Actually, were it not for private funding, modern astronomy would be nowhere near the state it's in today. You can thank people like Andrew Carnegie, and many other industrial captains of their day, for our current understanding of the cosmos. Yerkes, Hooker- many others. Even today, benefactors such as the Keck Foundation fund an incredible amount of astronomical science. I realize that pharmacology and other areas such as geology and energy science are different, due to the profit potential. There's about as much profit in opening an astronomy shop, as a philosophy shop. My point is just that painting with too-broad a brush in condemning private research money should probably be avoided. Too, it's hard for me to tell some big pharmacological company that they can't spend their money any way they want, just because they aren't working on what I want them to work on. If we want more government research spending so our wishes can be met, we need to accomplish it via the ballot box. And this is really a separate issue from a cultural anti-science mindset, anyway. The perceived public anti-science stance, as I see it, is largely epidemic in this country only, as far as the western world is concerned. Fundamentalism in both politics and religion are as big a factor here, as they are in the middle east. Both old cultures and new can be hobbled in their thinking if they go down that road, and in both instances it's a tool for control of the masses governed. Holding-onto relevancy and power. Bandwagon types and those resistant to change are usually the most vocal. People advocating the new have never been met with overwhelming enthusiasm right out of the gate. Science is largely controlled by peer-review. Bad science doesn't last in the long run. It's mostly a very vocal minority that try to screw things up for the vast majority that play by the rules. On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 9:44 AM, <erikhansen@thebluezone.net> wrote:
We need for government to take back its role in funding research, privately funded science is the problem.