700ravens

What this author considers a novel, future direction for science is something that I call "going to work in the morning." The US Department of Energy operates many user facilities distributed around the country, including nanotechnology centers, electron microscopy centers, neutron facilities, and X-ray facilities. (I run an instrument at one of the X-ray facilities.) Access to these facilities is free to the user and available through a peer-reviewed proposal system. In many cases, these facilities provide access to equipment and experimental techniques that don't exist at individual institutions. In some cases (notably at the nano-centers) capabilities are provided that might be available at a university or a company, but the nano-center provides access to a very broad suite of instrumentation as well as access to expert staff. While there might be a concern that the proposal system would cater to insiders (as one commenter discussing CERN suggests below), that is not my experience. I regularly have new folks coming to use my instrument.

My caveat here is that my field is in the physical sciences, while the author works in the life sciences. The user facility concept is specialty of the DoE and, while DoE user facilities do serve many life science users, it grew out of a physical sciences funding agency. Still, the user facility concept works well and is a model that could address the sort of distributed yet collaborative science that the author describes.

> this algae seems to only help with one kind of isotope

Not quite. This organism metabolizes one atomic species. (Actually, two, if you read the original paper, you'll see that this algae metabolizes barium much more readily than strontium. And I suspect it spends most of its life cycle metabolizing calcium or magnesium since those are much more abundant.) Very few organisms are sensitive to isotope, and then, not very strongly.

That said, you are probably correct in assuming that the authorities there will rely upon "natural attenuation", which is the fancy term for "waiting for it to dilute on its own".

Of course, you, too, could have chosen much less cynical language... "Wake me up" ... really? Are you a 12-year-old?

Contrary to the cynical ... ummm ... wit of the previous posters, bioremediation is a useful strategy for managing environmental contamination. As it is often presented as some kind of panacea in the popular press, a lot of wide-eyed misinformation follows the field around. That's a shame, but it is a common problem with the popular science press.

The point of bioremediation is to control the chemical state of the target element (strontium in the case of this article). Most elements on the periodic table can commonly exist in more than chemical state. Typically, the higher valence state is more soluble and therefore more mobile in water systems. Thus, when water become contaminated with the high valence metal, the contamination is quite mobile -- it will spread far beyond the point of the original contamination as water moves on and below the surface.

Bioremediation is a strategy to encourage certain microorganisms to flourish. As part of their metabolic cycle, these organisms can chemically transform the target metal from a high valence state to a low valence state. In the example of the algae in this article, doing so also cause small crystals containing strontium to form. The advantage of this is that the lower valence state is not soluble in water.

This does not mean that the resulting strontium is somehow not radioactive. Nor is it somehow not poisonous. But it is much less mobile because it is no longer soluble in water in its new chemical state. This doesn't fix the problem, but it does reduce the scope of the problem dramatically by keeping the contaminant in place rather than wandering away with the ground and surface water.

Would it better not to release radioactive strontium into the environment? Of course. But once a problem exists, bioremediation is a much more useful tool than well-practiced cynicism.

> He has no particular expertise whatsoever at deciding > whether project Y is more useful to society as a whole > than other possible uses of the money. In a democracy, > that decision is left up to our elected leaders.

That is not and never has been how science is funded in the United States or in any other developed economy. In the case of the US, Congress provides funding to and defines the overall mission of various funding agencies. The beaurocracies of those agencies supply funding to researchers, usually on the advice and recommendation of peer review panels. It is no accident that every time Congress created a new funding agency, it followed that same basic model. NSF works that way. DOE works that way. NIH works that way. DOD works that way.

The only case in which our elected leaders have a direct say in decisions of funding research are ear marks. In all other cases, Congress explicitly distanced itself from the quotidian chore of deciding on specific research programs.

Your assertion of how decisions about specific research programs should be made in our democracy is not well supported either by history or by the actual structure of our government. It sounds, instead, like a statement of personal opinion. Indeed, that fine-grained control over the quotidian role of government is something Representative Cantor and his party have campaigned against in the form of ear marks.

In any case, reforming 10^5 dollars worth of NSF funding in the presence of a 10^11 dolar budget deficit is clearly political grandstanding and not a sincere attempt to address structural budgetary problems.

I actually made an account so I could post as myself. Although someone has already made my point, I need to reiterate it -- crowdsourcing scientific review is an awful idea. Journals and funding agencies use peer review specifically because a review needs knowledge of the subject area and of the context of the research. Few scientists will review a wasteful proposal in kind terms. The research dollar is so limited that the ridiculous and the out-of-context tends to get flagged as such.

The problem with research (including much of my own work) is that it is difficult to explain quickly and in simple terms. Science tends to make crappy sound bites, but an unpoliticized research establishment is almost certainly good policy.