Omnibus bill reaffirms US commitment to science

The federal government has finally affirmed our nation’s commitment to science, research and discovery — the 2016 omnibus budget agreement includes meaningful increases for organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Federal investment has been at the heart of our nation’s leadership in health and technology innovation. As such, these are encouraging increases for science in what has been a very uncertain period for such funds; overall federal research and development outlays in non-defense areas were down 1.5 percent during the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation.

{mosads}This budget agreement provides a much-needed boost to key science agencies that fund university research across the nation. And that is true at the University of Minnesota. Although our faculty is diversifying its research base more every year, in fiscal 2015, more than 60 percent of research awards to our faculty and staff were from federal sources.

Last year, federal grants fueled U of M initiatives including the One Health Workforce project under USAID, an international effort to ensure nations have skilled healthcare workers to battle the spread of infectious diseases, a new center from the NIH to help commercialize healthcare inventions and innovations, and a grant from NSF to our Center for Sustainable Polymers to continue work on plastics that are derived from renewable materials and are biodegradable.

Federal support of field-shaping researchers in universities across the nation allow them to discover new opportunities, explore grand challenges and develop the knowledge, skills and agility that our students will need. When research support wanes, competition for grants becomes more fierce. At the University of Minnesota, our researchers are very successful in proposing research ideas that are funded and carried out, but too much competition can mean that good ideas, ones that might ultimately spur new technologies or medical treatments, for example, are left on the shelf.

I extend my thanks to lawmakers and the administration for their renewed commitment to science and discovery.

From Brian Herman, vice president for research, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Prejudice won’t solve refugee crisis

Gregg Roman and Gary Gambill’s Dec. 7 Congress Blog post, “Turkey’s human wave assault on the West,” displays a naked antipathy toward Muslims in general and Turks in specific, but I suspect that a policy argument is hidden in the article, somewhere.

But first their prejudices: The vast majority of people flooding from the Middle East into Europe in recent years are not economic migrants but refugees fleeing wars in which lives and livelihoods are being pounded into dust. The authors first describe this as a “migrant crisis,” later switching to “refugee crisis.” There is a difference.

One can reasonably regulate the means by which to absorb economic migrants. By contrast, one has a moral obligation to ease the misery of refugees. And Turkey, in accordance with its obligations under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, is doing just that, having taken in over 2 million Syrians at a cost now approaching $10 billion. According to the UNHCR, half of the refugees in Turkey’s camps along the Syrian border are children. There, they and their families are provided shelter, food, medical care, schooling and some modern amenities including Wi-Fi.

Further, the authors worry over “masses of Sunni Muslim migrants flooding Europe.” Not mentioning the nationality of these so-called migrants, while emphasizing only their religion, evinces the authors’ Islamophobia. But never mind this, the authors also see these sad people as mere pawns in the hands of cynical Turkish leaders. So the authors’ policy argument must be that innocent Syrians should suffer, lest they overburden and Islamize Europe or result in funds going to Turkey.

Let me propose that when Europe has finally provided for 2 million Syrian refugees, it can ask Turkey to no longer request that the cost be shared or that a safe zone be created that would allow the war refugees to stay in Syria in the first place.

As for fearsome “human waves,” the U.S. now absorbs, according the Center for Immigration Studies, approximately 700,000 illegal immigrants per year. Of course this is the same U.S. whose public, according to a Jan. 20, 1939, survey by the American Institute of Public Opinion, overwhelmingly refused to support the entry of 10,000 German Jewish child refugees, and who refused the landing of the M.S. St. Louis and its cargo of Jewish refugees who then steamed back to Europe where several hundred would be murdered in the Holocaust.

Refugee crises are not easy to solve, but prejudice and xenophobia are sure to exacerbate them.

From David Saltzman, Bethesda, Md.