National media begin to notice the Golden Goose Award
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0179
A 1 May New York Times editorial draws national attention to a new way of promoting publicly funded science: the Golden Goose Award, until now mainly unreported in national publications. An Association of American Universities press release headline summarizes: “Rep. Jim Cooper, broad coalition hatch ‘Golden Goose’ Award: Bipartisan members of Congress join innovation-focused organizations to honor seemingly obscure scientific research leading to major breakthroughs.”
Besides the goose that lays the golden egg, the award’s name recalls, with deliberate irony, a program of the late Senator William Proxmire (D-WI). His 2005 Times obituary declared him “best known for his Golden Fleece Awards, which he announced in monthly press releases to call attention to what he believed to be frivolous government spending. An award, for instance, went to the National Science Foundation in 1975 for spending $84,000 to learn why people fall in love.” The obituary quoted the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), who called the Golden Fleece Award “as much a part of the Senate as quorum calls and filibusters.”
More than two decades later, the Times says, “leading scientific organizations have now announced plans for their own annual Golden Goose Award to honor seemingly frivolous research that produced big dividends. The goal is to make clear that financing for science should not be cut recklessly in pursuit of deficit reduction.” The editors embellish their advocacy by chiding Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) for sustaining the Proxmire tradition without, the editors allege, doing his homework on the worthy National Science Foundation study that Coburn derided.
According to the AAU release, “The new award will highlight the often unexpected or serendipitous nature of basic scientific research by honoring federally funded researchers whose work may once have been viewed as unusual, odd or obscure, but has produced important discoveries benefitting society in significant ways.” Among the award’s creators is physicist Rush Holt (D-NJ), and among the selection panel for the first round of awards this September is physics Nobel laureate Burton Richter. Among the supporting organizations is the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The congressional representatives who are involved represent both parties. “This is a small, but hopefully important, effort to fight back, and to promote science,” Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) told the Chronicle of Higher Education .
The Times editorial cites and seems to have been inspired by the recent Washington Post blog posting “Why ‘the sex life of the screwworm’ deserves taxpayer dollars.” Science magazine’s online Science Insider has also publicized the new award . “An alliance that includes members of Congress and science and university groups wants to turn Proxmire’s gimmick on its head,” it said.
That posting’s closing merits quoting:
At a press conference today in the Rayburn House Office Building, AAAS CEO Alan Leshner said he hoped the prize would help remind people that even seemingly offbeat studies can produce unexpected results. When he was a working behavioral scientist, Leshner noted that his own mother “had a hard time understanding why I studied why rats ran in those little running wheels.” It turned out, he said, that such research helped reveal how mammals regulate body fat, a key health issue.
Leshner said he hoped researchers would nominate other potentially misunderstood studies for the Golden Goose Award by sending an email to: info@goldengooseaward.org.
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.