Trend in science

This article was put up by Nomura san (Assistant Professor) of this lab. I liked it.
http://cenblog.org/the-editors-blog/2010/10/it%E2%80%99s-not-the-money-stupid/

few highlights

The culture of academic research has shifted over the past 50 years from research evaluation based on teaching, creativity, and productivity to one based simply on the amount of money (often now called “resources”) raised.

1) A number of factors have played a role in this change:
the “business model” for universities,
2) an increased willingness to accept greed as a virtue in our society and as a measure of success, and
3) a desire for an easy “objective” measure of something that is otherwise difficult to quantify.

the final decision to fund really comes from project officers who have often become remote from the frontiers of research and often fall prey to the fad of the month. It is also true that the best grant-swingers are those who are willing shamelessly to hype their research and their field—truth and modesty be damned.

The agencies, forever seeking more funding from the government, also keep inventing an alphabet soup of new programs.

....potentially even more damaging trend is a growing expectation by universities that
1)faculty should help fund operations not only through overhead from research grants, but also
2) through the generation of intellectual property (IP).
3) to generate patents and find partners to license them, or, even better,
4) to nucleate new start-up companies.
...universities are hiring highly paid administrators—with visions of Warfarin and Gatorade dancing in their heads—to head technology commercialization efforts. These are intended not only to generate additional funds for the university, but also to demonstrate to the public the “economic value” of the university to society. These kinds of activities have even been described as “critical to the mission of a university.”

If working closely with students and doing long-term fundamental research is not the goal and money is the important thing, there are more lucrative professions than academic ones for them to pursue.

....the perceived importance of money in science has led to a public backlash on issues like climate change and chemical toxicity, with the feeling that scientists are pushing these areas to get funding and not necessarily because they believe all that they report. This indeed is tragic.