• Sequester would whack away at science funding

    By Tanya Lewis
    LiveScience

    With the deadline for government-wide spending cuts just hours away, attempts to avert the cuts — which would affect medical research, space exploration and defense spending — have all but failed.

    President Barack Obama must sign the $85 billion in cuts, known as "the sequester," into law by 11:59 p.m. Friday night. The White House Office of Management and Budget estimates an effective 9 percent cut to nondefense programs, including basic science research, and a 13 percent cut to defense programs. The blow to researchers and government workers will be felt widely, experts say.

    The president met this morning with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but no action to avert the cuts was taken. Obama supports a long-term budget deal that would include both spending cuts and tax increases.

    Stinging cuts
    The impact of the spending slash on research will be severe. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) estimates a total research and development cut of $8.6 billion in 2013. This includes a $5.4 billion cut to the Department of Defense, a $1.5 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a $283 million cut to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The sequester could also result in significant cuts to NASA.

    Some effects will be immediate: "Federal agencies are going to be either restricting or completely eliminating training and travel for the remainder of 2013," Joanne Carney, director of government relations at AAAS, told LiveScience. "There's going to be an amazing increase in competition" for grants, Carney added, so "universities are going to have to start becoming a bit more strategic, not only in proposals to the federal government, but also in looking for sources of alternative funding." [How the Sequester Will Affect Science]

    Other effects could take weeks or months to set in. Some agencies have warned that employees may face furloughs, or mandatory unpaid leave. But federal agencies are required to give employees 30 days' notice before furloughs can commence, so the soonest they could happen is April.

    Young researchers will likely be some of the hardest hit by the cutbacks. Spencer Diamond is a doctoral student at the University of California, San Diego who is studying photosynthetic bacteria that could be used to produce green fuels and chemicals. Diamond's work is funded completely by the NSF and the NIH.

    "A major loss of government research funding would severely impact most individuals at my university, and would significantly set back the basic scientific research we are doing to help develop alternative fuel sources," Diamond is quoted as saying in a letter Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS, wrote to Obama in December. "This is research on which we can build the foundations of U.S. energy independence," Diamond said.

    The cuts come on top of significant cuts already put in place in the last couple of years, according to Mary Woolley, president of the not-for-profit advocacy group Research!America.

    What happens now
    All agencies will be funded through March 27 through what's known as a continuing resolution, but if Congress fails to pass budget legislation by that date, the government will be shut down, except for essential employees (such as emergency workers). 

    The hope is that Congress might reapportion the cuts to provide flexibility, Carney said. "Some agencies may see more in funds, and some may see less," but it would be a more balanced approach than across-the-board reductions, she said.

    The sequester was designed as a last-ditch measure in case Congress couldn't reach a deal to reduce the deficit. It was scheduled to take effect Jan. 2, 2013 — the so-called "fiscal cliff" — but was delayed until March 1.

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  • Grant turns lab rats into scientific entrepreneurs

    National Science Foundation

    Scientists and engineers picked by the National Science Foundation for a two-month boot camp on entrepreneurship pose at Stanford University on the first day of class in October.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Lab scientists are getting a $50,000 assist from the U.S. government to go to school and learn the entrepreneurial skills required to take their innovations into the marketplace and, perhaps, become millionaires.

    "I am basically teaching them how to do eye contact and test their hypotheses outside of the lab," Steve Blank, a startup guru at Stanford University who designed and teaches the course, told me Tuesday.

    The course is part of the National Science Foundation's recently launched Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which aims to help researchers make the leap to entrepreneurship. The first 21 teams wrapped up the two-month-long course earlier this month.

    It is modeled after Blank's Lean LaunchPad class, which replaces the traditional masters in business administration curriculum — balance sheets, business plans, etc. — with what Blank calls "the scientific method for entrepreneurship."

    Entrepreneur training
    The course forces teams of researchers — an entrepreneur, principal investigator, and mentor — to network with colleagues and potential clients to test hypotheses about the market for their lab innovation.

    As hypotheses fail, the teams adapt with what Blank calls a pivot, or change in the business plan. It acknowledges that startups usually go through multiple failures en route to success.

    That's different than how a traditionally-trained MBA would operate in an established corporation, notes Blank, where failure would almost certainly result in the firing of an executive.

    "This word pivot not only encapsulates the fact that you are going to be changing rapidly, it embraces the fact that we are going to do it without crisis. We are going to do it without firing executives," he said.

    For example, a company called Arka Solutions, led by Satish Kandlikar, a mechanical engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, pivoted twice throughout the process. 

    They started with an idea they would manufacture highly efficient LED lamps, but ended up with a company that uses their technology to make heat-pipe cooling systems for LED lights as well as electronics cooling and HVAC applications.

    The next Google?
    Before the course started, Blank thought maybe three or four of the teams would end up going forward as companies. After 8 weeks and 1,947 calls, 19 of 21 teams said they are now entrepreneurs.

    None of these companies are going to be the next Google or Facebook, well-known Internet companies with eye-popping billion-dollar market valuations, Blank noted. But successful $100 million companies? 

    "Absolutely," he said, adding that these teams of scientists and engineers echo the original roots of Silicon Valley, which was founded by a bunch of PhDs, not MBAs.

    "The National Science Foundation has started the first incubator for science and engineering from the government," he said.

    Armed with his hypothesis-testing methodology to successful entrepreneurship, Blank says the teams involved in I-Corps could attract venture capital away from overly valued Internet companies.

    That should come as good news to students who stuck with chemistry, biology and physics as their counterparts chased riches promised by degrees in law or business.

    More on I-Corps, innovation and science:

    The National Science Foundation will be offering the I-Corps at least twice in 2012 and expanding the course to universities around the country. For more information, visit the I-Corps website.  

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.