Despite the "Recovery Act" signed by President Obama in February (http://recovery.nih.gov/), which has allocated $ 10 billion dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 2010-2011, we must already start thinking about making ends meet U.S. public research budget for 2012 and subsequent years.
blogger Steven Salzerg has some advice for the President to help solve the conundro in times like this, the economic crisis. The Board of Salzberg, who runs the blog "Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience" (Genomics, Evolution and pseudoscience, http://genome.fieldofscience.com/) is simple but clear: to make ends meet without losing the NIH in quality of research, just cut all of the NIH funds two centers: the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, NCCAM) and the corresponding office for Alternative and Complementary Medicine Oncology (Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine). According to calculations
Salzberg, cut funds to these two institutes at NIH would save about $ 240 million a year. Money from the taxes of American citizens and who are invested in pseudoscience and are responsible for disseminating "misinformazione" about the effectiveness of unconventional treatments such as homeopathy.
The undersigned had written sympathetically about this blog (the post of May 17, 2019, http://scienzaedemocrazia.blogspot.com/2010/05/uk-niente-soldi-pubblici-allomeopatia.html) concerning the decision of British Medical Association to cut public funding to homeopathy, so I can not claim to be agreed with the advice of Steven Salzberg, especially after having just finished reading the book convinced of another detractor of public funds in pseudo-scientific projects, such as Ben Goldacre . His book "Bad Science (Fourth Estate, 2008) is an excellent collection of the best stories about the disasters that pseudoscience has caused and continues to cause in our society: from homeopathy in fact, the fashion of" nutrition "to the medicalization of mental illness - with the proliferation of pills ready to solve any problem and to create conditions like "Nocturnal Eating Disorder" (sick of eating at night, and how many of us do not are affected?) - the "hoax" of the causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism, which caused and continues to wreak havoc on a herd immunity ('herd immunity') against the three infectious diseases of measles, mumps and rubella . As far as I know, Goldacre's book has not yet been translated into Italian, but interested parties can read his blog or his column on www.badscience.net on "The Guardian" (http://www.guardian.co .uk / science / series / badscience). One of the most recent posts on (June 5, 2010) talks about the return of another great pseudo-scientific hoax of our time: that the relationship between a diet of fish and the increased ability to concentrate in school children (http:// www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/05/bad-science-omega3-fish-oil). A conferma che l'utopia di una scorciatoia breve ed economica ai nostri problemi di tutti i giorni rimane sempre allettante. Peccato che, come molte altre scorciatoie, non porti da nessuna parte.
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