Comment!

It’s all over my social media today that today is the last day to comment on the rule that Russell Vought wants to impose on scientific grant-making, to add a political officer to those who must sign off on all grants.

This is what the Soviet Union did, and we can see from their experience that it is a very bad idea indeed. If you haven’t commented yet, you can do it here. You don’t have to be a scientist, just someone who doesn’t think that Vought should be the person deciding on grants to scientists.

Here’s what I wrote:

I am a chemist. I worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years both as a researcher and as a manager of practical projects. My projects had to do with nuclear reactors, laser isotope separation, other applications of lasers, cleanup technologies for extremely difficult problems like destruction of military chemical agents, plutonium processing, and environmental cleanup. I have worked with people in Estonia and Kazakhstan on environmental cleanups associated with nuclear research and development.  I am retired.

I am writing about the intention expressed in this document to decide funding for research and other projects by persons without a scientific background, on political grounds.

The way this regulations would affect me would be in the destruction it would visit on American science. As are all American citizens, I am daily affected by the results of research – in improved drugs and medical procedures, improved automotive design, the military developments that keep us safe, clean energy production, and many other areas. American science has been the envy of the world.

That science has been strong because of a competitive granting system in which grants are evaluated by qualified people. This regulation would change that in a very basic way.

Having worked in the former Soviet Union after its collapse, and with Russian scientists on other projects, I have seen close up what political control of science does. It destroys the ability of science to give us the great benefits Americans have seen.

This proposed regulation would bring about a Soviet system of political influence on grant-making. It would smother creativity. Who knew studying gila monsters’ saliva would lead to the GLP-1 drugs? Nobody, and an ignorant political operative might easily quash such a project as foolishness.

That’s the thing about research. You can’t know where it will lead.

I would add that even the more structured projects I worked on had surprises. In one disposal area, what looked like dirt piles had asbestos materials underneath. In Kazakhstan, my working with people at the Institute for Nuclear Physics helped to build confidence so that we could eventually work with the Russians and Kazakhstanis to recover 100 kilograms of plutonium from the nuclear test site there, before it could be accessed by terrorists. A political operative might well have thought that comparing environmental measurements was a silly feel-good exercise.

This regulation should be withdrawn. It has nothing to recommend it and the potential for wrecking the American system of funding science.