The Republican leadership of the House science committee has repeatedly criticized the National Science Foundation’s research choices. In many cases, detailed examinations have shown that, while there may be partisan reasons underlying the complaints, the disputes are often marked by misunderstandings. Two examples concern projects involving the environment and mechanics:
Yahara 2070. Given the politics of the day, it’s easy to see why Yahara 2070, an NSF research project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has become a target.
In a five-year, $4.9-million study of water quality, the researchers offer several visions of the future that could result from current farming practices.
One scenario describes a youth-led “Great Transition” in society and politics that leads Americans to give up cars and meat and to embrace communal life. It speaks of reorienting tax policy to benefit the needy.
In response, the Republican leaders of the House committee accused the NSF of paying $4.9-million to create a “hypothetical utopian climate-change future.”
In fact, the scenario was one of four predicting life in Wisconsin’s Yahara Valley in 2070. And Yahara 2070 was a small component of the overall project for work in limnology, the study of inland waters. “We weren’t just given $5-million to create some fictitious stories,” said the lead investigator on the project, Christopher J. Kucharik, an associate professor of agronomy and environmental studies
Most of the money, he said, is supporting a 25-person team working in the Yahara watershed, surrounding Madison, to collect environmental data and devise computer models to predict future changes.
The four scenarios were developed to help citizens, especially farmers, learn about the research and understand its implications, Mr. Kucharik said.
“You want it as contrasting as possible,” said Elizabeth Katt-Reinders, policy director at the Clean Lakes Alliance, an advocacy group. “Not to say this is how it’s likely to be or how it should be, but to push people’s boundaries when they think about the future of what it could be.”
‘Bicycle Dynamics.’ For almost a year after his NSF grant expired, Dale L. Peterson slept in his University of California lab at night to keep working on a bicycle that could travel upright without a rider.
That effort led him to a job designing a two-wheel electric vehicle for a Silicon Valley start-up that now boasts billionaire investors and more than 800 orders for the eventual product.
The grant has also become central to the assertion by Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who leads the House science committee, that the NSF is financing studies that are wasteful and not in the national interest.
Researchers at the University of California at Davis got the grant, Mr. Smith said in a statement, by claiming that bicycle-riding dynamics are poorly understood. “Yet bicycling is a $65-billion-per-year global industry that invests hundreds of millions in research and development,” he said.
Singling out the bicycle project reflects an incomplete understanding of the research, but it also highlights how the NSF and its grantees may need to better explain what exactly they are trying to accomplish.
The 2009 grant was for “Human Control of Bicycle Dynamics With Experimental Validation and Implications for Bike Handling and Design.” It cost the NSF $300,000 and succeeded in producing the riderless bicycle and providing data on how it functions, said the lead author, Mont Hubbard, a professor emeritus of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Davis.
Representative Smith has suggested that making relatively marginal increases in bike capabilities will not appreciably affect ridership levels. But Mr. Peterson, who worked on the project as part of his Ph.D. thesis, said the primary aim was never to expand bike usage in the United States. It was mainly about learning the dynamics of bike motion and developing mathematical formulas to represent them.
Using that knowledge, Mr. Peterson got a design job at Lit Motors, a Silicon Valley start-up with investors who include the billionaires Mark Pincus and Kim Jung-Ju. Its product, the C-1, is an electric, self-balancing motorcycle with a two-passenger cockpit. The company is planning a model that would safely travel as fast as 100 miles per hour.
Mr. Smith’s committee has not questioned the scientists directly about the benefits of their work; instead it has relied solely on the information contained in the NSF’s grant files. And the grant application submitted by Davis in 2009 does describe increasing bike ridership as a central objective.
Mr. Peterson, a former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, said he learned about government waste in the military, which had an October ritual of firing machine guns all day long into open space, just to expend ammunition ahead of the new fiscal year. He said the bicycle grant, by comparison, was a model of efficiency that greatly informed his subsequent work at Lit Motors.
“All of my skills that I learned from the grant over the course of four years were directly applicable to that product,” he said.
