In fact, when I attended the earthy sponsored talk/slide demo at Town Hall earlier in the month, I was given a get out of jail...er, two admit for one coupon. See, the Burke was involved because the event was about y2y.org? It hinged on the Yukon to Yellowstone photo exhibit. The artist was a very good speaker (English not 1st language), funny, and really emphasized the encroaching, money-grub-giving developer du jour imperial-IZMS who are destroying species from plant to critters, one by onje, how lovely.

Sounds like a good and snarky trip for the Public IOntern. He could take Jen Graves and they could have a serious discussion to be edited over cocktails later that night at the Funny Art closing at Francine Cedars. Two for One! Not to be missed!

If you do stop by say hi to the guy who curates the canoe and NW art holdings. His office, Bill Holm?, was next to our classroom for drawing eagle's wings and the like.

Paranoia in the Streets! Notify the Officials!

The NIH budget, in real dollar terms, steadily shrinks each year.

Wrong. The NIH budget (see http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/appropriations/part2.htm) has grown in real terms in every year of the Bush administration. Using the most common inflation adjustment (see http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/) it grew 22% in real terms from 2001 to 2006.

The publicly funded human genome project ruined his profit model last time.

Wrong. Venter started his map after the HGP had already begun, so it would have been rather strange for him to have a "profit model" that assumed the HGP didn't exist. Oh, and even though it started later, Venter's map finished earlier and at tiny fraction of the cost of the HGP map. Venter's profit model what that his superior mapping technology would be adopted by all workers in the field, and it pretty much worked out that way. Venter now spends his time sailing the word on his mega-yacht, doing hobbiest genomics of sea life.

Maybe you should get a clue stick. Or live in the real world instead of Bush fantasyland.

In the real world, Middle Class America has gas prices and other costs going thru the roof. And biotech has to deal with massive inflation in materials costs.

Thanks for that clear and convincing rebuttal. Just remember, saying that your opponent lives in a "Bush Fantasyland" always makes you right.

In case you haven't been paying attention, the CPI doesn't include gas either. It's an artificial economic measurement representing a household basket of goods designed back when housewives didn't work and assumes a number of things that are no longer relevant.

Now, do you want to discuss how our borrowing money from China and importing goods from there causes oil prices to go up even higher, or did you have a point other than that you don't understand true economic costs and can't even read the inside pages of the Wall Street Journal if your tutor stands over you?

Also, perhaps you can clarify how a biotech company's materials cost increase is related to the NIH public grant system of funding academic research.

It sounds like you'd rather rail against Bush, and if so, fine, but it detracts from the inaccuracies that DW pointed out.

The NIH budget for between 2001 and 2007 in billions:
2001: 20.5
2002: 23.3
2003: 27
2004: 27.9
2005: 28.5
2006: 28.5
2007: 28.6
Projected in 2008: 29.2



Even using the CPI it has shrunk every year after 2004.

There you go, Jonathan is correct, the NIH budget does shrink each year in real dollar terms.

Using the table to which you linked, the budget decreased from 2005 to 2006 in nominal (let alone real) dollars. It did so again in 2007, and will as well in 2008--thanks to the Democrats cave on the budget over the weekend. So, what I said is accurate: the NIH's budget is decreasing, even putting aside Will's (correct) point that inflation in research is higher than general inflation.

The other more subtle stats are even more disturbing. Since you're not accepting what I write, look up the R01 acceptance rate. I refuse to believe that the quality of proposals has declined by 30-40%. Good science is being blocked or denied by the current budget, regardless of the dollar terms. This short-sighted absurdity is forcing good science to be done with private dollars--with the accompanying loss of openness and access to results.

As far as Venter--he is very busy, primarily tying up intellectual property around biofuels. You sympathize with "The Genome War." I find "The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome" more compelling. Perhaps we can agree Venter's human genome project would have failed without genbank--why he couldn't start it until the HGP was at least partially completed--and shotgun sequencing is here to stay.

He *was* shamed into sharing his data, after an initial attempt to hoard and sell it. Venter is a bright guy and is more deserving of obscene wealth than most. Still, his initial moves with the celera assembly were shady at best. I'm not ready to give him the benefit of the doubt on the new patents. Read the link; I'm not the only one concerned.