The report, put out by Republican senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, blasted the National Science Foundation, a major government funder of research, saying it squandered taxpayer money on questionable science projects, including one pursued by Burnett and his colleagues that involved putting shrimp on a tiny treadmill.
Science really, really bothers the right. They seem to pore through scientific studies looking for government support and then have fits in public. NPR described this form of nanny-culture spread by the Traditional Values Coalition (whose tradition, by the way?) in a report this morning. A sample:
Just a couple of months later came another example of an odd-sounding scientific study being linked to a big wad of cash.
"They tried to say that about $9.4 million tax dollars was spent to study men's penis size," says Jeffrey Parsons of Hunter College in New York, referring to a study that was recently criticized by a group called the Traditional Values Coalition.
Parsons and his colleagues did publish a study on men's penis sizes and its link to the risk of sexually transmitted disease — but Parsons says no tax dollars were used to collect the data.
In reality, he says, those millions of dollars went to a government program to train scientists, and that program gave a small educational grant to a researcher who happened to write the paper.
"And because he credited that funding on the final publication, the Traditional Values Coalition assumed then that all of the funding for that postdoctoral program must have been used to pay for this penis size study," says Parsons.
Andrea Lafferty, president of the Traditional Values Coalition, says that "what we said was that there was an allocation of money that went and we said a part of it was used to do this study. We stand by that. They are trying to change the subject. The people that did the study have defended it. They feel it's appropriate to spend taxpayer dollars studying the size of male anatomy. We believe America is broke. People are losing their jobs. They're losing their homes. And this is not an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars."
Her group has also criticized other government-funded studies, including a National Institutes of Health grant for measuring nicotine exposure in toenail clippings. "They used recovery money, money that was meant to more or less stimulate the economy," says Lafferty. "Interesting use of money, mailing in toenail clippings."
Tut tut! Actually, that toenail clipping study has to do with diagnosing lung cancer. Relax, Lafferty. Don't you even want to know why bowlers smile?
