Guest Column: Letting Scientists Off the Leash

Where does the money come from to pay for our science? Mostly from the federal government — your tax dollars at work — and non-profit foundations. Income from grants written by professors is the single largest contribution to the Stanford University budget (the second largest is endowment income, and student tuition is a distant third). Stanford has an enormous endowment ($17 billion before the market crash) but applies it in a heavily leveraged manner — in other words, they tend to use it to prime the pump and not to support ongoing research programs.

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