blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes … obama.aspx
This really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it looks like 76 American Nobel laureates wrote a letter endorsing Obama…
So either all scientists are liberal freaks, or they’re just yearning for a president who finally takes science seriously.
Ha Ha Ha! Read: A bunch of people with Phd’s after their name who depend on government grant money so they can have some cusshy research job are endorsing the Democrats like they always do.
Yeah, how dare they want a cushy research job with stem cells to potentially help millions of people suffering around the world. Bastards!
Oh! Stem cells! The tiny, tiny, tiny little unborn babies that all the religious, anti-science, homophopic bigots are all so concerned about.
They been playing with stem cells since the early 1990s if not earlier. Where’s the results? They found a cure for diabetes yet? Didn’t take that long to put a man on the moon. Only took two years to develop the atomic bomb. I work for a big company (private sector) who hired Phd chemists to develop a new product. Took them less than five years. Results!
Like I said: cushy research jobs at univesities.
And finding cures for diseases and cleaner energy technology too! What a deal!
You forgot “global warming”, Smears!
Oh! And don’t forget the Democrats have to keep funding the “Office of National Drug Control Policy” so they can use our hard earned tax dollars to make those TV ads that show marijuana users running over little girls on pink tricycles!
Obama the Drug Warrior!!!
Two things:
The War on Drugs has always been more of a Republican thing. Something about striking back at hippies. Look at how possession and other minor things are treated under dem vs. repub admins and majorities.
Being in the private sector, you should be well aware of the synergy that exists between the public and private sectors. The research in the private sector is fueled by developments in the public sector. The best the private sector can do is travel the last 10%. To be sure, that is the most expensive part on a percentage basis, so privatizing it helps smooth that operation over. But comparing the two doesn’t really work, since the private sector is gifted nearly completed projects and they just have to run with it. It isn’t generative at all.
Hello Xunzian, and congratulations on your victory tonight. I’m already contemplating voting straight Rebublican in the next mid-term election - balance of power, you know - but enjoy your champagne for the moment.
False. Democrats are just as bad, sometimes worse. The only major office holders to publicly speak out against it are former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (Republican), Congressman Ron Paul (Republican) and former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura (Independent)
Again, the two parties are the same.
+++++++++
Research in the private sector is driven by competition. They have to serve the customer because that’s who pays (buys from) them.
I’m not against all research done in our taxpayer funded university systems. Just believe in weeding out the academic welfare from the truly useful projects.
I think it should just have been ‘scientists against Palin’.
On here we’re all smart people right? So, why would anybody here support a woman who holds views that, if posted here, would be laughed at?
Good one! It took 2 million years to put a man on the moon. It took 6,000 years to make the atomic bomb. As Carl Sagan said, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you first must create the universe.”
There are already treatments utilizing stem cells. But the interesting thing to note is that it’s hard to equate medical breakthroughs to general scientific ones. What we call Western medicine is only a couple centuries old, depending on where you pin the beginning, but consider in those centuries we’ve found no cure for the common cold. It seems much easier to make technological advanced (eg nukes, rockets) than to crack the fundamental laws that govern the universe.
A living organism is much more complicated and less understood than even the most advanced creation of technology, regardless of stem cell research. The common cold can be caused by over 200 different viruses. And trying to create new treatments for bacterial infections is complicated by the fact that bacteria evolve thousands of times faster than we do.
Overall I think scientists endorsed Obama because he doesn’t represent the terrifying ignorance embodied by Palin. C’mon, she thinks dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark fer cryin’ out loud.
President Kennedy said in 1961 “before the end of the decade we will put a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth”. July 1969 = “mission accomplished”!
It was only a couple of years. Didn’t you see the movie “Fat Man and Little Boy”?
Good one! Next time an employer asks their engineering team how long it will take to complete a designated project they can tell them “Billions and Billions and Billions of years”. Thats when they’ll get their paycheck too!
Doorkydude is the one who threw the stem cell thing into this thread. I was thinking of “government grant money” in general. But since the stem cell thing was thrown at me let me clarify further: I don’t object to experimenting with stem cells (I’m not a catholic priest). I’m just holding all those who work at universities to the same criteria as everyone else in the world. If they work in scientific research (any research) they must achieve results.
Endorsing Democrats isn’t science it’s politics. It’s like if a bunch of smart guys with engineering degrees, or some medical doctors, endorsed Republicans back in 1994 or ahead in 2012 it’s for social/political/economic reasons. I suppose Union bosses are “scientific”!
