Scientific Research in the National Interest Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TED LIEU of California. Mr. Chair, I rise to oppose this bill.

America is an exceptional nation. One of the reasons we are the best country in the world is that we believe in science and we believe in innovation. Our country has always believed in physics and in chemistry, and we trust scientists.

The National Science Foundation has helped this country grow in terms of innovation and in terms of amazing scientific discoveries. It is not broken. So why are we trying to meddle with what the scientists have done?

The chairman mentioned some examples of grants that sounded sort of funny. I understand that most of the Republican legislators do not believe in climate change, but the overwhelming majority of scientists do, as does the U.S. military, as does ExxonMobil today.

One of the grants had to do with how people learn about climate change. That is vitally important because climate change is going to affect our children and our grandchildren.

It is true that some of these grants sound funny. That is because scientists do all sorts of things that, to a layperson, may not be very obvious.

Because I am not a scientist and because most people are not scientists, I think that is perfectly fine, that we don't have all sorts of redundant writings that explain what an experiment does. Let me give you one example that is on the NSF's Web site.

One of the grants is to study funny-looking colored clay in France, blue-green clay in another country. It sounds like a really silly grant, doesn't it?

It turns out that, when they looked at it, there were properties in this blue-green clay in France that kill bacteria, anti-bacterial properties that can help deal with MRSA, that can help deal with superbugs. This can be a groundbreaking grant, a groundbreaking discovery, but under this bill, it might have problems being funded.

Ultimately, what this is really about and what I have learned now in Congress is that often we are very arrogant. We do not trust scientists. We do not trust the people in America.

This is an arrogant bill that sort of says we know best, not the scientists who are doing peer reviews of what grants to fund, and that we know which experiment might do exactly what.

It turns out, in science, lots of times scientists study one area and get a completely different, amazing discovery in a totally unrelated area. We need to fund basic science. We need to take our hands off this. We need to trust scientists and trust the people in America.

Do not pass this bill. We are not that arrogant. We should not determine what scientists are to be doing and that we know better than they do, because we do not. I ask for opposition to this bill.

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