Need to pander to your base? Attack funny-sounding science funded by the NSF!
Orac takes a retrospective back at a time when it was a Democrat who was the anti-science buffoon in congress to compare it to the most recent Tom Coburn anti-NSF screed.
Please click out to read the important part about Coburn’s current efforts to cut funding to the National Science Foundation.
Later, as I went to college and medical school, I started to realize that, when the Golden Fleece Awards were “awarded” to science projects, they frequently betrayed a profound ignorance of science, in essence taking cheap shots at worthy scientific projects that could easily be made to sound ridiculous to the scientifically ignorant. In other words, when it came to science the Golden Fleece Awards were more akin to demagoguery than anything else. Examples abound and include the infamous Golden Fleece given to fund what was dismissively called “tequila fish” research. This was basically a grant to a researcher from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 1975 to study, among other things, if drunken fish are more aggressive than sober fish, if young rats are more likely than adult rats to drink booze in order to reduce anxiety, and if rats can be systematically turned into alcoholics, which sounds ridiculous but in reality to most scientists would sound like important research into alcoholism using animal models. Other examples of abuse of science by Proxmire’s “award” included a National Science Foundation grant to investigate the importance of social justice and equity in romantic exchanges, another study funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse to study the effects of marijuana on sexual arousal, and a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1978 to study comparing the amount of food eaten by obese and normal weight people ordering from a menu compared to going to a buffet. In light of the “obesity” epidemic this nation has experienced over the last 30 years, this last bit of research seems downright prescient.
Be that as it may, although the Golden Fleece Award ruthlessly mocked whatever Proxmire’s staff perceived to be government waste, often when such projects were examined more closely it turns out that there were very good reasons for them. In particular, when it came to science projects, Proxmire’s awards misfired big time far more often than they were on target, such as his bestowing upon the Environmental Protection Agency for funding a study in Vermont in 1978 to determine whether runoff from open stacks of cow manure was the cause of pollution in nearby streams and ponds