A Stitch in Haste

There are 7.1 billion reasons to be indignant over President Bush's avian flu preparedness plan: it's too expensive, it imposes unfunded mandates on the states, it includes questionable liability waivers for hospitals and vaccine manufacturers, it assigns Homeland Security to coordinate the response to any outbreak rather than Health and Human Services, and so on.

But here is what I consider to be the most outrageous part of the bill:

The biggest share, $2.8 billion, would subsidize the rapid development of cell-based technology for making influenza vaccine — an investment that the United States' dwindling vaccine industry has been making only slowly.

Here's the problem: the government can tax-and-spend $2.8 billion, or $2.8 trillion, to underwrite "cell-based technology for making influenza vaccine," but that doesn't mean you're going to get any.

Where did this implicit notion come from that any medical breakthrough can simply be "bought" by throwing enough money at the medical establishment of this country? (SIDEBAR: Does anyone really think that Roche, the owner of Tamiflu and a non-U.S. company, is going to get any of that $2.8 billion? How about Chiron, the last major flu vaccine producer but whose facilities are in England and is being bought by another non-U.S. company, Novartis?)

We've been fighting a "War on Cancer" for 34 years and a "War on AIDS" for 20. The first Muscular Dystrophy Telethon was broadcast in 1966. Yet we still have cancer, AIDS and muscular dystrophy, even after having spent far more than $2.8 billion trying to cure them.

This political wishful thinking of "we can eradicate X in our lifetime" is of course not limited to medical research (e.g., "we can eradicate poverty in our lifetime"). And perhaps the idea that "it's just a matter of how much money" is a throwback to the Moon Landing. But I fear that is not the case.

We are dealing with the most anti-science, anti-intellectual political leadership of recent times and possibly of all time. Do we really need to sit every Washington politician down, one by one, and explain to them that avian flu vaccine is not something the government can simply requisition from Wal-Mart or Halliburton like a few million MRE's or a new space shuttle?

One of the first things every child has to learn is that "wishing won't make it so." And one of the first things every politician ought to learn is that "spending won't make it so, either."

Here's my counterproposal: Take that $2.8 billion, put it aside (dare I say "put it in a lockbox"?) and offer it as a bounty to whichever pharmaceutical company is first able to mass-produce a timely avian flu vaccine. If and only if someone can actually do it, then they claim the bounty and we get our money's worth; if not, then at least the money isn't wasted. But the investment risk will be on the private sector and not the taxpayer (and there would also be no danger of political favoritism in allocating the money). All the potential upside with none of the downside — now that's my kind of investment.

More thoughts from PoliBlog, Hammer of Truth, Corante.

President Bush's veto of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research using blastocysts that are slated for destruction anyway is of course the entirely correct course of action — but for the entirely wrong reason.

Senators voted 63 to 37 to approve a House-passed bill that would pour millions of dollars into a field of medical research that is promising — but also controversial because it requires destroying human embryos to extract the cells.

Bush announced in his first nationally televised address, on Aug. 9, 2001, that he would ban government funding for research using embryonic stem cell colonies created after that date, and he has vowed to cast his first presidential veto to block the legislation rescinding his executive order.

There should indeed be no federal funding of stem cell research — because there should be no federal funding of any medical research of any kind.

Demand creates its own supply. Where there is a need (i.e., a potential market) for the fruits of such research, private "greedy" capitalists will undertake it. And even where there are potential shortfalls (e.g., rare diseases, orphan drugs), the non-profit sector, relying on charitable support, can pick up the slack.

The government can never catalyze discovery; it can only forcibly misallocate resources away from where people actually want them to be deployed.

The President, meanwhile, sees none of this:

This bill would support the taking of innocent human life of the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it.

Instead, he is yet again pandering to his base, the evangelical ignoranti who wallow in anti-science cloaked as "choosing life." (Those who can distinguish between an amorphous clump of cells and a bona fide human fetus are, to the Bush base, a major component of The Others Who Are Ruining America™.) The fact that not a single (proto-)life will be saved by this veto, meanwhile, is a pesky irrelevancy. Go figure.

