Some Science Is Easy To Mock, But It Might Have Saved Your Life

Yet some of our greatest advances have come from exactly this sort of work. You may be alive today only because those projects went ahead, and there’s a high chance you know people who are. There are far too many examples of cases like this to list, but some of these examples have been highlighted below.

The Golden Fleece

Perhaps the most famous and lasting attacks on scientific research came from William Proxmire, the long-term former Democrat Senator from Wisconsin. Proxmire was a fierce critic of government waste, and is widely honored for the role he played in exposing dud programs, for example in military equipment. However, when he turned his attention to science, Proxmire often misfired.

For 13 years, Proxmire awarded a monthly “Golden Fleece Award” to projects he thought were ripping American taxpayers off, and which gained great publicity by mocking. Proxmire won widespread acclaim for bringing to light many of his choices, such as expensive refurbishing of the White House and tourist attractions that were never built. This success made it particularly hard for others who “won” to defend themselves, including many science projects. Yet that research was often far from silly or a waste of money.

In 1978, Proxmire gave the award to SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. That decision contributed to SETI’s defunding, setting back work in the area by years. It took a long campaign by scientists, including Carl Sagan’s Book Contact and the film made from it, plus large donations from wealthy supporters, for the project to recover, even after Proxmire apologized. 

We still haven’t found aliens, but in the process, we’ve learned a lot more about the universe. The work has greatly enhanced human knowledge of life in the most forbidding places on Earth, like Antarctica and the Atacama Desert.

It’s ironic that Elon Musk, who has made his reputation in large part by championing the quest to explore Mars, with the associated search for life there, is following in the footsteps of someone who set back that cause so much.

Golden Goose Awards

In 2012, Representative Jim Cooper established the Golden Goose Awards as a direct response to Proxmire’s Golden Fleeces. These highlight projects that sounded silly, and could easily have been Golden Fleece recipients, but ended up greatly benefiting humanity.

“Greatly benefiting” might be a bit of an understatement here. It’s estimated that one winner, David Sachar, help save the lives of 50 million people infected with cholera. Yet it’s not hard to imagine what Proxmire or his imitators would have said about funds going to the investigation of frog skin, and the way it’s affected by sugar.

Sachar’s work was partially funded by USAID, so today it would be doubly endangered.

Although Sachar helped achieve a 50-fold decrease in deaths from cholera, it’s a disease almost unknown in rich countries, so critics of research like this might still call it bad value for the United States.

Perhaps they’d be more impressed about a treatment for diabetes, which affects millions of Americans. Yet that work came out of investigations into the venom of the Gila monster, a desert lizard.

Even most people opposed to funding basic research can see the benefit of devising antivenoms against deadly creatures. However, Gila monsters are slow-moving, even when they emerge from their burrows, and seldom bite humans. When Dr John Eng was studying their venom there had never been a confirmed fatal case in the US (although one occurred last year).

Among the many molecules in the Gila monster’s complex venom, Eng found one that causes the pancreas to produce more insulin in response to glucose. This led to a synthetic equivalent named exenatide, which was granted Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. Although not the first-line treatment, exenatide has helped millions get their blood sugar under control when other approaches failed, extending lives and preventing serious complications such as loss of vision and kidney damage.

Other easy-to-mock Golden Goose winners include why jellyfish glow green, how organisms survive in Yellowstone’s hot springs, and whether stroking baby rats with a camera brush helps them grow. All the sort of thing that someone lacking in natural curiosity would have considered a waste, had they heard about them.

Yet out of these three projects came our capacity to identify which genes are activated in many conditions; to rapidly copy DNA, perform genetic tests, and sequence the human genome; and a technique that has saved the lives of thousands of premature babies.

All of these winners, indeed all those winning Golden Goose Awards, have been funded in whole or in part by the US Government through agencies such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. A global equivalent list would be far longer. 

Is this just cherry-picking?

Those seeking to defund research based on the way it sounds to non-scientists might argue that examples like this are few and far between. After all, Proxmire gave 168 Golden Fleece Awards (although not all of them involved science), while so far only 39 Golden Geese have been announced. 

However, budgets for curiosity-driven research are usually small (work requiring instruments such as particle accelerators or space telescopes being the exception). Even if you don’t care about the lives these projects have saved, the billion-dollar industries that have resulted from some of the examples above mean we can afford to back some duds as well.

Of course, not every science project can be funded, and many don’t deserve to be. However, the way to get more drugs like exenatide or technologies like PCR approved is to have funding decisions made by people who understand the science being proposed, and who appreciate why it’s novel and interesting. It’s definitely not to have decisions made by politicians or their appointees who judge a grant application by its title – the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. It’s even worse when projects are targeted based on the capacity to misrepresent them in a TV news grab.

Does science even need to pay?

As IFLScience’s original name, now sacrificed to more censorious social media, made clear, we swear we love science. That includes a lot of science that may never have any commercial use. We love that people are trying to explain the strange dimming of distant stars, (even though it’s not aliens), and think it’s fun to learn the mating habits of mongeese, to pick just two examples out of tens of thousands we’ve reported on. Learning these things makes the world a more interesting – and to our minds more beautiful – place to live in.

Nevertheless, if wonder and amusement were the only benefits of curiosity-driven science, every dollar would be hard-won in competition with immediate needs. The only science that would get more than a trickle of funding would be work with a short and obvious connection to a generally agreed goal, like curing cancer.  

However, centuries of science have taught us that the really big breakthroughs seldom come this way. They come from looking outside the box, finding things that don’t make sense, and trying to explain them. Work like this usually takes a lot longer to reap rewards, which is why the private sector seldom funds it, but eventually, it enriches us all.