into open hostility for cheap political points (Google up TABOR sometime), the attitude is mostly one of smoldering contempt. As far as the House of Representatives is concerned, universities are doormats and punching bags, albeit occasionally-useful doormats and punching bags.
It's a pickle. If you can use calculus to fight Nazis or Commies or the Taliban, there's government money a-plenty. If instead you want to fight polio or peak oil, well, um, good luck with that. Write if you get work.
It is here the ghost of Ayn Rand usually makes an appearance.
The Ghost of Ayn Rand
The free market will set me free. Solve all problems, right all wrongs. Or so I'm told. After all, if a research is worth something surely some company will pay for it, the scientists in their employ will be handsomely rewarded, and no man need suffer the unspeakable insult of taxation in the process. To take as but one hypothetical, a cure for cancer would bring riches beyond any government-funded lackey's wildest dream if provided by the private sector, would it not?
It turns out that experiment has been done. The answer, oddly enough, is: no, it would not.
In 2001, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis got FDA approval for its leukemia drug Gleevec. It was the first leukemia drug developed by understanding the molecular biology in detail, figuring out what the cell was doing to cause unchecked proliferation (incorrect phosphorylation in this case), and using that as a marker to kill cancerous cells specifically. Not only does the drug not have the devastating side effects characteristic of most chemotherapy, but the type of leukemia it kills (known as chronic myeloid leukemia or CML) does not respond well to other treatments. For those suffering CML, Gleevec was literally a life-and-death discovery.
Free market high five! Yes, but I've left something out of the story. Novartis didn't discover the drug. The compound that would become Gleevec was discovered by Oregon Health and Science University faculty Brian Drucker. When his drug looked promising as a treatment for CML, Drucker looked around for a company who could make it available to the public. He approached Novartis.
Novartis turned him down.
Why? Because there weren't enough people with CML to make manufacture of the drug profitable. Note: the manufacture of the drug. Not the research. Not the grunt work. Not the lucky breaks. Just bringing it to market. The tail-end of the process turning discovery into profit.
This is not to pick on Novartis. They did what was fiscally necessary. A biotech firm -- or any firm -- can't help anyone if they are bankrupt. And, we should note, Novartis eventually relented and manufactured Drucker's drug after Drucker completed his own successful independent clinical trials. However, it's unclear if that would have been the case, or even possible, had Novartis been required to bear the full cost of developing the drug, from basement bench to oncologist's script.
The point is research doesn't lend itself to free-market solutions. It's the nature of the beast. The scary reality is that for all of the gleaming expensive equipment, all of the goth chicks in pigtails running gels while square-jawed Navy men look on, for all of the machines that go ping, the lion's share of research is groping in the dark. There it is: our dirty little secret. Scientists but see through a glass darkly, and then stumble home from the bar rejected at the end of the day. Nature once again decreeing no, we shall not be having a look up Her skirt today. And tomorrow isn't looking very promising either. This is exactly the sort of tomfoolery that gives shareholders the heebie-jeebies.
So if the private sector won't pay for research and the universities won't pay for research, that leaves the government. Unless you'd rather put mom on ice until someone gets a Kickstarter together every time we need benchwork to discover a new treatment.
The Social Contract
It's the social contract. The tacit agreement between university researchers and You the People. We work long hours and for not much money and generate the knowledge base that industry relies upon to make life-saving drugs and longer-lasting light bulbs available to the customer public and do so in a way that won't put the board of directors into revolt. University research is the engine of creation. The science for the engineering. The know-what for the know-how. It's the fire under the hearth and the river that turns the millstone. University research establishes the trail head that industry takes to the summit. And university research goes down countless dead ends so industry doesn't have to.
In return, Congress promises to provide sufficient funding so that, having pledged our life our industry our chastity to the machine, university researchers can sleep at night knowing that the machine will provide for us.
