Articles tagged Science Policy
(64 results)

Given the outcome of the US presidential election, some of our members have asked us if they should fear an erosion of federal support for research funding. Others have asked more pointed questions, such as: What is the GSA doing to defend the interests of geneticists? Young scientists, they’ve told us, are now even more…

Dear President-elect Trump, Congratulations on your victory. As a fellow president myself (albeit with a much smaller constituency), I can remember well those early post-election days, when the surge of heady enthusiasm for all those things I hoped to accomplish had not yet been eroded by the practicalities of actually governing. But as a geneticist…

The detonation of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 resulted in horrific casualties and devastation. The long-term effects of radiation exposure also increased cancer rates in the survivors. But public perception of the rates of cancer and birth defects among survivors and their children is in fact greatly…

Last week at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins provided an overview of model organism support from his agency. Collins used a new analysis performed by NIH staff to address concerns expressed by many of the model organism researchers gathered at TAGC, particularly a 2015 analysis by Michael…

Model Organism Databases (MODs) and the Gene Ontology Consortium play a crucial “behind-the-scenes” role in the work of model organism geneticists and many other biomedical researchers. This guest post by the newly-formed Alliance of Genome Resources announces the group’s intention to integrate the efforts of the MODs and other genome resources. You can learn more…

Back in December, we wrote here about a proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor that would mandate that postdocs earning less than $50,440 per year would be eligible for overtime pay at 1.5 times their hourly rate. This week, the Department of Labor released its revisions to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The…

A couple of weeks ago I presented a poster at an unusual event, entitled “Wasteful” Research? Looking Beyond the Abstract which was sponsored by the Coalition to Promote Research (CPR) and the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF).  It was unusual (at least in my experience) for two reasons. First, because I was accompanied by…

Last night, a milieu of scientists, Congressional staffers, members of Congress, and representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSF) filled the banquet room of the Rayburn House Office Building to show how investments in STEM research and education are fueling American innovation. Among those scientists was GSA member Ahna Skop, an Associate Professor of Genetics and…

  Advocating for Model Organism Research This month, GSA member Jeff Leips (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) packed up a few his fruit flies and brought them to the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. There he joined other researchers, including David A. Scholnick of “shrimp on a treadmill” fame to present at the Wasteful Research?…

In 2014, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus published an article in PNAS detailing the pitfalls and challenges of the structure of the biomedical workforce. Though many have written about and discussed these problems before, people seemed to pay attention to the conversation this time. Scientists at all stages of their careers…

 FY 2017 Budget Process Underway President Obama submitted his budget request for Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 to congress at the beginning of the month, proposing funding levels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to accommodate a nearly $1 billion increase in mandatory spending to fund special projects like the BRAIN, Precision Medicine, and Cancer Moonshot…