More thoughts at To the People, Below the Beltway.

(Cross-posted previously at Overlawyered.)

Which of the following was recently uttered by a Member of Congress?

"Cutting-edge research by top scientists from the United States and Israel could..."

a) discover a cure for cancer.
b) locate Noah's Ark.
c) reduce our reliance on foreign oil.
d) prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer.
e) find a way to end world hunger.

Oh, and if you need a reason to care, is $20 million of taxpayer money annually reason enough?

My previous post on the folly of trying to "legislate discovery" here.

Via Coyote Blog.

Apparently it's the next big crisis:

Thomas Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at the University of California at Berkeley, proposed that the federal government provide prizes as an incentive to spur research. Kalil's idea originates from a contest in 1919, when a New York hotel owner, Raymond Orteig, offered a $25,000 purse to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.
...
Dangling prizes in front of innovators has benefits not found in the typical funding process. By offering a prize, government pays for success instead of rewarding a research proposal, as occurs with grants. Second, prizes can stimulate private investment by attracting entrepreneurs and corporate enthusiasts interested in capturing a trophy. Finally, there is nothing like a cash jackpot to stir public interest.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

In an episode of The West Wing, a politician about to face reporters for the first time is warned by a handler, "Never accept the premise of the question." Sage advice here. The notion that "prizes trump grants" presupposes that any federal underwriting of scientific research is ever "proper." That is a entirely faulty premise.

(Note also that even the example provided is an insolent non sequitur: If a hotelier or any other private philanthropist wants to offer a prize for cold fusion, or an AIDS vaccine, or for a motor that converts static electricity into kinetic energy*, then that's his business and more power to him. It does not follow, however, that taxpayers should be financially conscripted into similar beneficence.)

The only proper context for "government science" is military defense: If the Nazis are trying to unlock the power of the atom, then we better do it first. See also this chain.

Consider another way that the dire prediction about American science self-implodes:

Lawrence H. Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and the former president of Harvard University, concisely summed up the day's concerns. The last century was the century of physics, and it was a century directed by America, he said. The 21st century will likely be defined by advances in the biomedical sciences. "The question is," he asked, "'Will the United States be the leader?'"

Here's the defining distinction between physics and the biomedical sciences: It is very difficult for capitalists to make money in the former; it is almost trivial to do so in the latter. Build a better vaccine, or analgesic, or artificial knee, or tongue depressor, and the world will beat a path to your door. Demand creates its own supply — and there's far more demand for new and better biomedical science than there is for "new and better" physics.

Which is precisely why we need even less government involvement in science in this century than the last. Pharmaceutical and biotechnological research certainly needs less of a "jump-start" than physics research. Government intervention, even if nominally benign, will only create distortions — precisely at the time, according to the doomsayers, when we can ill afford them.

One more thought: If I'm the one who actually needs a new and better artificial knee, then do I really care whether that knee was invented by an American rather than by a European or Asian? Or might I care more about whether I can afford it after being so heavily taxed by our "scientifically enlightened" government? Or, worse, whether government regulation keeps that artificial knee off the market altogether? Or, worse still, whether artificial knees are being rationed (by politicians and bureaucrats, not by doctors) under a single-payer health care regime (i.e. socialized medicine)?

So, if the intelligentsia are so concerned about "maintaining America's scientific lead" in this century, then the single best prescription is no prescription at all: Get out of the way. Let American innovators innovate — in the private sector where they can do it best.

And if the politicians desperately feel an urge to "do something," then strengthening patent law and cleaning up the strict liability swamp in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries would be a good start. Tax reform in the areas of charitable giving and "paying for college" might be appropriate agenda items as well.

But federal subsidies, whether via grants or prizes, only cause misallocations — those monies come from somewhere else in the economy, and are always subject to the Politics of Pull — is your memory really so fleeting?

(Via Slashdot.)

*A physicist who invents a motor that converts static electricity into kinetic energy? That would make a great novel...

A bad idea is germinating in Congress:

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill ... authorizing the Department of Energy to create a competition modeled after the X-Prize to encourage innovation in hydrogen research. The bill passed last year, but stalled in the Senate.

Congressman Bob Inglis (R-SC) — the bill's lead author — outlined details of the plan last month, which include multi-million dollar prizes that would be given out every two years for technological advancements (hydrogen production, storage, distribution and utilization), prototypes, and transformation technologies.

Besides the facts that "technology" is not a public good (see, e.g., GE) and that politicians cannot "legislate discovery," the political obliviousness of the supporters of such a appropriation is astonishing.

With a Congress that riddles the budget not only with earmarks and pork, but with just plain dumb spending, suddenly we're going to entrust it, or the bureaucrats it anoints, with deciding which technologies warrant a taxpayer-subsidized prize? Who can possibly be naive enough to believe that government can be non-partisan in matters of science or education? Who seriously thinks that the same moral defectives who give us Bridges to Nowhere aren't going to give us Prizes to Nowhere?

Private persons, either as individuals or as donors to private foundations, are certainly entitled to invoke their subjective value judgments when allocating their charitable dollars. I am entitled, for example, to consider medical research more important than hydrogen research and to give my money accordingly. I am not entitled to persuade Congress to force you, through your tax dollars, to do the same.

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Don't believe that politics would corrupt the prize process?

--What state does Representative Inglis hail from?

--What field of technology does he want taxpayers to subside via prizes?

--Where does most, almost all, of the research in that field take place?

All politicians are, by definition, moral defectives.

Yet another data point reinforcing my thesis that "science" is simply not a public good:

Of the 186 Nobel winners in Medicine since 1901, 99 did their prize-winning research with the support of U.S. research institutions. Of those, only five did their work at NIH and fewer than one-third did their work while affiliated with public institutions.

The other two-thirds were affiliated with private institutions and were primarily supported through private funds. While only a cursory analysis, the evidence seems clear that private investors, whether entrepreneurial or philanthropic, are much better at identifying truly innovative research than government institutions are.

And remember also that government is simply incapable of keeping "public science" even close to apolitical or nonpartisan:

For years, advocates spent millions of dollars trying to convince Congress to support in vitro fertilization research. They claimed that without funding the U.S. would suffer a brain drain and infertile Americans would have to seek treatment abroad. While a divisive debate over the ethical merits of test-tube babies raged, some scientists quietly pursued their research privately. Even after decades of lobbying, the federal government never funded any IVF research, and today the U.S. has the largest IVF industry in the world.

Other "government science is never unbiased" data points include "stem cell research" and, of course, "Reagan and AIDS" (see also this article on homosexuality: "there is very little research money, and almost no glory, to be gained in the hunt for gayness"). And don't forget the related examples of "Medicare and Viagra" or the (hardly "apolitical and nonpartisan") network of taxpayer-subsidized arts funding.

Note also the additional, and important, point made in the commentary: A private dollar spent on "lobbying for science" is not a dollar spent on "science." A taxpayer dollar spent establishing, administering or overseeing a governmental science bureaucracy is likewise not a dollar spent on "science." There's a significant deadweight loss in trying to convince politicians that your scientific agenda is the "correct" scientific agenda. A scientist cannot simultaneously be in a lab and in a committee meeting. Neither can her patron's checkbook.

Just as government cannot "create jobs," but only redistribute them (net of bureaucratic and political overhead), and just as government cannot "create wealth," but only redistribute it (again, net of bureaucratic and political overhead), so too can government not "create research," but only redistribute it to politically favored areas from disfavored ones.

(Via Hit & Run.)

Orac, a noted science blogger thinks so:

I heard a statement that sounded something like this: "We're spending three million dollars to study bear DNA. I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money."

