Thursday, May 08, 2008

Reducing science budgets until Norquist could drown them in a bathtub

I have gotten into the habit of scanning ScienceDaily.com. The write ups are short and generally good at conveying the impact of a journal article to a general audience but hey, its not war and politics they write about so how stimulating could it be? [or didn't y'all notice your volitional reading is geared to stimulation? Conditioned stimulus perhaps, but stimulation all the same!] Well, the writing is not always dry and the writers tap the right notes when the know they have more than science to report.
If you think the only class of people Bush and company cut adrift by neglecting Katrina-ravaged NOLA where the poorer and mostly black and Democrats..read this. A significant research team got its progress demolished there and the scientists finally got the message they should go elsewhere because the administration was never going to come through for the reconstruction of New Orleans. You may not understand all the talk of introns and RNA in which the remarkable findings are couched. Its not confirmed but a key mechanism of animal cell division appears to not so much evolved as arisen from a symbiosis in the very dim and remote past. I was quite stirred by the back story of a major biology research insight worthy of a PNAS paper clawing its way back to life through the dozens of generous acts of fellow scientists and the dedication and vision that it took to reconstitute the research using literally the kitchen sink if that could be spared to make a little progress.

Science Daily is not on my blogroll but maybe it should be.

No comments: