Psych!
This week’s School Me Saturday is not about any of the grants I have in the pipeline. However, it is about the grants that may never be.
Research is expensive. I mean the kind of research that is done correctly, not the diddle on your phone, and read some BS articles from BS sites that don’t know proper research from a hole in the ground.
Properly done research takes a principal investigator who has gone to further their education. They know how to search for research gaps, they know how to protect the people and things being researched, they know how to create a quality research protocol, and they know how to answer the question that prompted the research in the first place.
I am a nascent researcher. This means I have barely scraped the surface of how to do research, how to find gaps, how to answer the research question, and, most importantly, how to do all of this in a safe non-compromising way that keeps the data that is gleaned free from bias.
There are the hours the researcher puts in before a project can even begin, there is the research assistant who shoulders some of that work, there is the university that gives the researcher a place to do the research, there is the statistician who helps make sense of the gleaned data, there is the cost of doing the research, be it paying participants, feeding participants, and even FINDING participants. The point is there are a lot of moving parts to research. Don’t get me started on getting the research, when it is done, released to the public. This is called dissemination.
It is also of vital importance to have succession planning in place. After all, even the Wise Ones in Wicked knew they couldn’t live forever and they had to write down all their magic in a book. Students are also expensive, as is the cost of learning how to do university-level work. See also the con-man who came to Oz after a tornado in a balloon and bamboozled the Ozians into believing that he could read the book. That is a story for another time.
The US federal government cannot say the same. Which is why they disperse monies through the NIH. That is the National Institutes of Health.
Research is expensive. Without grants, research would be much, much, much, much, much smaller and the amount of research would drop. Precipitously. And it would have a subsequently diminished impact on the ones it should impact. Like Suzy, with childhood cancer, or Jen, with triple-negative breast cancer.
Bob with the male pattern baldness would probably be okay, there is always money to research white male problems.
Think to yourself why that is?
This week the newly inaugurated president wasted no time in freezing the review of grants at the NIH. Among all the other nonsense that took place. And there was a LOT of BS. The presidency, the revenge for small slights and maybe others know what they are doing, no wait, no they don’t, tour.
No review of grants, no grant approval. No grant approval, no research being done. Are you going to tell your child with cancer that sorry, the research wasn’t done? But you can ask them what color coffin they want.
But, sure, some ass in BFE US can claim they did their “research”.
No, no, you most assuredly did not.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 