Hi, it's Helen Pidd here, one of the hosts of the Guardian's award-winning daily news podcast

today in focus. We go beyond the headlines all over the world, talking to the people at the

heart of the action, bringing you stories that matter every weekday. Listen wherever you get your

podcasts. Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A couple

months ago, I did a bonus episode that you might remember on science funding. And I was a little

worried when I did the episode in response, of course, to proposed cuts in science funding that the government

has put forward, a little worried that it might seem a little drying, a little inside baseball.

You know, we were talking about indirect costs, overhead, how different ways of applying for grants

played out in the academic environment and so forth. But in fact, I got a lot of positive

feedback about that episode. People explained that they knew nothing about this. You know,

they'd never heard of any of this stuff. And it turns out that it's really important.

I guess maybe I shouldn't have been surprised because we academics, as much as I love them,

my fellow compatriots in academia, we love doing our

research, we love doing our work. Some of us love taking that work that we do and explaining

it to broader audiences, but mostly we're trained to sit in the office or the lab and do our thing and talk to our colleagues.

We're not very good at explaining ourselves to the broader world.

And it continues the assault on the research infrastructure that has been built up here in the United States and the world.

So maybe it is useful to talk about how academic research works

and its relationship to the important technological breakthroughs that we all benefit from.

There's a very clear story where you see the end result of a certain research tradition. You might see the last bit of it,

and the last bit of it that leads to some important technological innovation is often carried

out in the context of private industry, corporations, right, who want to make money off of something.

...