Then, Ah wrote mah Senator...

[rain_gryphon]

Ah sed, sez I:

Dear Senator Young:

I fully agree that your Endless Frontier Act should be kept completely separate from Mr. Biden's wasteful spending bill. While it's tempting to attach measures like this to it to ensure that at least some of the money is spent on useful things, I'm still hoping to see Biden stopped.

Having just read the Association of American Universities' summary of your bill, I am concerned by one thing. The bill calls for the 10 to 15 "Regional Technology Hubs" to be geographically distributed. I recognize the political wisdom in spreading the spending around. I am less sure that it serves the goal of advancing science and technology, though.

You are familiar, I am sure, with the widely-held view that research into science and technology benefits from the cross-fertilization that occurs when researchers chat informally with one another. QSAR, for example, a widely-used type of mathematical analysis based on least squares regression, arose from drug designers and mathematicians talking shop as they ate lunch together. It allows the biological effect of a drug to be predicted from its structure.

For a more recent and probably more news-friendly example, see https://scitechdaily.com/egyptian-animal-mummies-from-over-2000-years-ago-digitally-unwrapped-with-high-resolution-3d-x-rays/ A team of Egyptologists from Swansea University were able to link up with the university's Engineering School, who used high-resolution X-ray tomography to produce unprecedentedly detailed images of several mummified animals, which resulted in a rich haul of information about ancient Egypt. This is quite unlikely to have happened, of course, had the research efforts been geographically separated.

I hope that you'll reconsider, and perhaps commit to tightly packing the Regional Technology Hubs into areas that already have substantial science and technology infrastructure in place. You would get, I feel sure, a lot more bang for the buck.

Thank you.

*****
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Comments

[nodrog]

I hope you get more than a form letter thanking you for your communication and assuring you that it will be given due consideration…

[rain_gryphon]

I probably shall.

[nodrog]

As for literally uncovered discoveries - I yearn for the indisputable finding of anything bronze in a Mayan or Toltec tomb.  The maddeningly circumstantial evidence of Bronze-Age European contact with the New World would be confirmed at a stroke.

(Not just legends - look how culturally advanced were the Algonquin tribes on the Eastern Seaboard compared to the rest of the continent!  They'd learned all that from somewhere.)

[rain_gryphon]

Yeah, for whatever reason, that whole 'fascination with indians' thing never really hit me as a child, so that I know very little about them. I take it as pretty much axiomatic that there was pre-Columbian contact, though.

[nodrog]

My interest is in the Bronze Age, but I give due credit for ingenuity to people who can build civilizations out of beans and corn and deer (and monkeys and dogs).  No metals - not even copper! - no draft animals, not even the wheel.  (Given the terrain, that's not surprising; even now, driving in, say, Costa Rica is not a job, it's an adventure.)

No sheep horses goats oxen, no wheat barley oats rice peas…

But they had cotton.  So did Africa. Hmm…