Funding Basic Agricultural Research

Funding Public Agricultural Research

Funding of Agricultural Research in ColombiaFarmer And Industry Funding Of Agricultural Research In ColombiaN

Rubén D. Estrada1

A basic scientist’s reflections on research funding

Scientists are among the most enthusiastic people when it comes to talking about their work. Despite this, it seems that it is the funding system that Canadian scientists most often discuss these days, and not their findings and new ideas. Needless to say, research can only exist with good and secure funding, but when obtaining funding becomes a dominant part of investigators’ activity, the sys...

Winners and Losers: Formula versus Competitive Funding of Agricultural Research

State Agricultural Experiment Stations (SAESs) were established with federal formula funding by the Hatch Act of 1887. In 1955, the Hatch Act was amended and a number of subsequent formula funding programs were consolidated under the USDA Cooperative States Research Service (CSRS), which today is known as the Cooperative Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES). Currently, all of the ...

Agricultural Genomics: Commercial Applications Bring Increased Basic Research Power

Homologous recombination has been a focus of basic research for over a hundred years [1–3]. The advent of genomics has allowed fine-scale analyses of recombination, including genomewide analysis of global recombination rate [4–6] and hotspot usage (the proportion of recombination that occurs at hotspots) [4,6]. Recently, PLOS Genetics published the work of Ma et al. [7] describing a genome-wide...