Two US Senators, John McCain and Tom Coburn, have published a list of 100 projects funded by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “stimulus package”) that they consider to be wasteful.A number of these were scientific research projects—including a program in Texas that will monitor the atmosphere of Venus to produce weather reports ($298,543), an effort by MIT scientists to develop smartphone apps to teach introductory biology to high schoolers ($435,271), and a six-week trip for nine Montana State University students to conduct paleontology research in China ($141,002).
One in particular, which the report referred to as “Monkeys Getting High For Science”, attracted media attention to a Wake Forest University research project that received a $71,623 grant to study how monkeys react when given cocaine. Obama administration officials pointed out that the research was being done to investigate the role that the neurotransmitter glutamate plays in addiction, an insight that could lead to treatment strategies for human addicts.
Senator Coburn’s spokesman, John Hart, responded to a Washington Post article explaining the scientific value of the cocaine monkey study: “Was it unfair to not do more to emphasize the good intentions of the researchers? Absolutely not. Americans are intelligent and they implicitly understand that all research is conducted for the purpose of benefitting humanity, however tangential, circuitous and duplicative the approach may be.”
When Nature Medicine asked a representative from Senator McCain’s office how projects were singled out for censure in this report, she said that the projects were evaluated based on how many jobs they had created. It is unclear if either McCain or Coburn consulted a scientific advisor to determine the utility of the research projects named in the report.
John McCain has a history of deriding or misusing scientific research. During his 2008 presidential campaign, he lambasted a $3 million program that studied the DNA of grizzly bears—which was being conducted in compliance with the Endangered Species Act.
While on the campaign trail, McCain’s then-running mate, Sarah Palin, derided federally-funded fruit fly research conducted in Paris (though it’s unclear whether it was the subject or the location that offended her more). It later emerged that the scientists themselves were Americans, and the study, which examined the threat fruit flies place towards olive trees, was funded at the behest of a congressman from California, where olive trees are a burgeoning business.
For any politicians looking to score points by demeaning research projects, keep in mind to hit some key notes. First, deride the project as useless, as in the above-mentioned Venusian atmosphere project, which the Coburn-McCain report sarcastically congratulated for “satisfy[ing] the American taxpayer’s profound need for interplanetary weather info”.
Second: if possible, induce moral panic, as Pennsylvania Representative Pat Toomey did in 2003 when he proposed stripping funding from four NIH grants that focused on human sexuality, among them a survey of San Francisco sex workers aimed at understanding how to prevent HIV transmission.
Finally: never forget to oversimplify, oversimplify, oversimplify. Even the most sober study can be made to sound silly when you take it out of context. And if the mischaracterization lends itself to a quick sound-bite like “stimulus cocaine monkeys”, so much the better.
