Where Reason Will Always Triumph, Because Dumb Is Dumb.
posted by Tokatakiya at 6:03 PM
33 comments
"Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because there is no further need for the lactase enzyme that breaks the sugar apart. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on."The change may have been as recent as 3,000 years ago. Once again, throw this on the pile of data that supports evolution. (In your face creationism and Intelligent Design!)
posted by Tokatakiya at 9:24 PM
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posted by Tokatakiya at 9:42 AM
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posted by Tokatakiya at 9:12 AM
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"After careful review and modeling of future NIH budget scenarios, AASLD has concluded that the NIH Reform Act of 2006 will deal a sever and crushing blow to the future of biomedical research in this country. Damage to the research enterprise will result in the permanent loss of investigators and technical support staff from our academic centers with an inevitable negative impact on America's position as the world's leader in basic, translational and clinical research and as the creator of much-needed high paying, technology jobs in our country.Make no mistake, crippling the NIH like this will have unimaginably damaging effects on the biomedical sciences for years, possible decades, to come.
Several provisions of HR6164 will negatively impact our ability to develop the new diagnostics, treatments and, ultimately, cures:For the first time ever, this legislation places a cap on the amount of funding Congress can appropriate to NIH by replacing the existing "such sums" language with hard limits. Had this bill been in effect from 1998 to 2003, the will of Congress to double the NIH budget would have been thwarted, and our current funding levels would never have been achieved.
The legislation creates a "Common Fund" by siphoning off money from the institutes and centers. Under provisions of the bill, 50 percent of any increase in NIH funding would go to the Common Fund; but 100 percent of any reduction would be borne by the institutes and centers - and thus by peer-reviewed research.
The budget of the Director's Office at NIH would be authorized at a level in excess of $1.0 billion (it is currently appropriated at $527 million). Again,this funding would come at the expense of the institutes and centers.
The authorization caps,when combined with the Common Fund and the Director's Office authorization level - and when controlled for biomedical research inflation - assures that NIH will not experience more than a 1 percent increase for the life of this bill, even if Congress appropriates the fully authorized amount - something it rarely does." [Emphasis mine.]
posted by Tokatakiya at 2:33 PM
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posted by Tokatakiya at 10:55 AM
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posted by Tokatakiya at 2:29 PM
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