An Arm and a Leg

Last Friday was March 1, 2013, the date of the budget sequestration.  Due to the inaction of congress, the U.S. faces an $85-billion budget cut which includes an 8% cut to scientific research.  PhD Comics, as always, does a good job of explaining the situation:

PhD Comics - Budget Sequestration Explained. Click to enlarge.

These cuts were originally slated to take place on January 2nd, but a last-minute compromise bill delayed the Fiscal Cliff until now.  The White House Fact Sheet explains the effect of the “sequester” this way:

Cuts to research and innovation: In order to compete for the jobs of the future and to ensure that the next breakthroughs to find cures for critical diseases are developed right here in America, we need to continue to lead the world in research and innovation.  Most Americans with chronic diseases don’t have a day to lose, but under a sequester progress towards cures would be delayed and several thousand researchers could lose their jobs.  Up to 12,000 scientists and students would also be impacted.

In science, funding equals jobs, and for every job lost there is a significant “brain drain” effect where people leave science careers for other options.  Much of the lost funding won’t be replaced by other sources–the cuts mean that some innovations just have to wait.

Even ignoring the direct technology benefits (such as the development of the internet) and the indirect applications (the iPhone is an excellent example of the combined results of physics research), fundamental science is a investment in the economy.  For example, FermiLab’s Tevatron cost about $4 billion to build, but returned about $40 billion to the economy.  For a clearer picture of the value of science, take a few minutes to read the response when a nun wrote a letter to NASA asking how we can justify the cost of the space program.  The reply begins:

You asked in your letter how I could suggest the expenditures of billions of dollars for a voyage to Mars, at a time when many children on this earth are starving to death. I know that you do not expect an answer such as “Oh, I did not know that there are children dying from hunger, but from now on I will desist from any kind of space research until mankind has solved that problem!” In fact, I have known of famined children long before I knew that a voyage to the planet Mars is technically feasible. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

Regardless of logic and reason, we now must live with the consequences of the sequestration.  We now have to figure out how to do Science missing an arm and a leg.

-Dr. D