| > the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not? Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress, e.g. they set what specific diseases, etc. should be worked on. This represents more than half of all funding for academic scientific research in the USA. > Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town. Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located. When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live. |