The Wastebook

Undiscovered

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Society & Culture, 805813, Science, History, Friday, Studios

4.6 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2017

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a senator calls her research a waste of taxpayer dollars, biologist Sheila Patek heads to Capitol Hill to prove what her science is worth. In December 2015, the fight over science funding got personal for biologist Sheila Patek. She discovered that a U.S. Senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, had included her research on mantis shrimp in his “wastebook”: a list of federally-funded projects he deemed a waste of taxpayer money. So what did Patek do? She headed to Capitol Hill to make the case to Senator Flake—and to Congress—that blue-sky science is worth the money. GUESTS Sheila Patek, Professor of Biology, Duke University Bryan Berky, Executive Director, Restore Accountability Paula Stephan, Professor of Economics, Georgia State University, author of How Economics Shapes Science Melinda Baldwin, science historian, author of Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal FOOTNOTES Read Sen. Jeff Flake’s 2015 Wastebook "The Farce Awakens," and his science-themed 2016 Wastebook “Twenty Questions.” Watch two mantis shrimp duke it out! Read Melinda Baldwin’s article on the grand-daddy of the modern waste report: Sen. William Proxmire. Read about Congressman Jim Cooper’s answer to Sen. Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece Award”: the “Golden Goose Award." Read the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2014 report Furthering America’s Research Enterprise, detailing the benefits of federal science investment (and the difficulty of measuring them). Learn more about Restore Accountability and read their response to the episode. Watch Sheila Patek’s PBS NewsHour essay about her meeting with Sen. Flake, and read about current research at the Patek Lab. How much does the federal government spend on R&D? Here’s how much! CREDITS This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help by Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported WNYC Studios.
0:09.6	I'm Annie and I'm Ella and this is Undiscovered a podcast about the backstories of science.
0:18.2	Sheila Paddock has always obsessed about whether her work was important.
0:22.8	I mean, always there's this little voice in the back of my brain saying, well, what are you doing for the world?
0:28.2	I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, but it's really true.
0:31.4	Sheila's a biologist. She's a professor at Duke University.
0:34.7	And she studies an animal called the mantis shrimp.
0:38.4	Yeah, more on them in a second. But she thinks this, what are you doing for the world question? It comes from her family.
0:44.0	My older sister teaches developmentally disabled preschool children, and my younger sister
0:48.7	teaches STEM classes in a public high school in Maine. Her mom taught high school Latin and French.
0:54.6	And for the teachers in Sheila's family, it's pretty clear what they're doing for the world.
0:58.9	This is not some kind of abstract idea.
1:01.3	They are shaping the next generation.
1:03.8	It's normal dinnertime conversation for them.
1:06.1	And then at some point in this conversation, the three teachers turned to Sheila.
1:10.6	And it's like, so Sheila,
1:12.9	has it going with the shrimp? Yeah, no pressure. So Sheila says the pivotal moment that helped her
1:17.5	family understand just what exactly she decided to do with her life. It came in grad school.
1:23.1	Her research got written up in the New York Times. And when they read this stuff in the New York
1:26.8	Times and they realized, oh, it's in the section
1:30.0	about discoveries, like new discoveries. They had this aha moment of, oh, that's what she's
1:37.9	doing. She's discovering stuff. Sheila has made a career discovering stuff about mantis shrimp
	...

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