It strikes me that the "9 months to make a baby" applies much more to Engineering than it does to Research Science.
There are a ton of areas of research that we know will yield a lot of future benefit but since the NIH is actually funded at a lower inflation-adjusted rate compared to 15 years ago [1], the research is held up greatly. Grants to young scientists are diminishing and many promising researchers are leaving the field.
Building a bridge is a serial process, studying the metallurgy of hundreds of compounds is massively parallel.
> From FY 2003 to 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 22% of its capacity to fund research due to budget cuts, sequestration, and inflationary losses.
There are a ton of areas of research that we know will yield a lot of future benefit but since the NIH is actually funded at a lower inflation-adjusted rate compared to 15 years ago [1], the research is held up greatly. Grants to young scientists are diminishing and many promising researchers are leaving the field.
Building a bridge is a serial process, studying the metallurgy of hundreds of compounds is massively parallel.
[1] - http://faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/FederalFunding/Graph%2...
> From FY 2003 to 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) lost 22% of its capacity to fund research due to budget cuts, sequestration, and inflationary losses.