BOSTON—"The national debt is a big structural problem," former Representative Brian Baird told his audience at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that, according to Baird, is one reason scientific research comes under fire. “If you can’t solve something big," he went on, "distract people by attacking something small.” All too often, that something small has been scientific research.

Two of the researchers who found their work under fire were on hand to describe the experience and talk a bit about the lessons they learned.

One of them was David Scholnick of Pacific University who produced the video above, showing a shrimp going for a run on an underwater treadmill. It's hard to tell just how many people have ended up viewing the video, given that it has been cloned, set to various music, and appeared in news reports that have also made their way onto YouTube—it's fair to say that it's quite popular. Scholnick wasn't looking for that popularity. He had just put the video up on his faculty webpage; someone else grabbed it and stuck it on YouTube.

A treadmill of outrage

Scholnick also wasn't looking for the attention it received from then-Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who claimed the treadmill cost $3 million and named it as an example of wasteful government spending without even bothering to find out what the results were. Representative John Culberson (R-Texas) saw Coburn's report and said “NSF should avoid funding studies” like that. Then the news picked it up. Mike Huckabee blamed Scholnick's spending for leaving the military unprepared. It showed up on Fox News three times, including as recently as last year (the video was posted in 2009). AARP picked it up, too, and blamed the cost for grandparents not getting healthcare.

Scholnick even went to DC and talked to Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who took over the waste reports when Coburn retired. The video still showed up in the next one.

And that bugs Scholnick. “This is a publicity stunt," he said, "this is not an individual who is concerned about public spending.” Why's that? Because the treadmill cost the government nothing. Its bearings came from an old skateboard Scholnick had been using. The tread is just an inner-tube that's been stitched together. Any parts that cost money were paid for out of Scholnick's pocket. The $3 million dollar figure? That came by adding up every single grant Scholnick's ever received and then throwing in various grants awarded to his collaborators for unrelated projects.

The reality is that most of the research that goes on in Scholnick's lab is done by undergraduates who work during the summer. Between their low stipends and the long hours they work, it's done at about $4 an hour for personnel and about $20,000 to keep the lab supplied and make sure the university keeps the lights on. The shrimp? Local fishermen give them to Scholnick for free.

That's because the fishermen have done something nobody in Congress could be bothered to do: find out what the research is all about. Scholnick said that most animals in the ocean are carrying various infections and parasites that can influence their behavior and activity. Scholnick tries to figure out how these animals are affected by looking for changes in their physiology. To make this as realistic as possible, he forces the animals to be as active as they would be in the wild. Hence the treadmill.

It's not earth-shattering research, but it's hardly an utter waste of money—especially considering how little it costs. But, if Congress ever gets bored of going after shrimp, there's always duck penises.

Sex lack-of-appeal

Patty Brennan studies genitalia at Mount Holyoke College. The physical shape of genitals is very diverse even among closely related species. It's shaped by distinct selective pressures in both males and females. Figuring out what these pressures are and how animals have responded to them is a great opportunity to study evolution. One of the more dramatic instances of this is in ducks, where both males and females have evolved corkscrew-shaped genitals in what's essentially an arms race. Brennan's research on the topic was striking enough to earn an article in The New York Times. (Her response: “yay, someone else likes duck penises!”)

So she set up a Google alert to see if there was any further coverage, which is how she found out when conservative news media discovered her work and placed it in a list of research that was labeled wasteful spending as the budget sequester went into effect. Sean Hannity later joined in the attack.

But Brennan noticed a pattern to all of this: most of it involved organismal biology. She suspected this is because it's easy to understand. "Everybody knows what a duck is, everybody knows what a penis is, you put them together, haha,” Brennan said. “You never heard of a politician making fun of quantum physics.” But she said that's misguided, and she now has a list of results that demonstrate this: how understanding mating habits of an insect pest saved us $20 million in annual control efforts; how understanding bird migration has made air travel less likely to end in dangerous collisions; and how studying bird song enabled us to recognize that our brains are able to produce new nerve cells, for example.

But even if these attacks are misguided, historian Melinda Baldwin said they're not likely to go away. Questions about public funding of science date back to the 1960s, and direct attacks on funding started in the 1970s. William Proxmire, a Democratic senator who served in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, frequently named research as wasteful spending and even attacked peer review as "elitist" and "incestuous." Then, as now, scientists weren't ready to defend either their research or the process of science itself. But Baldwin said that the attacks are worst at times of financial or budgetary turmoil, so now might be a good time for scientists to get ready.

As Baird said, “If you think it’s been bad before, it’s going to get really bad soon.”