Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few

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WASHINGTON — 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.”

From proposed animal research laboratories at the University of Arizona, the University of Nebraska and the University of Pennsylvania to empty floors in laboratory buildings at the University of California, Irvine, Ohio State University and Southern Illinois University, colleges across the country have hundreds of shovel- and beaker-ready projects in the sciences that could collectively cost tens of billions and begin within weeks.

“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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24stim.html?th&emc=th