Senator John McCain's exuberant proposal that the U.S. government fund a massive X-prize style research push for a efficient automobile-scale electric battery points up several problems with the way science is funded in the United States today.

First, the power to decide what technical direction research will follow is ultimately in the hands of politicians. Sometimes these are powerful politicians working for special interests; sometimes they are well-meaning people seeking to fix a real problem. Always, these decision-makers are subject to the law of unintended consequences, or at best tend to force research along directions that are less efficient than would be taken by directors of research groups acting more independently.

In a relatively benign example, almost no one working in an engineering or physical science field has missed the ridiculous hyperinflation of the word "nanotechnology." Thanks largely to government funding initiatives for this nebulously defined field, any branch of physics, chemistry, or engineering which happens somewhere to encounter objects less than a micron in some dimension now calls itself "nanotech." Colloid science has been around for centuries in some form, but the word "colloid" is being inexorably phased out in favor of "nanoparticle" in the rather large regime where they happen to be the same. It's a silly trend, and it makes groups that are actually working on nanotech that much harder to pick out of the crowd.

Less harmlessly, President Bush's fatuous demand for a hydrogen economy has spawned a great increase in the development of hydrogen fuel cell catalysts, membranes, and storage technology. This is fine more or less, but a 2003 Science report indicates that hydrogen in industry and transportation has the potential to be the next chlorofluorocarbon - a useful chemical with terrible and subtle consequences that are not detected til it is already in wide use.

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2003/06/59220

McCain's advocacy of this "battery prize" is unlikely (depending on the technology) to bring forth unintended consequences, perhaps, but it shows weaknesses inherent in the system. An efficient and cheap battery would be good, great even. However, what would be better is a cheap, efficient way of powering said battery. Why not award the prize for that? For high-conversion solar power, or efficient fuel cell electrical conversion of ethanol, or even efficient cellulosic ethanol for that matter?

Also worrisome is the whimsy with which the proposal is made. "A dollar from every American" is not the way the tax system works. While a politician can be forgiven for getting a technical detail wrong, (and ought not to be in charge of getting them right) one would think that we could rely on a politician to accurately portray taxation, which is after all their business.

Politically motivated funding of pet projects and faddish buzzwords is a disservice to scientists and to the taxpayers who are supporting it. The fact that it exists at all points up the need for changes in the system by which basic research is supported today.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/06/23/daily27.html