D**s
发帖数: 6361 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Faculty 讨论区 】
发信人: gjq (不好啦,咕咚掉到井里啦), 信区: Faculty
标 题: 生物琐男教授被参议员点名批评了 (转载)
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Jul 13 11:26:47 2016, 美东)
发信人: gjq (不好啦,咕咚掉到井里啦), 信区: Military
标 题: 生物琐男教授被参议员点名批评了
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Wed Jul 13 11:26:17 2016, 美东)
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201607/waste-money.cfm
At a biology workshop in Washington, D.C., this past May, David Hu clicked
on an email from his university’s media relations team. They’d written to
tell him that a U.S. senator had just published a report calling his
research a waste of taxpayers’ funds. Out of 20 studies highlighted in
Senator Jeff Flake’s (R-AZ) 83-page report, titled “Twenty Questions:
Government Studies That Will Leave You Scratching Your Head,” Hu had co-
authored three.
Hu was shocked. The Georgia Tech mechanical engineering professor had heard
of members of Congress directly ridiculing scientific research, but he never
imagined he’d be on the receiving end. “Everyone thinks it’s not going
to happen to them, that it’ll happen to somebody else,” he told APS News.
Flake even appeared on Fox News’ daytime talk show, Fox & Friends, to
publicize the report. The show’s host spun a game-show-style wheel divided
into wedges, each wedge labeled with one of the twenty studies. After each
spin, Flake briefly described the study that the wheel’s indicator landed
on. “I don’t see the utility, frankly,” Flake said on the show, when the
wheel landed on one of Hu’s studies. (Flake did not respond to a request to
comment on this story.)
Hu’s offending research consisted of a study on the mechanics of how
animals dry themselves, a study on whether body size affects how fast
mammals urinate (it doesn’t), and one on the functionality of eyelashes in
mammals — all supported by National Science Foundation funding. In Flake’s
report, embellished with brightly colored cartoons, the senator referred to
each study respectively as “How Many Shakes Does It Take For A Wet Dog To
Dry Off?”; “How Long Does It Take To Pee Like A Racehorse?” and “Which
Has More Hairs, A Squirrel Or A Bumblebee?” Flake explained that he’d been
motivated to expose these so-called wasteful studies after reading a 2014
Huffington Post interview with National Institutes of Health Director
Francis Collins, in which Collins had said that they “would probably have
had a vaccine in time” for ebola, had it not been for stagnant government
spending. The funds from studies like these could be diverted to ebola
instead, Flake suggested. |
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