The article I chose for this week is about funding science and budget cuts that science may be facing. The article was written by Anna Lewcock and entitled Funding Cuts Will "Damage A Generation" of Science. The article starts out by stating that cutting the budget cap on science is a bad idea. As stated in the article, "Cutting research budgets will harm science for an entire generation" is how the science world feels at this point. Not only will harm us from the progress we are making in certain areas that will not only better the US but the world in general. One of the areas they hit on was the fact that many aspiring scientists would loose interest in the field if there were budget cuts. This is because most of the projects that require a budget are very expensive, especially things such as cancer. This was better explained in the article by a nobel prize winner scientist Peter Agre by saying, "When we have booms in scientific funding, young people devote their careers to this, and then we have busts and they can't pay the rent." This is very true.
The article next talks about how science functions on an international basis and the funding that each country receives directly influences many other countries in the world. The US deals heavily with other powerhouses such as France, Germany and the UK. The UK is currently experiencing budget cuts and their economy is in about the same situation it was in before the cuts. The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) furthers explores this by stating, "we should be investing in UK science to create sustainable employment and re balance our economy, instead of making damaging cuts which will have no discernible impact on the national debt."
I believe that we should continue to fund science, but only to a certain extent. Projects that really don't do much for society should not be funded nearly as heavily as projects that have a great influence on how our society functions.