Winners of the world’s most prestigious prize in science did work that was funded by the federal government, the New York Times reports.
The winners, James E Rothman, 62, of Yale University; Randy W Schekman, 64, of the University of California, Berkeley; and Thomas C Südhof, 57, of Stanford University, were announced yesterday in Sweden. The discoveries that led to their prize involved the “machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells,” according to the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.
As this was basic, not applied, science, funding sources for this type of research have been drying up for several years. The federal government shutdown, however, which has furloughed many NIH employees who work on this type of research, threatens it even more. And just because these specific discoveries don’t affect any medical procedures right now, the Nobel folks recognized that future scientists will pick up the discoveries and increase our medical understanding and ability to reverse the course of disease.
“Through their discoveries, Rothman, Schekman and Südhof have revealed the exquisitely precise control system for the transport and delivery of cellular cargo. Disturbances in this system have deleterious effects and contribute to conditions such as neurological diseases, diabetes, and immunological disorders,” they wrote.
But that won’t ever happen if we stop the basic research by cutting off funding for scientists like this whose discoveries don’t lead directly to profit for a company but add to our collective understanding about the machinery in our cells. Discoveries like theirs must come first, before other scientists can take those discoveries and apply them to medical procedures. The applied scientists and engineers usually get funding from companies, like pharmaceutical or medical device companies, because their work will lead to profits. But basic research is funded mostly through the government, which, once again, picks up the slack for which private industry has accepted little or no responsibility.
The prize thus comes at a time when government seems more interested in de-funding healthcare insurance for millions in the interest of increasing personal responsibility than it is in keeping the nation on a path of discovery, which will propel us and many of our for-profit corporations forward in the future. It seems the current shutdown tells individuals they need to be more responsible for their own well-being and tells certain for-profit corporations, whose interests I thought the Tea Party was looking to advance, that the government is giving up on their futures as well. How ironic that is!
“How many potential future Nobel Prize winners are struggling to find research support today, or have been sent home on furlough?” the Times quoted NIH director Francis Collins as saying. “How many of them are wondering whether they should do something else—or move to another country? It is a bitter irony for the future of our nation’s health that NIH is being hamstrung this way, just when the science is moving forward at an unprecedented pace.”