Is the Recovery Act Stimulating Science and the Economy?

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By Katherine Harmon, Scientific American

February 17, 2010

"It already does have the immediate impact to attract and hire staff," says Amy Pienta, an associate research scientist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who is using an ARRA-funded NSF grant to evaluate the stimulus's impact on the social sciences. Most of the awards may not be big enough to fund senior-level positions, she says, but many of them will "certainly" help hire "people who are on the front lines of a lot of the work—on data collection, data analysis." She offers as an example her own project, which will hire someone to do computer programming. "We're able to advertise in the community," she says. "That's pretty immediate."

Matthew Thomas, a professor at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at The Pennsylvania State University who is running a project funded by a $1.8-million NSF stimulus grant to study the impact of climate change on malaria and dengue fever, says most of his money is going to hiring graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Being able make the four-year-long appointments has had "short-term and immediate benefits," he says. But the rewards will continue to pay dividends into the future, he notes: "There's a longer term legacy for this research." In addition to the new information he hopes the project generates, it will also create "a cohort of trained personnel who will, themselves, [go on] to secure new positions and build their own labs."

So far, $9.3 million for researchers building robotic bees, $1.3 million to hunt for viruses that infect single-celled organisms, and $845,000 to study past climate change in Russia has been doled out. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been able to fund thousands of new research projects with money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), aka the economic stimulus package, which was passed a year ago today.

But has this money been as much of a boon to the economy has it has been to science?

When advocating for the bill last January, President Obama called for "investing in the science, research and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries and entirely new industries." Progress would not come immediately, he warned, but when he signed the bill, an unprecedented influx of funds funneled to agencies flush with project proposals but lacking the cash to back them. This money set the grant-giving gears in motion, but the research pipeline itself can be prodigiously long.

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