You miss the point, Tunis- sure, Kennedy stated the goal of putting a man on the moon, but think of the thousands of pioneering people over the last few centuries that made it possible. Especially think of Robert Goddard, and all the German scientists that worked on the “V” missiles. NASA by no means had to invent rocketry, they stood on the shoulders of those who went before.
It’s no surprise that the guys your company hired to create a product did so, but know this: they’re mechanics, knuckle draggers. Those guys, like most doctors, are simply technicians, using tools invented by others. Scientists and researchers do the heavy lifting so the mechanics can do jobs. If the tech-monkey who keeps your computers running at work does his job it’s because computer scientists and mathmeticians created the tools they use.
Which leads back to research. Eventually if you trace all technology back you’ll find pure science behind it. And for the most part, religion inhibits science. Stem cell research is a classic case of this. Why did Bush ban the creation of new lines for research? His religion. Same Galileo had to face.
There’s no reason to think a bunch of scientists necessarily have more insigh into politics in general, but it’s not difficult to see how religious dogma and bigotry could inhibit scientific research.
Get lost Dude!!!
I used to work at a state university. There’s a lot of screw offs there. Academic welfare!!!
If I need medical help I’ll take a knuckle dragging doctor and all the hard working support people, including the nurses and ambulance driver, anyday before I call some guy in academia begging for government grants so he can write position papers about which came first the chicken or the egg.
You need to calm down Phaedrus. As Michael Corleone would say “don’t get emotional, it clouds your judgement”.
Calm down? Maybe you should limit your use of exclaimation marks to just one at a time, Tuna. As for screwoffs, I imagine there was at least one while you were there. 
Calm down? Maybe you should limit your use of exclamation marks to just one at a time, Tuna. As for screwoffs, I imagine there was at least one while you were there. :-"
Don’t get me wrong- we need the sorts of mechanics that are doctors, engineers, etc. But technology flows from science, rarely the other way around. You’d do well to keep your cool and think on that.
Did you intend to identify the common cold as a fundamental law governing the universe?
Otherwise, yes - the whole is more complicated than the parts.
The Chinese have, until the invention of the machine gun at least, carried through a holistic approach to science up to an incomprehensibly refined level of knowledge. Now a billion of them are being educated western science.
Just makes me wonder what is going to be the next big thing.
It’s sometimes difficult to know what problems will be the toughest. There’s a type of fruit fly that has many, many more base pairs than humans- we have no idea why an organism so much “simpler” has so much more genetic material than we do. And look at cancer; the reduction in mortality is almost entirely due to earlier detection. When it comes to treatment we’re little more effective than we were in the 50s/60s.
I guess the actual point I’m attempting to make is that you don’t look very hard for truths if you feel your Bible already gives you all the truth you need. Christianity is just one viewpoint, and one that’s not universally held in the US. So I don’t think determining what research will be done based on a Christian litmus test is advisable. Besides, there’s nothing in the Bible that would specifically proscribe human cloning, yet nearly all reputable, ethical scientists are very uncomfortable with the idea.
At any rate, the election is over and Obama won. I doubt the endorsement of the scientific community was as helpful to him as those from people like Colin Powell.
Actually there was, and it was reported in the press. Some person was on the faculty earning about 40,000$ a year (1990s) and wasn’t doing anything, literally. Not teaching students, not doing anything. They were just on the payroll. They were terminated from their “job” after that was discovered.
Re: Drug policy. I would double check the info you’ve got that makes you say the two parties are the same. Check out policies from federal all the way down. Look at blue states vs. red states. Pretty clear trend. But, hey, don’t listen to me, look at the numbers.
Re: Private vs. Public. I’m not so such that “customer driven” really means anything. Private pharmacies are notorious for neglecting orphan diseases while they will freely pump literally millions of dollars into attaching a lysine residue to a molecule that has been widely used since 1911 for the sake of copyright! I’ll side with the end of things that actually gets things done, thank you very much. Private industry just coattails on academic research. Name a drug and I’ll show you how either that occurred or that it was a cynical ploy for more money.
Since this thread was started as a political endorsement two days before a major presidential election, which is now over, I don’t know if I want to continue on it. It is getting off topic from the original post and is just getting stretched out into other areas not relevant to the pre-election hysteria from which it originated.
However you did make some interesting points about pharmaceutical companies which might be better discussed on another thread. I might join in depending on what is being discussed.