Life sciences' stewardship of science.

*These authors contributed to the devlopment and review of this manuscript but are unable to endorse the request for NIH funding. On Sept. 20, 2011, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) released its inaugural AACR Cancer Progress Report to commemorate the

O ver time, the balance of governmental support for basic research among different fields should change, but it should change in a reasoned and purposeful way, not as the result of politics. The negative effects that can result from the politics of the “disease du jour” are familiar to readers of Science . Another case is less well known and perhaps even counterintuitive—the effects of proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress to increase nondefense R&D. A shift in federal underwriting of R&D overlooks the vital role the Department of Defense (DOD) plays in funding academic basic research. This oversight reflects the mistaken belief that all research supported by DOD is motivated solely by military applications. In fact, basic and applied research funded by DOD includes a significant fraction of academic basic research; for example, 69 percent of electrical engineering, 60 percent of computer sciences, 40 percent of materials science and engineering, and 27 percent of mathematical sciences. DOD supports some 9000 graduate students, as compared with 15,000 supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The simplistic notion that R&D funding by DOD should not be increased would have a disproportionately negative impact on specific disciplines that are essential to the country. There are two cases in which DOD has become a critical funder of academic basic research. In hindsight, both were almost historical accidents. In the first, the initial motivation is defense but the major application is not. The Internet, for example, grew from the desire for more reliable defense communication. In the second, a community of scholars grows up around a defense problem and continues to be funded by DOD long after the motivating problem is solved. Several areas in the mathematical sciences fit this pattern. We cannot predict who will benefit most from basic research funded by DOD—the defense sector, the civilian sector, research itself, or all three. In many cases it has been all three. In computer science and engineering, basic research supported by DOD extended our ability to do research in virtually all areas of engineering and science. The data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Pathfinder mission, and the modeling of the climatic effects of greenhouse gases were all enabled by computer advances from DOD-sponsored research. The effect of applying this leverage to all research is often lost in the debate over defense spending. Although some argue that the money allocated for basic research now supported by DOD should be transferred to another agency (possibly NSF), the development of legislation through the congressional committee structure makes this very difficult to accomplish. In addition, DOD has shown itself to be a reliable and patient supporter of academic basic research. Such a transfer would run counter to the very sensible policy of including a role for basic research in the mission of each federal agency or department. This practice not only provides greater diversity in the nation's R&D portfolio but also adds to these agencies' abilities to carry out their missions. As it stands, the pluralistic nature of research funding in this country is a great strength. It is not immediately clear that any benefit could be gained by reducing that plurality. Congress is currently reviewing DOD research activity, and legislation has been introduced in the Senate authorizing a 2 percent real increase in defense RD it is not a zero-sum game. In the past, cuts in DOD research funds have been used to increase operational funds, not research funded by other agencies and departments. It is likely that future increases will come from within the defense budget. Making the basic research component of DOD's funding increase comparable to that of the nondefense agencies would increase the pie for all academic research and strengthen the country in the process.

Large organizations develop layers and rules for members to operate within accepted processes and conventions whereas innovation tends to occur in a less constrained, less conventional, and less risk averse environment. This basic cultural difference creates a need for protected semi-autonomous centers that cultivate great ideas, providing freedom to explore new concepts and harbor the zealots to champion them past institutional barriers to change. The management objective at the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) is to advocate and accelerate technology development and ensure benefi cial implementation in the shortest possible time. TATRC accomplishes this objective through integrating multidisciplinary teams that combine engineering technology and physical sciences with both basic and applied clinical biosciences to solve medical problems. This convergence in medical research complements Department of Defense (DoD) investments in long term basic research and large investments in high risk problem solving. TATRC successes in this technology push to satisfy clinical need began with radiograph digitization standards and has continued to spin out medical systems and program initiatives to new DoD core programs in rehabilitative medicine (e.g., regenerative medicine, advanced prosthetics, vision research, and integrative pain management), medical modeling and simulation, and current combat zone telemedicine applications. TATRC technology scouts look for transformational approaches across traditional boundaries and provide active assistance to build new capabilities and to successfully complete projects through commercialization and DoD implementation. Many near term problems can be addressed by mature technologies in medical robotics, synthetic biology, tissue engineering, nano- and biomaterials science, medical imaging, and neuroengineering. Everyday technologies such as smartphones can be immediately harnessed for better access to medical care, improved safety and efficiency in medicine, technology management and ultimately reduced medical costs. The end result of this culture of convergence can be transformational, calling for disruptive change in technology and capability as exemplifi ed by telemedicine and m-Health, fostered through the unique TATRC research management model.

