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Surprise! Congressmen Support Science with the Golden Goose Award

With the budget fight proving to be one of the most bitter, hyperbolic, government-stopping battles in recent history, the outlook for science funding has never looked worse. The shuttle program and Fermilab are now dead, and Mars plans have been...

With the budget fight proving to be one of the most bitter, hyperbolic, government-stopping battles in recent history, the outlook for science funding has never looked worse. The shuttle program and Fermilab are now dead, and Mars plans have been shelved, and overall it’s enough to make one wonder if the U.S. will be able to hold on to its position as the world’s leader in research.

But now there’s a glimmer of hope: a bipartisan (!) group of congressmen led by Representative Jim Cooper (pictured above), teaming up with business, university, scientific and public policy organizations, have created the Golden Goose Award, which will be handed out yearly to esoteric research projects that end up laying a golden egg. It’s a surprising show of support for weird research — like studying drug-addled rodents — that, despite potentially sounding silly, produce big results.

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“We’ve all seen reports that ridicule odd-sounding research projects as examples of government waste,” said Cooper, who came up with the idea, in a release. “The Golden Goose Award does the opposite. It recognizes that a valuable federally funded research project may sound funny, but its purpose is no laughing matter. I hope more of my colleagues will join us in supporting, not killing, the goose that lays the golden egg.”

The name pokes fun at the storied — albeit narrow-minded — Golden Fleece Awards handed out by former U.S. Senator William Proxmire from 1975-1988. Proxmire handed out the rewards to any projects he deemed wasteful, and by the end of his reign of shaming, he’d handed out awards to nearly every major branch of government. One of my favorites was the award he gave to DARPA for the Aspen Movie Map, which basically beat Google Maps Street View by more than three decades.

And that’s the thing: no matter how silly or out there research may sound based off a title, it’s impossible to make snap judgement about the benefits of a study. GOOD business editor Tim Fernholz makes that point brilliantly:

Proxmire's award once knocked a $250,000 study of screwworm mating habits; it turns out that research saved the cattle industry more than $20 billion as it battled the pesky parasite. Another study of why rats use exercise wheels that earned a razz from Proxmire revealed valuable information about how and why people exercise. The list of weird science projects that yielded benefits to the rest of us goes on—dog urine studies that helped diabetes patients, and a study of guinea pigs’ hearing gave doctors new ways to prevent hearing loss in infants.

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Weird-sounding or not, there’s no way to know definitively what research will prove successful and valuable — if there was, there’d be no need for the research in the first place. There’s also no point in holding up a single study, good or bad, as evidence that programs are working or not. The vast fields of scientific research are incredibly broad, which is exactly the point: only by supporting researchers who are poking into every nook and cranny of life on Earth can we expect to gain the most valuable benefits.

The goal then shouldn’t be to cut funding based on what lawmakers think is goofy work, like Proxmire did; it should be to support work in all areas, and hold up those that provide breakthroughs as evidence that funding is indeed producing tangible results. Cheers to the congressmen behind the Golden Goose Award for doing just that.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.

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