Science

Give me Money (That’s what I want)

The eternal quest for any science, the quest for funding to do research.  I learned a really interesting, and to a degree saddening, fact today about the amount of money spent by lobbyist, approximately 29 billion dollars is spent to get their voices heard.  That is 2.9×10^9 or 29,000,000,000 dollars spent annually.  Take 1% of that (290,000,000) and put it directly into science research, on top of what is already what is spent, and hopefully we would see a direct benefit from that spending.  It has been asked many times, why should we spend money on X, Y and Z?  Unfortunately, I think the public sometimes forgets the outcomes of research.  While not related to the ocean sciences, establishment of the particle accelerators at CERN is allowing me to write this and for the eyes glued to the screen on a computer to read it.

What of the woefully underfunded, depends on perspective there, marine sciences?  We have only explored about 5% of the ocean, more than half of the population in the US lives on 17% of the total landmass (the coastal zone).  And yet we push to explore of the emptiness surrounding us, but ignore the close neighbor, the ocean.  Do we question where our fish come from, or even the impact of eating the fish?  How do we make our voices heard?  Speak the language that everyone wants to hear: money.  We need to speak both the technical language to our peers, what X does to Z by way of Y.  To sway the general public, and therefore the members of Congress they are represented by, we must put it in terms of how does our research boost the economy, or how does what we study harm the economy.  We need to show end products/applications as well, it may be great to study X but how can X be used in the future.

The question is, can we in the marine sciences raise our voices loud enough?