Let 100 flowers bloom

Whoo, I don't know how people like Revere and PZ Myers do it. I'm in the middle of two proposals, three papers and a conference presentation, and I'm supposed to be reading transcripts and analyzing data (ha!), and here I am trying to do a blog post every day. Why did I get involved in this scientific research biz anyway?

Well, in the middle of all this NIH finally puts out the money to stimulate us all. It's like the neighborhood candy factory exploded and we're all falling over each other trying to scoop up the sweets. One of the tasty treats is $200 million worth of "challenge grants," for 2-year projects of up to $1 million each. There's a long list of stuff they want done, from "Mechanisms and measurement of human thermogenesis" to "Building trust between researchers and communities through capacity building in Environmental Public Health," to "Vascular networks in engineered tissues." Our piece of the pie, if we are lucky enough to get one, will have to do with enhancing physicians' clinical skills.

Other money will pay for equipement and laboratories, bring in new fellows and expand existing projects, and pay for a lot of comparative effectivness research to make health care better and cheaper.

The official point of all this is to create jobs but it's also going to create an avalanche of scientific knowledge. It's all going to hit us at once a couple of years from now and then we'll have to digest it and apply it. A lot of it is basic science that will take a long time to pay off, some of it is clinical science that can lay the groundwork for trials that will lead to real payoffs in just a few years, some of it is translational work that has the potential to improve health care very quickly.

It's all happening in haste and maybe it isn't the best way to do things, but this is a major investment in work that can make our lives better, that nobody but the government would ever pay for. That, my friends, is socialism we can believe in.