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At MIT and Brandeis University this week, newly minted Nobel Prize winners stressed the key role that federal funding played in their breakthrough scientific research and worried that public taxpayer support for such experimentation is drying up.
Government spending for research and development has remained flat for years and threats to funding are growing, including the Trump administration’s recent budget proposal for steep reductions in science to offset increased spending in defense and border security.
“Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a champion,” said MIT professor emeritus Rainer Weiss, one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday.
Weiss and his co-winners, Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish, won for their roles in creating the LIGO — Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — that helped detect gravitational waves in space.
Although Weiss began his work in the 1970s, the group didn’t discover proof that Albert Einstein’s gravitational theories existed until 2015.
The National Science Foundation initially gave him about $40,000 to fund his work, gradually increasing its financial support for the project to its current level...