• DOI:10.1038/457945a
• Corpus ID: 4390646

Rethinking silk's origins

@article{Ball2009RethinkingSO,
  title={Rethinking silk's origins},
  author={Philip Ball},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2009},
  pages={945-945}
}

• P. Ball
• Published 17 February 2009
• Physics
• Nature

which a budget doubling between 1998 and 2003 was followed by five years of flat funding, leading to a glut of investigators and plummeting application success rates. “We’re hopeful that this represents a first step towards sustained growth,” says David Moore, senior director of government relations at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington DC. Kington notes: “We are being very careful to focus on funding that only covers the two years of the stimulus package. There will be relatively little, if any, money that entails a four-year commitment.” National Science Foundation: The $3-billion stimulus award is a vast amount for an agency with an annual budget of only twice that. Will the NSF have trouble distributing the money quickly and wisely? “It’s not a problem at all,” says Rita Colwell, former NSF director, who believes that the agency could use up all of the stimulus money with existing grant applications. Michael Turner, former assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences at the NSF, says that grant-application success rates have been very low, around 20%. By increasing that rate to just 30–40%, the agency could use up the $2.5 billion that has been designated for research. “They have many more proposals that are highly worthy,” he says. Another $400 million has been designated for the construction or rehabilitation of facilities. Department of Energy: Lubell says that the Office of Science should have no trouble spending its $1.6-billion award even without funding grants. With the help of the department’s national laboratories, he drew up a list of infrastructure needs alone that came to that figure. In a statement, acting Office of Science director Pat Dehmer says her office is “putting the mechanisms in place to get the funding out quickly with strong transparency and accountability controls”. The bigger question is how well the rest of the agency will fare. Energy secretary Steven Chu has been given sums totalling $40 billion, that dwarf the accustomed budgets in the parts of the agency targeted. For instance, spending on fossil-fuel energy research and development was just under $750 million last year; the stimulus bill will dump $3.4 billion in that arena. Much of the energy department’s new money can be distributed in big chunks, because many energy demonstration projects require loan guarantees worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ■