Funding Quotes (20 quotes)
Action precedes funding. Planning precedes action.
Epigraph in Ask Without Fear (2008), 18.
August 29, 1662. The council and fellows of the Royal Society went in a body to Whitehall to acknowledge his Majesty’s royal grace to granting our charter and vouchsafing to be himself our founder; then the president gave an eloquent speech, to which his Majesty gave a gracious reply and we all kissed his hand. Next day, we went in like manner with our address to my Lord Chancellor, who had much prompted our patent.
Economists use the expression “opportunity costs” for losses incurred through certain choices made over others, including ignorance and inaction. For systematics, or more precisely the neglect of systematics and the biological research dependent upon it, the costs are very high.
In 'Edward O. Wilson: The Biological Diversity Crisis: A Challenge to Science', Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1985), 2, No. 1, 25.
Every hour a scientist spends trying to raise funds is an hour lost from important thought and research.
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 287.
Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system.
Quoted in Tom Harper, 'Scientists threatened for "climate denial",' The Telegraph (11 Mar 2007).
I think it’s time we recognized the Dark Ages are over. Galileo and Copernicus have been proven right. The world is in fact round; the Earth does revolve around the sun. I believe God gave us intellect to differentiate between imprisoning dogma and sound ethical science, which is what we must do here today.
Debating federal funding for stem cell research as Republican Representative (CT).
Debating federal funding for stem cell research as Republican Representative (CT).
In Eve Herold, George Daley, Stem Cell Wars (2007), 57.
If the NSF had never existed, if the government had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many mathematicians as we now have, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
From interview (1981) with Donald J. Albers. In John H. Ewing and Frederick W. Gehring, Paul Halmos Celebrating 50 Years of Mathematics (1991), 3.
It always seems to be easier to obtain financial support for science when there is some connection with defence. Oceanography is no exception to this.
In 'Man Explores the Sea', Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (Sep 1963), 111, No. 5086, 786.
It’s hard to explain to people what the significance of an invention is, so it’s hard to get funding. The first thing they say is that it can’t be done. Then they say, “You didn't do it right.” Then, when you’ve done it, they finally say, “Well, it was obvious anyway.”
http://www.thetech.org/nmot/detail.cfm?id=95&st=awardDate&qt=1997&kiosk=Off
My profession often gets bad press for a variety of sins, both actual and imagined: arrogance, venality, insensitivity to moral issues about the use of knowledge, pandering to sources of funding with insufficient worry about attendant degradation of values. As an advocate for science, I plead ‘mildly guilty now and then’ to all these charges. Scientists are human beings subject to all the foibles and temptations of ordinary life. Some of us are moral rocks; others are reeds. I like to think (though I have no proof) that we are better, on average, than members of many other callings on a variety of issues central to the practice of good science: willingness to alter received opinion in the face of uncomfortable data, dedication to discovering and publicizing our best and most honest account of nature’s factuality, judgment of colleagues on the might of their ideas rather than the power of their positions.
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My Rainforests Project … has three main elements. Firstly, to determine how much funding the rainforest countries need to re-orientate their economies so that the trees are worth more alive than dead.
Presidential Lecture (3 Nov 2008) at the Presidential Palace, Jakarta, Indonesia. On the Prince of Wales website.
Science can be thought of as a large pool of knowledge, fed by a steady flow from the tap of basic research. Every now and then the water is dipped out and put to use, but one never knows which part of the water will be needed. This confuses the funding situation for basic science, because usually no specific piece of scientific work can be justified in advance; one cannot know which is going to be decisive. Yet history shows that keeping water flowing into the pool is a very worthwhile enterprise.
In 'Technology Development', Science (1983), 220, 576-580. As quoted and cited in H. Charles Romesburg, Best Research Practices (2009), 213.
Society can, and does, and must control research enormously, negatively and positively, by selectively cutting off or supplying funds. At present it cuts—not so selectively. That is all right with me, as far as my own research is concerned. I certainly do not think society owes me a living or support for my research. If it does not support my research, I can always do something else and not be worse off, perhaps better. However, the question, from society's point of view, is exceedingly complicated.
In 'Homo Scientificus According to Beckett', collected in William Beranek, Jr. (ed.),Science, Scientists, and Society, (1972), 135-. Excerpted in Ann E. Kammer, Science, Sex, and Society (1979), 279.
The rigid career path of a professor at a modern university is that One Must Build the Big Research Group, recruit doctoral students more vigorously than the head football coach, bombard the federal agencies with grant applications more numerous than the pollen falling from the heavens in spring, and leave the paper writing and the research to the postdocs, research associates, and students who do all the bench work and all the computer programming. A professor is chained to his previous topics by his Big Group, his network of contacts built up laboriously over decades, and the impossibility of large funding except in areas where the grantee has grown the group from a corner of the building to an entire floor. The senior tenure-track faculty at a research university–the “silverbacks” in anthropological jargon–are bound by invisible chains stronger than the strongest steel to a narrow range of what the Prevailing Consensus agrees are Very Important Problems. The aspiring scientist is confronted with the reality that his mentors are all business managers.
In his Foreword to Cornelius Lanczos, Discourse on Fourier Series, ix-x.
There are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science, that support for research is somehow a luxury at moments defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before. … we can't allow our nation to fall behind. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happened. Federal funding in the physical sciences as a portion of our gross domestic product has fallen by nearly half over the past quarter century. Time and again we've allowed the research and experimentation tax credit, which helps businesses grow and innovate, to lapse.
Speech to the National Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting (27 Apr 2009).
This study was supported by NSF MBS75-14268 and inspired by paying 95 cents for a rotten avocado.
In 'Why Fruits Rot, Seeds Mold, and Meat Spoils', The American Naturalist (Jul-Aug 1977), 111, No. 980, 707. The author suggests that food spoilage is the result of microbes competing to keep the resource to themselves by engendering the rotting process to repel larger animals from consuming the food item.
To make the peaks higher.
[His reason to target philanthropic funding to only the best university science departments.]
[His reason to target philanthropic funding to only the best university science departments.]
As quoted by Stanley Coben in 'The Scientific Establishment and the Transmission of Quantum Mechanics to the United States, 1919-32', The American Historical Review (Apr 1971), 76, No. 2, 450. As president of the Rockerfeller Foundation's General Education Board in the 1920s, Rose explained the reason to narrow the board's financial focus. It would cease distributing funds to many university general endowment funds, and instead support only the few strongest university science departments. It became an unofficial motto for philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It was also a favorite of George Ellery Hale. The quotation comes from Rose's private notebook as cited by Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, The Story of the General Education Board (1962), 230. Further details of the board's change in policy are in Annual Report of the General Education Board, 1924-1925 (1926), 6-8.
Two years ago 1 tried to appeal to Rockefeller’s conscience about the absurd method of allocating grants, unfortunately without success. Bohr has now gone to see him, in an attempt to persuade him to take some action on behalf of the exiled German scientists.
We have vastly increased the amount of funding that is available for conservation partnerships.
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You must never believe all these things which the scientists say because they always want more than they can get—they are never satisfied.
[Responding to a complaint of inadequate support for research.]
[Responding to a complaint of inadequate support for research.]
Quoted in Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Nuclear Scientist Defect to the United States (1965). In Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (1999), 156, footnote.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