The research developed from the identification of the most highly cited Soviet journals in the physical and life sciences. Several measures of growth and citedness were taken at the beginning and end of a recent five-year period, 1982–87, in order to generally assess the functions of these journals. The research involved making comparisons among these groupings of journals and control groupings of journals with similar content, but not published in the Soviet Union. Differences in citedness could be related, in the physical sciences, to the scale of Russophone science within world sciences, but not in the life sciences. In the physical sciences, there are increases in the citedness across Soviet and Western journals; but in the Soviet journals the increase is several times greater than in the control grouping. In sharp contrast, the largest, most cited, Western life sciences' journals have increased in citedness and other groupings, including Soviet journals, have declined. The measures on control groups show that the extreme levels of improvement in citedness on the part of Soviet physical sciences' journals reflect local, i.e. Soviet, developments. The decrease in citedness of Soviet life sciences' journals seems, instead, tied broadly to events in the world life sciences' literature. There has been, apparently a “centralizing” of attention within those discipline on those few journals publishing major findings while leaving the rest of the world literature behind. In addition, the research developed several findings on the formal properties of the measures used.

U.S. Federal investments in basic research transformed life and commerce in the 20th century. They sent us to the Moon and beyond, revolutionized communications, helped to feed the planet, reinvented work processes, and drove the remarkable economic growth of the post-1950s era in the United States. These advances and more grew out of the convergence between engineering and the early 20th-century discoveries in the physical sciences. The United States can anticipate comparable world-changing innovations in the 21st century if we adapt our education and research funding strategies to capitalize on new opportunities emerging at the convergence of the life sciences with the physical sciences and engineering.

Can industry rescue the National Institutes of Health?

The feminist critique of science is one of the most active areas of current feminist scholarship. Most of this work has concentrated on the life and social sciences, but some feminists, most notably Evelyn Fox Keller, Sharon Traweek, and Karen Barad, consider the physical sciences as well. Feminist critics have pointed out, among other aspects, the prevalence of hierarchical models in our thinking about science and scientific ideas. Sandra Harding observes that we think of the sciences themselves as a hierarchy, with the pure, hard, analytic, or mature (depending on one's choice of complimentary adjective) physical sciences at the top, the life sciences in the middle, and the irredeemably soft social sciences at the bottom. (The Science Question). This hierarchical structure is apparent in most traditional works on the philosophy of science, which treat as the paradigm for all sciences. Even heretical philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend draw most of their examples from physics. Stephen J. Gould speaks of physics envy on the part of scientists in other fields, an often inappropriate desire to reduce complex phenomena to simple and quantifiable causes. Physicists have for the most part accepted our position at the top of the scientific hierarchy, regarding other sciences and feminist critiques of science with complacency and a touch of arrogance. We have been reluctant to challenge traditional paradigms of science. We also accept a similar hierarchy in itself, ranking the subfields. Physicists ask questions about many things: the universe; galaxies and stars; bridges, spaceships and other machines; the structure of crystals, atoms, nuclei, and quarks. But some of these questions are regarded as more important-physicists say more fundamental-than others, and the branches of that pursue these questions are more elite and competitive than others. Until recently this hierarchy of subfields has been taken for granted by the community. However, the proposal to build the superconducting supercollider (SSC)l stimulated a debate within the community, one that turns on our use of the word fundamental and calls into question the hierarchical structure of and its relation to other sciences.

In November 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would begin enforcing its April 2008 mandate of public access to NIH-funded research by delaying processing of investigators’ grants reporting noncompliant publications. In response, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries offered to assist the University’s sponsored research administration in supporting NCSU researchers who had publications stemming from NIH funding and had not achieved compliance. Since the 2008 NIH mandate, over 1,000 articles based on NIH-funding have been published by NCSU across research areas including veterinary medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, textiles, design, math, and statistics. Many were published in journals which did not automatically deposit papers to meet NIH requirements. Although familiar with biomedical literature, author agreements, and open access, we did not fully grasp the complex web of investigator, author, publisher, institution, and funder relations involved in this mandate until we were deeply engaged in the process and gained access to the compliance monitoring data. In this paper, we discuss the costs and benefits of library support for authors needing to attain compliance with an eye toward how this support may be scaled up if other federal funding agencies follow suit. We share practical strategies for supporting compliance efforts for individual researchers and at the campuswide level, as well as training newly funded researchers to facilitate future compliance. We discuss the advantages of leveraging existing relationships with publishers to help their researchers, strategies for getting involved in compliance support, and insights on how to skill-up and scale-up when engaging in this part of the research process.

The Role of the Government in the Internet and Its Implications for Technology Policy

A healthy lifestyle is fundamental for the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Investment in primary prevention, including modification of health risk behaviors, could result in a 4-fold improvement in health outcomes compared with secondary prevention based on pharmacological treatment. The American Heart Association (AHA) emphasized the importance of lifestyle in its 2020 goals for cardiovascular health promotion and disease reduction. In addition to defining “cardiovascular health” based on criteria for blood pressure and biochemical markers (lipids and glycemia), the AHA Strategic Planning Committee further identified lifestyle characteristics of central importance: nutrition, physical activity, smoking, and maintenance of a healthy body weight.1 The World Health Organization estimated that ≈80% of NCDs could be prevented if 4 key lifestyle practices were followed: a healthy diet, being physically active, avoidance of tobacco, and alcohol intake in moderation.2 To support healthy lifestyle initiatives, major changes are necessary at the societal level to improve population health. Numerous strategies might help to create a culture that promotes and facilitates healthy behaviors, including creating laws and regulations, mounting large-scale public awareness and education campaigns, implementing local community programs, and providing individual counseling.3 Physicians are uniquely positioned to encourage individuals to adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors: Approximately 80% of Americans visit their primary care physician at least once a year. Physicians directly communicate with their patients during clinical encounters across numerous settings, and research indicates that patients highly value recommendations provided by their physicians.4,5 However, data further indicate that lifestyle counseling does not routinely occur in physicians’ offices, thereby representing a lost opportunity. Physicians report that they perform lifestyle counseling during ≈34% of clinic visits.4 Patients, in turn, report an even lower frequency of physician lifestyle counseling. For example, obese patients reported receiving physical activity and …

