With NIH funding dropping and few alternate sources of income—remember that tuition, massive endowments and other bank account stuffers support the Harvard Medical Schools of the world—virtually all independent institutes are in some kind of budgetary trouble.Levitan's article is excellent at making the point that some research scientists (and institutes) that mainly rely on government funding are in dire straits in this cycle of cutbacks.
This is a sore point, but it kind of surprises me. In our early years, we're often told to not put all of our eggs into one basket, a saying which later morphed into the whole concept of diversification, applying to seemingly everything from making investment choices to building a portfolio of research projects.
But one point not really emphasized enough is that revenues need to be diversified too. Whether you're concerned with business revenue (grants, contracts, clients, or product lines) or personal revenue (two or more incomes per household, consulting, independent wealth), there's risk related to the number of revenue streams, their source, and their quality.
Which suggests that the problems arising with the current climate of science funding and sequestration are one great big example of putting too much faith into a concentrated revenue stream that happens to be more volatile than previously assumed. If there's anything this cycle of fiscal tightening is teaching a new generation of scientists, it's that government funding is actually pretty volatile and comes with many added risks associated with it; Like the potential to completely destroy your research program's momentum when it disappears.
Taxes are guaranteed; tax funded science is not.
It doesn't actually have to be that way, as the article points out. Adapting to Sequestration, or any period of tight money is hard, but possible.
You can always merge institutes with universities (Homework question: Who gets the money from the sale of an institute?) but ultimately you're just switching one revenue stream (government) for another (wherever the university's funds come from).
(And before someone writes to point out an error in logic, it's true that some university money comes from taxes, but it's already one step removed from other demands on the public purse.)
For researchers, switching one source of revenues for another probably isn't the most terrible thing to happen - you can still do good work - but when the switch comes it's the different responsibilities attached to the new money that cause the problems, not the fact the old money is gone.
Whether individual scientists have been taught to adapt to the new strings is another matter altogether.
