The showdown in Washington, DC, over the sequester is unlikely to be resolved before the March 1 deadline, Politico reports, predicting that bills aimed at preventing the across-the-board cuts are merely "political cover" and will fail to receive the required number of votes to pass the US Senate.
Funding agencies and research institutes across the US are already planning for dealing with funding cuts.
The National Institutes of Health, the Huffington Post reports, has already scaled back some grants by 10 percent in anticipation of the sequester. The National Science Foundation has said, according to ScienceInsider, that its existing grants won't be affected by sequestration, but the number of new grants that it will fund would drop by about 1,000. If the sequester goes into place, the NIH and NSF budgets both face about a 5 percent cut.
Biomedical research labs rely heavily on federal funding to keep their research programs going. Keith Yamamoto, vice chancellor for research at the University of California, San Francisco, notes that salaries and stipends are the biggest costs for most labs. "There's just no way to escape the impact on employment," he tells HuffPo. Scott Zeger, the vice provost for research at Johns Hopkins University, similarly says that labs would have to become smaller under sequestration cuts.
The Harvard Crimson reports that some labs there have sought to contain costs by cutting staff and spending less on equipment and reagents.
The effect, Marc Kastner, a the dean of the School of Science at MIT, tells Tom Levenson at Scientific American's Guest Blog, will be felt most acutely by smaller labs and by graduate students, postdocs, and people who are supported by soft money. "Is ever Eric Lander going to slow down? He'll find a way," Kastner says, adding that "the rich survive and the poor get devastated. The real question is the next generation."
Research will, of course, continue on, but Zeger tells the Huffington Post that the pace will slow. "America will be a little bit less competitive. We're still going to make these discoveries ultimately. It may take a little longer, people may suffer in the meantime, but we're going to make these discoveries. It's human nature," Zeger says to HuffPo. "The question is, what role does America want to play in the discoveries that will define our future?"
Maybe Life and Illumina and
Maybe Life and Illumina and the rest of the crowd will have to cut back on those 80% profit margins... I'm sure they could afford to suck up some of the hurt!
The above post is certainly
The above post is certainly correct on one huge part of the problem. Prices of research products are obscene and it largely is because the bar is set by academic researchers who are not spending money they had to earn but are tapping into the public teat.
I understand that there actually is more money availble in 2013 than 2012 even if the sequester takes place, just less than the fully funded allocation would have been. So Keith R Yamamoto might suffer the indignity of having one or two fewer post-docs in his factory. Well welcome to the real world Keith; I know plenty of people who have been laid off and simply can't land a new job in the private sector. After being out of work for several years, I considered myself truly fortunate to find a job for one-half of what I made 6 years ago.
Why is private sector emplyoment so bad? Well in part because the enonomy is so weak that no company or entrepeur is willing to invest in anything remotely exploratory or uncertain. And why is the ecnomy so weak? Well partly because of the surreal deficits that have made sequestration necessary in the first place.