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The Daily Signal
NIH Spends
Millions on Hopped-Up Honeybees and Sexy Goldfish, Then Asks for Zika
Funding
Philip Wegmann
May 10, 2016
What do honeybees on cocaine, drunken songbirds, and sexy goldfish have
in common? Each was the subject of extensive, taxpayer-funded research
and each features prominently in Sen. Jeff Flake’s most recent expose
on government waste.
The Arizona Republican’s oversight report—”Twenty Questions: Government
Studies That Will Leave You Scratching Your Head“—highlights $35
million worth of federally funded research projects of dubious merit.
It’s part of an effort to increase oversight and efficiency in
government research.
“When federal agencies don’t spend our limited research dollars
wisely,” Flake said, “they’re not just wasting money, they’re missing
opportunities, and we can’t afford either.”
The overseas Ebola epidemic, Flake’s office said, provided the original
impetus for this study. In 2014 the director of the National Institutes
of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, complained that lack of government
funding hampered the agency’s effort to develop a vaccine for the Ebola
virus.
It did not, however, keep the NIH from spending part of its $32 billion
budget to study the appearance of Jesus Christ’s face on toast, the
musical preferences of monkeys, and the contagious nature of yawning.
Flake, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on
Africa and Global Health, argues that the funding would be better
deployed to find “treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and viral
infections such as Zika and Ebola.”
The NIH funding that Flake finds questionable often flowed to academic
research facilities.
The Oregon Health & Science University spent $5 million studying
whether zebra finches altered their singing habits when intoxicated.
Researchers found that alcohol “measurable affects the song” of
inebriated avian.
A researcher at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Gene
Robinson, spent $242,600 in taxpayer funds to observe the impact of
cocaine on honeybees. When hopped up on the stimulant, the insects are
“about twice as likely to dance,” he found.
At Bowdoin College in Maine, researchers spent $3.6 million on a study
entitled “The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: How Brain Chemistry Affects
Social Judgment.” Toward that end, scientists asked, “What makes
goldfish feel sexy?” Researchers discovered that when given sex
steroids, male goldfish exhibited more social behavior and swam closer
to their female counterparts.
Flake’s report comes as the White House calls for a standalone
emergency package worth nearly $2 billion to prepare for the coming
Zika virus.
On April 17, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called for additional
funding from Congress on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
“Right now, we’re using money from other accounts to [fight the
virus],” Fauci said. “And that is going to be just a stopgap measure.
We are going to have to get the money to be able to do the full job we
planned to do.”
But Flake insists that Congress needs to do a better job overseeing how
already allocated money is being spent.
Washington, he said, must “set clear goals for federally funded
research, improved transparency to ensure tax dollars are being
prioritized to meet those goals, and reduced wasteful and duplicative
spending on lesser priorities.”
Flake has carved out a career in Congress going after questionable
federal expenditures.
In December, the fiscal hawk released an annual “Wastebook” outlining
over $100 billion in what he described as “wasteful government
spending.” Before that, he had released three other oversight reports
with similar examples.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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