Opinion

GOP fumes: That’s not science!

Excavation of the Neanderthal site Abri Peyrony, France, where bone tools known as lissoirs were discovered. Excavation of the Neanderthal site Abri Peyrony, France, where bone tools known as lissoirs were discovered. Photo: Abri Peyrony Project Photo: Abri Peyrony Project Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close GOP fumes: That’s not science! 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

If Congress has its way, the next round of grants by the National Science Foundation, a hallmark of government funding for graduate students and scientists, will no longer be based on scientific merit. Proposals would not be reviewed by panels of preeminent scholars across the United States as they have been for more than a half-century; instead, they would all be “in the national interest,” with strict new rules adopted earlier this month by a Republican House committee.

More, the foundation would be stripped of its control of its $7.3 billion budget. Congress has told the foundation exactly how much money to allocate to specified areas of research. Funding in social sciences and economics, for example, would be cut in half to $150 million. Climate-change studies, including crucial research in the Arctic, would be cut 12 percent. And, despite House claims that the U.S. must beef up its science, technology, engineering and math education workforce, the foundation education budget stands to be cut by 10 percent.

Battle for control

Republican distrust of the NSF had been simmering for nearly three years before the unprecedented clampdown attempt. Fed up from what he considered a foolish waste of taxpayer dollars, House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, last year began singling out about 50 grants and fellowships that were, in his opinion, questionable. (The NSF has awarded 11,000 grants annually, some 2,000 of which are graduate fellowships.)

“For example,” he said, “a game that focuses on people from the future leaving voice mails about climate change does not seem like the best use of limited taxpayer funds.” That NSF award did indeed involve a game, yet there was much more to it. It derived from a congressional appropriation requiring the NSF to find new climate-change approaches and collaborations. The result was a coordinated network of universities and major research centers — and, in the first phase of the process, the NSF found gaming to be a highly effective educational tool.

The ranking science committee Democrat, Eddie Bernice Johnson, also from Texas, railed against the GOP ploy of keeping the bill, HR1806, under wraps until a week before it was presented to the full committee. She called Smith’s in-depth search of NSF grants a “witch hunt.” The legislation, she said, sought to “prevent research in fields to which the majority is ideologically opposed,” specifically clean energy, climate change and social sciences.

The bill passed out of committee along strict partisan lines and sailed through Congress with 217 ayes, all Republican, on May 20. It is now awaiting the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

On the heels of the main bill, the committee took up redefining “national interest” in HR3293 in July, and last month began marking up the bill. Science committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, said, “The apparent intent of this legislation is to interject politics into the scientific review process.” She said Democratic suggestions were not adopted — just as some 30 Democratic modifications to HR1806 were ignored by the GOP committee leadership.

What does the House committee want? It wants adherence to seven national-interest criteria: economic competitiveness by the U.S.; health advances within the U.S.; development of a domestic science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce that can compete globally; science and technology education within the U.S.; more university partnerships with U.S. industries; national defense; and scientific progress specifically for the benefit of the U.S.

A case in point

UC Davis Professor Teresa Steele is in the center of the ideological onslaught. She is a paleoanthropologist and chair of the university’s Evolutionary Anthropology Graduate Program. Her archaeological study of Neanderthal man is largely centered in France, Morocco and South Africa. Among the graduate students she advises are two NSF fellows.

Steele’s challenges are multifold: Her field is considered social science, which is now frowned upon and which could suffer extreme budget cuts; her work takes place abroad and is considered a benefit to international scientists — also demerits; the benefits, as demanded by the national interest criteria, don’t exist because there were no known Neanderthals in America.

Excavations led and co-led by Steele have unearthed stone and bone tools as old as 55,000 years at sites dating to 80,000 years, with several specimens from the same site in the Dordogne region of France. Her studies on hunting practices and prey, tool technology and environmental change have shed light on the disappearance of humankind’s ancestor.

“We are telling the story of human origins,” Steele said, “looking into Neanderthal behavior and extinction and why other humans replaced them.

