We had our reception for our new students yesterday. Time to show them they are special and important to us. Also a time to hit on them to work in your lab. The problem now is paying for the student. I appreciate that they have to be paid a living wage but when this is coming out of a grants budget it is hard to do the math between paying for a grad student who may take 3 or more years to get publications or a postdoc who may not be as talented and cost 50% more but who can be expected to turn out publications faster.

Just read a blurb that the Department of Defense wants to reduce the indirect costs rate for grants from the current 45-55% to 20%. For those not aware of it when we write a grant on top of the money we request is a percentage - the indirect costs. This is supposed to pay for things required by the university to keep the research enterprise going - lights, electricity, housekeeping, etc. What has happened is that the University has become dependent on that income stream to keep the operation afloat - including the operation of departments. With the budget cuts from our state to the university ALL the state money in our Department is for faculty and staff salaries. We live off the indirect costs our Department gets - when someone in our Department loses a grant it hurts us all as we lose that indirect cost money. Almost monthly we see how much grant money and indirect costs we bring back compared to all the other departments. Money, money, money.

Finished Michael Crichton's "Next". I hope that people who read this are not taking some of his statements as facts. Although it is true that the Congress has mandated that Universities try to patent things that the faculty develop it is also true that the companies will not try to develop things without patent protection. Why spend all the money on development when someone can jump on the bandwagon at the end. They need to recover some of their money - not all projects taken to the development stage work out. Now it is another matter for the price they set to recover their investment and make a profit but the scientist does not play a role in this in spite of the implication from the book. The other issue is how universities, especially public ones, are supported. For big research based universities the proportion of the budget that comes from the state is about 20%. In fact faculty are mandated even at public universities to bring in a significant proportion of their salary from outside sources (20% here). All the research is supported from outside sources - their is no money in the budget for the school to support research. Believe it or not the vast majority of scientists do not measure their success as the size of their compensation - their prestige with their colleagues is the driving force.