Ack! First McCain credulously buys into the pseudoscience that vaccines somehow cause autism, and now this! Shades of William Proxmire's infamous Golden Fleece Awards from the 1970s and 1980s. In a truly irritating bit of antiscience demagogery [sic], Proxmire not infrequently peppered his lists of truly wasteful spending with Golden Fleece Awards to federally funded science projects that, because of the odd or unusual nature of the subject matter, were easily portrayed to the ignorant as wastes of taxpayer money. Never mind that many of them had been subjected to NSF or NIH peer review, just like any other grant proposal, and been found scientifically meritorious enough to fund. If they sounded "funny" they must be wasteful.

I have no "bear in the race" when it comes to researching bear DNA. I am no supporter of John McCain. I am no supporter of any politician who distorts reality to score political points with the ignoranti. (And, as a gay libertarian, I've certainly encountered enough of them.)

But Orac overreacts and "gets political" himself with the "NSF or NIH peer review" nonsense. (Incidentally, it appears that the $5 million "bear DNA study" — coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey — was not funded by a peer-reviewed NSF grant but by a gaggle of plain vanilla earmarks arranged by recently ousted Senator Conrad Burns (R-Bears). So "15-0" McCain on that serve.)

But let's put earmarks aside and focus, as Orac would prefer, on government research grants peer-reviewed by the NSF, NIH or other government conduits. Of course the science and humanities bureaucrats (and they are bureaucrats) will find that at least some, and indeed more than enough, proposals are "scientifically meritorious." That's what government spenders of taxpayer money are specifically retained to do — find ways to spend it. The fact that they actually wind up doing so proves nothing whatsoever. Doing what you're hired to do does not prove that what you do was ever worthwhile in the first place; it's an entirely separate and precedent question. How could a leading science blogger engage in such atrociously circular reasoning?

Indeed, Orac totally puts the cart before the bear. The function of grant-dispensing bureaucrats is not to disqualify any research proposal as "unworthy" — only "less worthy" than other "worthy" proposals. Federal research funds (i.e., the taxpayer money the bureaucrats get to dole out as beneficences) are allocated before the peer review process ever begins — appropriation precedes allocation. The bureaucrats are merely prioritizing scarce funds among essentially unlimited proposals. "Here's a billion dollars in grant funding — allocate as you think best, NSF peer reviewers." Think a bureaucrat, even a scientist-bureaucrat, swimming in other people's money is going to run out of things to fund? That's a theory debunked by mountains of empirical data.

It's analogous to scholarship competitions: just because you didn't win doesn't mean the application reviewers expect you to flunk out. You may very well have been "worthy" — just not as worthy as the winner. But what's not analogous is that scholarships tend to be endowed by voluntary money, not tax dollars. When the government steps in, suddenly everyone becomes "worthy" and too much money is never enough — especially other people's money. No matter how much funding politicians are willing to extract from taxpayers, there will always be another "worthy student" — or another "worthy research proposal" — deserving of funding instead of an "ignorant" politician's scorn.

All because the (hardly impartial) money-hungry scientists say so. And because they're so much smarter than you. They are, at the end of the day, no better than the politicians whom they do not hesitate to damn as "demagogues." Go figure.

(And, especially in the case of the biological sciences, please don't pretend that politics never plays a part in it.)

Truly "scientifically meritorious" research proposals would be able to find strictly private funding — either for-profit or not-for-profit. Pure research, outside of military applications, is simply not a public good. Something beyond "scientists would like more" is required before one can assert "market failure."

P.S. Don't forget taxpayer-extracted arts funding.

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Meanwhile:

[Clinton's] insourcing plan would enact the largest expansion of tax benefits for research and job growth; create at least 15 new "Innovation and Research Clusters" across the country, launch a new "Insourcing Markets Tax Credit" to spur business investment communities facing global competition, and catalyze the 21st Century manufacturing sector with several bold new programs, including the "Made Green In America" Fund, which would provide $500 million annually in investments to encourage the creation of high-wage jobs in clean energy manufacturing technologies.

Combining "Clinton-speak" with "Orac-speak" -- She has a million "peer-reviewed research proposals" -- the country can't afford them all.