By: Belle Moyers
Edited by: David Mertz, Shweta Ramdas, Scott Barolo, Kevin Boehnke
Why haven’t we cured cancer? Physicians have known about cancer for over 5000 years, and the United States spends nearly $5 billion per year on cancer research. But there’s still no cure. Also, where is our clean, renewable energy? We can’t even catch half the energy in sunlight, and solar panels don’t come cheap! Why don’t we have a moon colony yet or a male birth control pill?
In the U.S., science funding comes from many sources, including the taxpayers. As an example, half a percent of the federal budget goes to fund NASA, before considering all of the money that goes to the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institutes of Health and other federal science organizations. It is reasonable that publicly-funded science should provide some benefit for the public, but it seems like there’s a lot of scientific research out there that’s not giving us the technologies and discoveries we want and need. So why do we throw money at projects that don’t seem to deliver?
Continue reading “Science behind the scenes: The costs and payoffs of science”
Almost 100 years ago, the English biologist and statistician Dr. Ronald Fisher was enjoying a cup of tea with his Cambridge University colleagues when another biologist, Dr. Muriel Bristol, made an interesting claim. Bristol asserted that just by tasting her tea, she could infer whether the tea was poured into the cup before the milk, or the milk before the tea.
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