“As an anthropologist, (the congressional demands) really concern me. We’re studying cultural and biological diversity on an international basis, and that’s not being valued. I would say there’s a lot of wariness” among scholars about how Congress hopes to redefine the national interest.

According to NSF Director France Cordova, proposals have historically been judged under two criteria: intellectual merit and broad social impact. It’s been that way since 1950. Integral to this, she said, initiatives “all depend on the inclusion of social and behavioral sciences to advance knowledge in the physical, biological, computer and geological sciences, as well as engineering.”

Programs like Steele’s at UC Davis may not, in Steele’s words, “fit the imposed research trajectories” developed by Congress.

Future science

The bills probably will not survive the Senate, and President Obama has promised a veto. But the audacious move to gut an American scientific institution that has been a part of more than 200 Nobel Prizes (of which 52 were in economics), isn’t for show. The slow, grating movement of the far-right bloc in the GOP has been most recently effective in ousting House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and neutralizing his heir apparent, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.

If the two science-funding bills become law, those e-mails from the far-flung future that so enraged Lamar Smith might very well lament the science and innovation that was lost because of politicians exerting their power in 2015. What might be lost if this bloc has its way? The study of climate change, social sciences, reproductive studies, stem cell research, tissue research, human evolution, animal extinction. And in the place of science? Perhaps the reintroduction of a flat Earth that was made on the third day of creation, 6,000 years ago and upon which walk politicians who are the center of the known universe.

Brooks Mencher is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: bmencher@sfchronicle.com To comment, submit your letter to the editor to www.sfgate.com/submissions.

Questioned Proposals

Among the grants that got under the skin of GOP House science committee members and which are viewed as a misuse of funds (all proposals met NSF criteria of scientific merit and social/international impact) such as inappropriate spending and nondomestic studies:

1. Ridiculed: To “thumb through pictures of animals in old National Geographic magazines”

The NSF proposal abstract says: Photos to be used to create a new digital archive for animal conservation, and will apply to tracking historical shifts in science and culture.

2. Ridiculed: Oppression and mental health in Nepal

Abstract: Research will influence training in psychiatry, public health, education, and training, with increased international research partnerships.

3. Ridiculed: Studying the regulation of China’s dairy industry

Abstract: This is a study of the deadly 2008 melamine poisoning in China, affecting food safety standards in many nations. China is a $592 billion U.S. trading partner (2014, Congressional Research Service stats).

4. Ridiculed: A climate change musical entitled “The Great Immensity”

Abstract: This was a science-based production meant to help the public better appreciate how science studies the Earth’s biosphere, and included educational outreach and panel discussions, exploring how theater can increase awareness of science-society issues.

5. Ridiculed: Fishing practices around Lake Victoria, Africa

Abstract: The proposal would assess scenarios of aquaculture growth (farm-raised fish) and trade-offs in fish population dynamics while analyzing food security and income security.

6. Ridiculed: Early, man-made fires in New Zealand

Abstract: The study has the potential to transform fire-history science into an interdisciplinary field worldwide.

7. Ridiculed: Study of Bronze Age on Cyprus

Abstract: Will shed new light on understanding the effects of cities on ever-expanding populations while forging international collaboration.

8. Ridiculed: Causes of stress in Bolivia

Abstract: This project will provide new approaches to chronic stress in other populations.

9. Ridiculed: Improved bicycle design

Abstract: This study by an emeritus professor of engineering at UC Davis asks, “How do we learn to ride a bike?” It’s not simple. The answers deal with mechanical engineering and research will apply to innovations in piloting planes and humankind’s ability to work with machines in general.

Graduate studies

Congressional changes to National Science Foundation fellowships to graduate students will impact California student scholars significantly. The NSF awards, representing less than 2 percent of its $5.9 billion research budget, are $46,000 per year for three years, or $138,000. Those who would suffer most are social science scholars — anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and economists.

2,050 graduate student fellowships awarded in 2015

351 went to California scholars

110 to UC Berkeley

100 to Stanford

36 to UC Irvine

28 to UC Davis