clhs sciblog

In today’s society the economic crisis has been felt by everyone in every aspect of life. How does this effect our nation as a whole? How does it effect the field of science? Well to put it bluntly it has an extremely bad effect on the future of our science industries. The recent budget cuts have eventually started to have a negative effect on out scientific industries.

In this article William F. Brinkman talks about this very effect and what we can do about it. He starts off by explaining how things were when he first started out in his career. He tells us that when he started people were spending enormous amounts on science. Why were they doing this? One simple reason; they were getting results. When you put hard work, money, effort, and time into something you are extremely grateful when you get something out of it. This was the case for scientific projects back then. They were making history by discovering important things. They were also inventing things that today we consider necessary for life. However, just because our scientist are not discovering things that are “life changing,” doesn’t mean that we should stop trying.

In this article Brinkman talks about the place where he used to work before he retired. He used to work for the DOE Office of Science. This is an important part of federal system. They are a federally funded and have contributed to the winning of around a hundred Nobel Prizes. The Office of Science was also the ones to initiate the decoding of the human genome. Although today there is not really any major projects that would be considered life changing, there are still many projects going on at the Office of Science. One of these projects has to do with clean energy. In today’s society clean energy is something that many people are concerned about. Almost everyone knows and realizes that the world’s oil supply is running out. They also know that products that use oil and other non clean energy sources are not good for the environment. This is why we need to be constantly researching different sources of clean energy.

This is where psychology comes into play. If we can convince people that the things that our scientists are researching today are just as important as things that were being researched in the past, then we will be able to get more funding and able bodies. The world of science is always changing, therefore we need to constantly be researching for the future. If you would like to read more about this subject click here to see the full article.

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