Congress Critter Hilarity

Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R, Maryland) had an Op/Ed bit up in the NYT a few days ago. He’s against the use of chimpanzees in research.
Fair enough, our elected Representatives are welcome to their opinions. But there were two glaring items that require correction or comment.
First, he tells tall tales about Nim.

Is R01 level funding necessary to get hired as an Assistant Professor?

Go give your answer at The Tightrope blog.
I’d say that for substance-abuse type disciplines, the answer is no. There do seem to be a lot of K99/R00 folks being hired though.

Toni Scarpa to leave CSR

Via writedit:
CSR presser [PDF]

Immediately my eye was drawn to the claim that Scarpa launched the effort to train early career reviewers. What a crock of misleading fewmets!

He was the one driving the ship, right over objections from his SROs, to purge Assistant Professors from panels. And when they started this training initiative, he wanted the noobs to just sit there without any assigned reviews to write!