Posted May 9, 2011 by pkbowen@gmail.com
BP's Research Board Announces $500M Research Initiative
BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance has published a request for proposals for the $500M Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. The goal is admirable, and the array of research topics is well thought-out. However, there is little in their press release to indicate what they intend to do with the research results. Given BP's previous publication-squashing grant conditions, this point is of great interest and concern.
There should be no mistake: BP has done a lot of things wrong over the past ~13 months. However, the $500,000,000 research initiative is one of the better things to come out of this disaster. BP's press release states that:
BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance announced today that the independent Research Board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GRI) has released its Request for Proposals for studies into the effects of the Deepwater Horizon incident and the potential associated impact on the environment and public health. The $500 million GRI is funded by BP and administered by the Gulf of Mexico Alliance.
The list of goals that this fund is intended to accomplish is well thought-out, as are the list of research themes, which are:
- The physical distribution and ultimate fate of contaminants associated with the Deepwater Horizon incident.
- The chemical evolution and biological degradation of the contaminants.
- The environmental effects of the contaminants on Gulf of Mexico ecosystems, and the science of ecosystem recovery.
- Technology developments for improved detection, characterization, mitigation, and remediation of offshore oil spills.
- Integration of the previous four themes in the context of human health.
These topics and the research fund, I believe, provide a platform for significant advancement of our understanding of the impact of this type of ecological disaster. This is probably the single best "silver lining" outcome: learning from our mistakes. (Of course, if we really had learned from this disaster, we wouldn't be doing any more offshore drilling...but that's another topic.) Hopefully, we come out of this disaster with a much larger brain trust (in graduate students, their advisors, and undergraduate research assistants) than we had going into May of last year.
I have one, quite large concern about this research fund, which is will the investigators be allowed to publish the data/findings/models unhindered by BP? We know that some of the preliminary funding given out by BP came with a large catch: it was very difficult to publish the results in an academic journal (or online, for that matter). One can only surmise that a similar restriction will be placed on research results gleaned from projects funded by this initiative. I certainly hope that enough collaboration takes place that any crucial results are not held "in a vacuum" until BP decides to release them.
Also interesting is the list of GRI research board members, which includes faculty from many reputable universities (UT, Dartmouth, LSU, Cal-Tech, etc.), but there is one good university conspicuously absent from this board: U-Alabama at Huntsville. This may be more consipicuous to me due to my Metallurgy background, but it is nonetheless a noticable gap in the lineup.