The budget policy during D. Trump's administration is followed by certain changes in the structure of federal budget spending, particularly federal expenditures on R&D. The President of the United States of America makes budget proposals, traditional for republicans, on increase in defense expenditures, giving preference to the developments financed by the U.S. Department of Defense. Efforts of the Congress on prevention of spending cuts to R&D, offered by the D. Trump's administration, led to the notable growth of federal R&D budget in FY 2018 and FY2019, as well as to saving science programs in the nondefense area important for economic development and innovations. The analysis of structure of federal budget spending showed that in many years as the discretionary budget goes, so goes the federal R&D budget. There are official long-term forecasts that the discretionary budget will continue to be reduced. In these conditions there are certain risks of declining of federal financial support for R&D, first of all, basic research and continuation of long-term trend of decrease in federal R&D funding as a share of U.S. GDP. It is established that since the end of the Cold War federal research funding portfolio has shifted away from the physical sciences and engineering toward the life sciences. But this is a serious concern because physical sciences and engineering play an important role in development of modern innovation and technologies. It is possible that the growing foreign competition in development of advanced technologies, weakening of some international positions of the USA in the innovation area will provide an impulse to the D. Trump's administration and Congress for changes of structure and amount of federal R&D expenditures. Among the budget priorities which are contained in a budget request of the White House for FY 2020, there are such directions of research as artificial intelligence, quantum information science, lunar exploration, competitive agricultural research and infrastructure, exascale computing, cybersecurity.

The impact of public basic research on industrial innovation: Evidence from the pharmaceutical industry

Expenditure on research and development (R&D) is a key indicator of the innovative efforts of countries. In this paper, we want to examine through a new approach the relationship between basic research and economic benefits. Although we are aware that the topic has already been extensively addressed, this paper differs from the previous literature because it focuses on value-added trade instead of gross trade flows. We use an exponential random graph model for weighted networks to study the impact of private investment in basic research on value-added of exports in high technology, namely the domestic value-added absorbed abroad. We want to understand if this measure (without intermediate imports) is able to confirm the results of the previous literature, which used gross flows. Our results show that private investment in basic research has a positive influence on exports, giving a competitive advantage in international trade.

The aims of this study were to examine self‐efficacy and other motivation variables among high school science students (n = 502); to determine the degree to which each of the four hypothesized sources of self‐efficacy makes an independent contribution to students' science self‐efficacy beliefs; to examine possible differences between life, physical, and Earth science classes; and to investigate patterns of gender differences that may vary among the fields of science. In Earth science classes, girls earned higher grades and reported stronger science self‐efficacy. In life science classes, girls earned higher grades but did not report stronger self‐efficacy, and did report higher science anxiety. In physical science, there were no gender differences in grades or self‐efficacy, but girls again reported higher levels of science anxiety. For boys across science fields, science self‐efficacy significantly predicted course grades and mastery experiences was the only significant predictor of self‐efficacy. For girls, self‐efficacy was also the strongest predictor of science grade across fields. Mastery experiences significantly predicted self‐efficacy in Earth science for girls, but social persuasions, vicarious experiences, and physiological states were better predictors of science self‐efficacy in life and physical science classes. Results support (Bandura, A., 1997) hypothesized sources of self‐efficacy, previous research findings on self‐efficacy in the domain of science, and validate the suggestion made by Lau and Roeser (2002) to disaggregate data by science field. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 955–970, 2008

Note from the EditorsToo often, biology has been considered by both students and faculty as the ideal major for the scientifically inclined but mathematically challenged, even though the advantage of quantitative approaches in biology has always been apparent.Increasingly, biologists are utilizing mathematical skills to create simulations or manage and query large data sets.The need for basic mathematical and computer science (CS) literacy among biologists has never been greater.But does this require a fundamental change in the organization of the undergraduate biology curriculum?What is the utility of math/CS in different areas of biology?How can we best provide math/CS instruction to biologists so that the utility is appreciated?Do all biology students require a stronger math/CS foundation, or only those interested in research careers?Given the speed at which technology changes, what is the best preparation?Three different points of view are offered below.Dr. Roger Brent, President and Director of the Molecular Sciences Institute, reflects on the "innumeracy" common among biologists and argues that significant insights into biological problems may be gained from better mathematical intuition.