Congress isn't living up to its end of the deal. Current funding levels are the worst they have been in 50 years. The social contract has been broken, the covenant violated. And when covenants get violated, bad things happen. As Susan Sontag wrote about her cancer:
But the unsunny side of that ledger remains. It's waiting for you. And everyone you care about. When your kid dies from a disease we could have cured by now, maybe another tax cut can pay for the funeral.
Everybody gets a turn.
Everybody.
Afterwards I dined on unicorn steak and toasted single-malt, the glass filled with chilled diamonds hewn in the shape of dollar signs. Then there were Cuban cigars, taken from Harvard's secret reserve and rolled in the parchment of the U.S. Constitution -- the real one J. Phineas Harvard demanded and received upon founding the institution, not the copy currently on display in the National Archives. Some of the original text was still legible, but everywhere the word "freedom" appeared it was crossed-out and dollar signs were written in its stead. Then, the pilot let me come up front and steer with my feet.
As I gazed out the window of our Gulfstream, empennage festooned with a giant dollar sign, I thought of the little people down there, toiling in the fields and the factories and the food courts. Working their rudimentary lathes, driving their trucks and forklifts, slaving away at their fentoozlers and gronkulators, participating in activities involving sweat.
Fools, I thought. Were it not for the dump trucks filled with grant money the government dumps in my labor-o-tory I too would have to get a real job! And then I cackled, longly, lustfully, evilly, diabolically, and other adverbs I looked up in my thesaurus app.
But not for too long, because someone brought Frogurt.
I'm told there are people who believe this is what university life is really like. Much as I would that it were true, it is time to come clean: I made up this story. Except for the part about the Frogurt (yummy!). And if reading this was the first time you took an interest in hitting the books, then I am well and truly sorry, and not just for leading you on. Then again, if it would help get the national test scores up, maybe we should provide free prostitutes to academics.
The reality of university research is long hours for not very much pay. It breaks homes and kills marriages. There's petty backstabbing and vicious back room bickering. Occasional glimpses of a small prize quickly followed by defeat after crushing defeat. Most days, about the best you can hope for is that your shoddy lab equipment doesn't kill you. And all-the-while, AM radio is calling for your head because Bronze-age musings on cosmology and phylogeny don't quite jive with the data splashing across your oscilloscope.
Academics tolerate this life not for fortune or glory, but because it allows them to do something they love. Which is nice, I guess. Sometimes love is all that stands between another 18-hour experiment and the siren song of the pub. But love doesn't pay the rent. Or buy food. Or trips to the vet. Once upon a time, researchers could expect to draw a university paycheck. But those days seem to have disappeared, which is a right puzzle given the balance sheets seem so heavily weighted in the accounts receivable column. I guess all the 3000% tuition increases just go to pay the lawyers for whatever Nancy Grace is about to uncover in your athletic department this week.
Meanwhile, the supply side of the equation has stagnated, what with hiring freezes and bludgeoning class sizes and armies of adjunct faculty paid in rodent pelts. It makes one pine for that alternate Star Trek universe where Spock had a goatee and you advanced by killing whomever currently had the job you wanted. We academics ain't exactly known for our martial arts prowess.
Which brings us to the mercy of the federales.
Odd how the bluster that defense spending creates jobs in every state of the Union goes silent when asked if NIH or NSF funding wouldn't do the same. Indeed, the jobs that research funding is creating these days are few and far between. This has little to do with recent economic downturn mythology; Congress has always looked for an excuse to short-sheet the academic bed. While it occasionally bubbles into open hostility for cheap political points (Google up TABOR sometime), the attitude is mostly one of smoldering contempt. As far as the House of Representatives is concerned, universities are doormats and punching bags, albeit occasionally-useful doormats and punching bags.
It's a pickle. If you can use calculus to fight Nazis or Commies or the Taliban, there's government money a-plenty. If instead you want to fight polio or peak oil, well, um, good luck with that. Write if you get work.
It is here the ghost of Ayn Rand usually makes an appearance.
