As I listened to the debate
between Senators Barak Obama and John McCain yesterday, I heard Senator McCain regurgitate
his twice-told tale about the Federal Government’s “pork barrel-spending” on
the Grizzly bears’ DNA in northwest Montana. The project, which tracks and studies
the grizzlies, has come under attack by McCain several times before. So I thought perhaps, this time, I needed to
defend this project since I believe in Science and the Scientific Method. And, from that perspective, my instincts as a
Microbiologist are the same as any wild-life Biologist.
Let me say, from the onset,
that I’m not questioning McCain’s rhetoric about “pork barrel-spending” as a
whole. I understand he wants to become
our next president and this is his way of selling the American public his
version of wasteful spending—which I largely understand. So, why don’t I view Federal spending on “bear
or seal DNA” or for that matter “studying the mating habits of crabs” as
pork-barrel spending? Because such
requests are fundamental to basic scientific research; without funding such research,
science in the US
Little discoveries add up and
lead to major and exciting ones. And one
could never know the impact of what, at the time, appears to be a trivial piece
of research on the future of science.
One such case was Gregor Mendel’s studies of heredity in garden
peas. Initially, his paper was ignored,
even by the likes of Charles Darwin. Years
after his death, Cytologists working on the behavior of chromosomes during Meiosis
saw a link between the behavior of these chromosomes and Mendel’s forgotten work. Suddenly his obscure writings led to a whole
new scientific field that we call Genetics.
In the early 1950’s, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the
structure of DNA, a discovery which was based largely on their careful analysis
of existing scientific research. Their “humble”
1953 landmark paper in the Journal Nature,
bridged our understanding of Genetics and led to the birth of Molecular Biology,
a field that revolutionized modern Biology and Medicine. Our medical advances today, including
treatment methods for cancer, benefit us all, and undoubtedly, not too long ago
saved the life of at least one United States Senator.
So now back to the Grizzly
bear of northwest Montana Montana
Interestingly, the bill that
McCain criticizes was advocated by the former Montana Senator, Conrad Burns, a
Republican who’s now the Chairman of McCain’s campaign in Montana
And what about the mating
habits of crabs and the DNA of harbor seals? It was Sarah Palin, as Governor of
Alaska, who actually requested federal funds for this research.
