Word: lederman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many researchers, however, the single greatest threat to U.S. science, and a source of many of its troubles, is money -- or a lack of it. That view came into sharp focus in January when Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman, the newly elected president of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science, issued what he called his "cry of alarm...
...Lederman, former head of Fermilab, the high-energy physics center in Illinois, had conducted a survey of research scientists in 50 universities. Most of the nearly 250 responses, he reported, came from demoralized and underfunded researchers who foresaw only a bleak future for their disciplines and their jobs. "I haven't seen anything like this in my 40 years in science," Lederman said. "Research, at least the research carried out in universities, is in very serious trouble." And that, he warned, "raises serious questions about the very future of science...
...Lederman's calculations, if inflation is taken into account, federal funding in 1990 for both basic and applied scientific research in universities & was only 20% higher than in 1968, while the number of Ph.D.-level scientists working at the schools doubled during the same time period. In other words, twice as many researchers are scrambling for smaller pieces of a slightly bigger pie. The competition for financing has forced scientists into fundraising efforts at the expense of research and has led to angry exchanges over what kind of work should have priority. It has also forced researchers to propose "safe...
Those restraints are clearly detrimental to the bold and innovative research that has made American science great. Lederman's solution: "We should be spending twice as much...