The Ghost of Ayn Rand
The free market will set me free. Solve all problems, right all wrongs. Or so I'm told. After all, if a research is worth something surely some company will pay for it, the scientists in their employ will be handsomely rewarded, and no man need suffer the unspeakable insult of taxation in the process. To take as but one hypothetical, a cure for cancer would bring riches beyond any government-funded lackey's wildest dream if provided by the private sector, would it not?
It turns out that experiment has been done. The answer, oddly enough, is: no, it would not.
In 2001, the pharmaceutical giant Novartis got FDA approval for its leukemia drug Gleevec. It was the first leukemia drug developed by understanding the molecular biology in detail, figuring out what the cell was doing to cause unchecked proliferation (incorrect phosphorylation in this case), and using that as a marker to kill cancerous cells specifically. Not only does the drug not have the devastating side effects characteristic of most chemotherapy, but the type of leukemia it kills (known as chronic myeloid leukemia or CML) does not respond well to other treatments. For those suffering CML, Gleevec was literally a life-and-death discovery.
Free market high five! Yes, but I've left something out of the story. Novartis didn't discover the drug. The compound that would become Gleevec was discovered by Oregon Health and Science University faculty Brian Drucker. When his drug looked promising as a treatment for CML, Drucker looked around for a company who could make it available to the public. He approached Novartis.
Novartis turned him down.
Why? Because there weren't enough people with CML to make manufacture of the drug profitable. Note: the manufacture of the drug. Not the research. Not the grunt work. Not the lucky breaks. Just bringing it to market. The tail-end of the process turning discovery into profit.
This is not to pick on Novartis. They did what was fiscally necessary. A biotech firm -- or any firm -- can't help anyone if they are bankrupt. And, we should note, Novartis eventually relented and manufactured Drucker's drug after Drucker completed his own successful independent clinical trials. However, it's unclear if that would have been the case, or even possible, had Novartis been required to bear the full cost of developing the drug, from basement bench to oncologist's script.
The point is research doesn't lend itself to free-market solutions. It's the nature of the beast. The scary reality is that for all of the gleaming expensive equipment, all of the goth chicks in pigtails running gels while square-jawed Navy men look on, for all of the machines that go ping, the lion's share of research is groping in the dark. There it is: our dirty little secret. Scientists but see through a glass darkly, and then stumble home from the bar rejected at the end of the day. Nature once again decreeing no, we shall not be having a look up Her skirt today. And tomorrow isn't looking very promising either. This is exactly the sort of tomfoolery that gives shareholders the heebie-jeebies.
So if the private sector won't pay for research and the universities won't pay for research, that leaves the government. Unless you'd rather put mom on ice until someone gets a Kickstarter together every time we need benchwork to discover a new treatment.
The Social Contract
It's the social contract. The tacit agreement between university researchers and You the People. We work long hours and for not much money and generate the knowledge base that industry relies upon to make life-saving drugs and longer-lasting light bulbs available to the customer public and do so in a way that won't put the board of directors into revolt. University research is the engine of creation. The science for the engineering. The know-what for the know-how. It's the fire under the hearth and the river that turns the millstone. University research establishes the trail head that industry takes to the summit. And university research goes down countless dead ends so industry doesn't have to.
In return, Congress promises to provide sufficient funding so that, having pledged our life our industry our chastity to the machine, university researchers can sleep at night knowing that the machine will provide for us.
Congress isn't living up to its end of the deal. Current funding levels are the worst they have been in 50 years. The social contract has been broken, the covenant violated. And when covenants get violated, bad things happen. As Susan Sontag wrote about her cancer:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.Maybe you don't get cancer. But you will get something. If not cancer then heart disease. Or diabetes. Or a stroke. The relationship that exists between Novartis and the National Cancer Institute also exists for commerce mirrors of the National Heart Association and NINDS. Not to mention countless who would labor in physics and engineering and material science departments to bring good things to light so GE can bring good things to life. The modern world. The one whose conveniences you're enjoying at this very moment.
But the unsunny side of that ledger remains. It's waiting for you. And everyone you care about. When your kid dies from a disease we could have cured by now, maybe another tax cut can pay for the funeral.
Everybody gets a turn.
Everybody.
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