324 | Elizabeth Mynatt on Universities and the Importance of Basic Research

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A couple months ago, I did a bonus episode that you might remember on science funding. And I was a little worried when I did the episode in response, of course, to proposed cuts in science funding that the government has put forward. A little worried that it would might seem a little dry, a little inside baseball.

You know, we were talking about indirect costs, overhead, how different ways of applying for grants. played out in the academic environment and so forth. But in fact, I got a lot of positive feedback about that episode. People explained that they knew nothing about this, you know, they had never heard of any of this stuff, and it turns out that it's really important. I guess maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, because we academics, as much as I love them, my, my fellow compatriots in academia, we love doing our research.

We love doing our work. Uh, some of us love taking that work that we do and explaining it to broader audiences, but mostly we're trained to sit in the office or the lab and do our thing and talk to our colleagues. We're not very good at explaining ourselves to the broader world. And it continues the assault on the research infrastructure that has been built up here in the United States and the world, so maybe it is useful to talk about how academic research works and its relationship to the important technological breakthroughs that we all benefit from.

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