Hoover Institution scientist assails federal research in Wall Street Journal op-ed
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2514
Henry I. Miller ‘s harshest criticism of federally funded research mostly bypasses physical science. But that’s hard to tell from his 18 July Wall Street Journal op-ed . Unfortunately, his general indictment of science overall will likely exacerbate the science wars.
WSJ editors identify Miller as a physician, a molecular biologist, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and the founding director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology. They emphasize his theme of blanket condemnation by headlining his op-ed ‘Time to sequester insipid federal research: Focus science funding on real science, not on silliness like studying how to ride a bike.’
Miller emphasizes it by challenging ‘the lions of the scientific research establishment,’ especially at NSF. ‘Too much of what’s dispensed,’ he alleges, ‘is pork, overlaps with work that would otherwise be performed in the private sector, or supports poorly conceived or trivial experiments.’ When he charges that parts of NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ‘have shown themselves to be incapable of consistently discerning good science from bad,’ he adds to the blanketing by asserting that the charge applies as well to other—though unnamed—federal funding agencies.
But in fact most of Miller’s criticism isolates NSF’s social sciences and NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). At NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate, Miller charges, ‘scientific rigor gave way to cronyism and narcissistic self-regard.’ He disdains NCCAM as ‘an affront to NIH-funded investigators who are leaders in disciplines like cell and molecular biology, immunology and infectious diseases—but who are having increasing difficulty getting federal funding even for studies with obvious scientific merit.’
When Miller invokes the 2011 ‘Under the Microscope ’ report about NSF—the work of physician and senator Tom Coburn (R-OK)—he revives recent science-wars squabbling.
Coburn’s press announcement of 26 May 2011 trumpeted his report’s allegation that NSF had lost more than $1.2 billion to ‘waste, fraud, duplication and mismanagement.’ That same day, a Fox News online posting began with an implied smirk: ‘Scientific studies conducted in the public interest appear to have veered off course, according to a new report that documents government-sponsored research gems such as having shrimp walk on tiny treadmills to measure the impact of sickness on crustaceans.’ Shortly an article appeared elsewhere objecting that ‘a much-ballyhooed project that put shrimp on a treadmill was part of research intended to find out how marine animals will cope with increased environmental stress.’
The squabbling pits the Golden Fleece Award against the Golden Goose Award, and so does Miller—explicitly elsewhere, and implicitly in his WSJ op-ed.
In early 2012 at Forbes.com , Miller published ‘The National Science Foundation’s fleecing of American taxpayers ,’ a forerunner of the WSJ piece. Condemning mainly social sciences grants, he began and ended by invoking the old Golden Fleece Awards of Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), which mocked what Proxmire saw as misuse of taxpayers’ money.
A year later, in a piece called ‘Investing in bad science: The dubious projects of government agencies ,’ Miller criticized the Golden Goose Awards , instituted by members of Congress from both parties to honor useful but easily misrepresented research. At the end, he charged concerning science and scientists that ‘the courage from any of these quarters to air publicly the government funding agencies’ dirty little secrets has been lacking, and there has been only pusillanimity and politically correct silence. Except, of course, for the new Golden Goose award—which, from where I sit, looks more like a turkey.’
But it would be a mistake for stakeholders in the physical sciences to overinterpret Miller’s outspokenness. His main target is clear. In the ‘bad science’ piece, he asserts that ‘the funding of the social and behavioral sciences . . . has become an exemplar for worthless research.’ And as a physician and microbiologist, he plainly understands political excesses involving hard science. He writes:
[M]any politicians and other critics of federal spending have blasted various government-funded research projects.
Some of these criticisms clearly have been wrong-headed. An example is this dismissal of a supposedly unworthy research project by former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin: ‘Sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.’
The problem is that Palin didn’t know what she didn’t know. A century of studies on the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, an organism that shares about half of its genes with humans, has yielded information critical to understanding the process of aging and how genes work.
Also in the ‘bad science’ piece, Miller complains that the rationale for the Golden Goose Award seems to be, ‘Some criticism of federally funded research projects has been uninformed and ill-advised. People continue to criticize federally funded projects; therefore, their views are uninformed and ill-advised.’ Maybe his own criticisms would be better advised if he distinguished more clearly between hard but arcane science and the soft-science studies that he singles out as way too squishy.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.