Granting agencies disperse funds allocated for science which usually comes from public and charitable money. Private industry also funds scientific research, however it is typically heavily biased towards creating a new product or process that could be profitable. Unfortunately, granting agencies are also inclined to award funds to research that could lead to a new profitable product or process. This occurs by the very nature of the overly commercialized society in which we live – if scientific research is going to affect humanity for the better it is assumed that science will do so by creating a new invention that will have to become a commercial product – thus biasing scientific funding towards more commercializable endeavours.
Basic scientific research has been taking a back-seat in the funding process. Typically it is incremental research that gets funded; to get a significant grant to do some research study you typically need to have a bunch of recent journal papers that are being directly built upon in the (hopefully) funded study. Considering the amount of time it takes to get a paper published in a journal, obtaining significant grant funding is extremely challenging without a long term incremental approach to science. It also helps to be fortunate enough to establish a base of journal papers in one's graduate research to self-cite/self-promote in the grant application.
Basic scientific research has been taking a back-seat in the funding process. Typically it is incremental research that gets funded; to get a significant grant to do some research study you typically need to have a bunch of recent journal papers that are being directly built upon in the (hopefully) funded study. Considering the amount of time it takes to get a paper published in a journal, obtaining significant grant funding is extremely challenging without a long term incremental approach to science. It also helps to be fortunate enough to establish a base of journal papers in one's graduate research to self-cite/self-promote in the grant application.
A friend of mine sent me an article (Elements, April 2009) with this quote that I loved:
