exploration of life on earth

[George <E. at <schatz at MOBOT.ORG>.bitnet>]

A short follow-up to my earlier posting:

The FY2000 NSF Biological Sciences Budget request can be viewed at:

http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/bud/fy2000/00BIO.htm

The $408.62 million, an increase of 4.5% over 1999, is a commendable total.  I wonder how much of that will support systematics per se?  I assume that it is a subset of $124.33 million (slightly less than the Mars probe that crashed because feet and meters were inadvertently interchanged) allocated to Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE), although it is not completely clear how the individual thematic areas such as (BE) and (BED) correspond to the intial table in which Environmental Biology is allocated only $89.45 million.  BIO will also provide $134.62 million to support information based activities, a significant level of funding and also extremely commendable.  But again, how do these funds trickle down to the museum curator revising an endemic Malagasy genus of ants with 72 species, 70 of which are newly described!  Despite the best efforts by NSF to formulate funding priorities in the biological sciences (and they truly are commendable efforts), and the tried and true method of competitve awarding of those funds, it's still not what we really need to document life on earth.  As Richard Jensen said, that was eloquently laid out in Sytematics Agenda 2000.  The problem is, we also need core support (= "don't have to write one of the 74% of proposals *not* funded by NSF BIO last year" or alternatively, flip the numbers, and fund 74% of proposals seeking support for so-called "alpha-level" taxonomy) for taxonomists in the trenches, whose salaries collectively are a drop in the BIO budget.  Whose institution is not still suffering an attrition of the identifiers of life on earth?

Still, lots of food for thought in the FY2000 NSF BIO budget request.  Remember, for those of us paying U.S. taxes, it's our money.  And I completely agree, NASA is not the enemy.  To corrupt an old line: "We have met the enemy, and they are us"!

Dr. George E. Schatz
Missouri Botanical Garden
P.O. Box 299
St. Louis, MO 63166-0299
U.S.A.
Phone: 314-577-9512
Fax: 314-577-9596
schatz at mobot.org