Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few

There is lots and lots of money in the stimulus package for research, much coming through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. NSF will use its extra dollars to dig deeper into funding already proposed research. Not quite clear yet what NIH will do:

The acting director of the National Institutes of Health begged university administrators on Wednesday to avoid even applying for stimulus money unless the universities planned to hire people almost immediately. . . . 'It would be the height of embarrassment,' the official, Dr. Raynard S. Kington, said, 'if we give these grants and find out that institutions are not spending them to hire people and make purchases and advance the science the way they're designed to do.' . . . Not a problem, the administrators said, in interviews. After working under flat federal research financing for years, scientists are ecstatic. 'This is a miracle, I think,' A. J. Stewart Smith, the dean for research at Princeton, said. 'It is redressing this terrible problem where the success rate for excellent proposals was very low.' . . . 'We're grateful for the money, but it's not such a large number that anybody's going to have to look very hard for good projects to fund,' said Leslie Tolbert, the vice president for research at the University of Arizona