Policy & Advocacy

With the Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 omnibus bill  signed into law and in effect, Congress now shifts its attention to the budget for FY 2017, which begins on October 1. To aid in this process, the House Appropriations Committee has asked individual Representatives to submit “Programmatic Requests.” These requests are used by the Committee to identify what programs are…

Following the much appreciated budget increases for scientific agencies in December, science and health advocates alike were ecstatic at the mention of a “cancer moonshot” in President Obama’s final State of the Union Address to the House of Representatives. It is reported that the White House  plans to request $755 million for cancer research funding as…

A worrisome habit is arising among some American politicians. They don’t like what scientists conclude about some supposedly controversial topic so they try to defund the research. A good example of this tactic is climate change—in recent months, we’ve heard of efforts to limit NASA, EPA, NOAA, and NSF funding for research in geoscience. But…

In response to concerns that have been raised about reproducibility in biomedical research, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) invited experts, delegates from its member societies (including GSA), and representatives from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and other stakeholders to discuss general factors that may impede the ability to…

An article in the most recent issue of Science highlights a growing concern about the continued support of the biological databases on which our community depends. Indeed, 2015 GSA President Jasper Rine was quoted as saying these resources are “critical for our daily life as geneticists and biomedical researchers.” Many of the model organism databases (MODs) used…

Catch up on 2015’s most popular Policy & Advocacy posts! How labor reform might overhaul postdoc pay A proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor could soon mandate that postdocs making less than $50,440 per year will be eligible for overtime pay at 1.5 times their hourly rate. Research labs are generally not prepared…

On December 16, 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released an agency-wide strategic plan. This document does not replace the strategic planning process of the individual institutes and centers (ICs), rather it serves as an overarching framework for all of the ICs to incorporate into their strategic planning for the future. Development of the…

A proposed rule from the U.S. Department of Labor could soon mandate that postdocs making less than $50,440 per year will be eligible for overtime pay at 1.5 times their hourly rate. Research labs are generally not prepared to track overtime hours and many do not have the additional funds available to pay postdocs above…

  Early this morning, the U.S. House of Representatives released the text of the fiscal year (FY) 2016 omnibus appropriations bill, which would fund the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30, 2016. The bill includes increases for all of the science agencies of interest to the GSA community:…

Last week, the National Academies of Science and Engineering joined forces with the Chinese Academy of Science and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom to host an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, DC. Top scholars in genetics, bioengineering, ethics, and law debated the merits of human gene editing; however consensus was far from achieved.…

NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has announced that Dorit Zuk, PhD, will be the next director of the institute’s Division of Genetics and Developmental Biology (GDB). She will join NIGMS in early 2016. NIGMS’ GDB division funds basic research on the cellular and molecular mechanisms related to inheritance, gene expression, and development. Many of…