i see nothing wrong with this NIH study. sure it may be sound a bit flaky (quoted out of context) and may cause certain people to "giggle" (especially the unedcuated, as just about everything with this culture invariably does) but i'd rather my tax $dollars be spent this way than X -- substitute just about anything for X!

i say f**k Rep. Jeff FLAKE (if ever there was a more fortuitous alignment of personality and last name, it escapes me!)

freaking uptight puritanical tight-wad Republican troglodytes!

oh Bill ... where art thou?  

LOL

If our representatives are getting down to scrutinizing grants of $26,000, then I guess we can assume that they've already busted the -big- pork-barrels, right?  Whatever happened to the missing $2trillion at the defense department?

conservative credentials for their base.  The amount spent on this pork is pittance compared to other porks.

Certain level of government funding is needed for seemingly inconsequential researches like this.  Once in a while, there is a huge payoff down the line.  Nobody really know.  That is why government funded researches with small grants are important.

about sex than Democrats.  Pathetic.

It's actually more insidious than mere political grandstanding by the Congressional Republicans. It is, in fact, very reminiscent of Soviet "genetics" research under Lysenko in the '50's. Below is from the NYTimes:

May 9, 2003
No Time to Get Squeamish
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

"...Most AIDS scientists are terrified these days. They describe witch hunts by neo-Puritans in and out of the Bush administration, and many are so nervous that in e-mail and research abstracts they avoid using words like "gays," "homosexuals," "anal sex" or "sex workers."

So scientists at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere are devising their own secret code. I won't give it away, but one term stands for "gay" or "homosexual," another for "anal sex" and so on.

"I would recommend avoiding all electronic communication to any N.I.H. office," one scientist warned in one of many e-mail notes buzzing among AIDS researchers. "Phone communication does not appear tapped at this time. Even so, I am advising staff to speak `in code' unless an N.I.H. staff member indicates you can speak freely. In short, assume you are living in Stalinist Russia when communicating with the United States government."

As my Times colleague Erica Goode noted in breaking the story last month, researchers have been told by N.I.H. project officers to avoid "sensitive language" in grant applications. A University of California researcher, for example, was told to "cleanse" the abstract of his grant proposal of words like "gay," "homosexual" and "transgender."

Since his research was on H.I.V. in gay men, this was a challenge. How can scholars investigate how AIDS spreads without using words that make the religious right blush?

Perhaps this seems like an obscure issue. It's not: the fundamental question is whether elements of the Bush administration are politicizing science, using budgets, advisory committees and the fear of embarrassment to chill the way science is conducted in America...."