@Joneill, sure! Warning: very long, enjoy with a cup of coffee or your favorite adult beverage!
For my project, it actually got funded on the third try and I just now wrapped up that five year project. The project was a joint venture between myself and two other research labs. My share of the funding was $415,000 for five years. So that works out to $83,000 per year for each year of the project.
The project was aimed at understanding how frogs choose their mates. To do this, I invented a robotic frog to mimic a live, male frog so that we could test hypotheses regarding female frog mate choice. On the basis of this description, I can see where a lot of people might complain that this is exactly that kind of waste we don't need in science.
So what did you get for your tax dollars?
First, we discovered a new mechanism of evolution. It's been known for decades that female mate choice is an important mechanism of evolutionary change. In short, males that make mating displays that don't "cut the muster" don't mate, and their genes don't go in the next generation. So in essence female choice drives the evolution of male display traits. So what we discovered is that these tiny female frogs (about 2 grams), evaluate male advertisement calls as well as the movement of their vocal sac (a visual cue). So in the noisy rainforest, females use the visual cue of the moving vocal sac, in much the same way the human listeners lip read to improve speech comprehension at noisy parties. We also discovered that even though the vocal sac as a visual cue improves female auditory discrimination, there are also limits to this. At some point, background noise in the auditory channel and changes in the timing of the vocal sac movement completely change how females perceive the male mating signal. In addition, male frogs pay attention to both when they hear a rival's call and when they feel the water ripples from his motion in the water. They use these arrival time differences to assess how far away their potential rival is, much the same way that you can estimate how far away a storm is by paying attention to when you see the lighting versus when you hear the thunder.
In sum, what we discovered was that these tiny little frog brains are integrating multiple streams of sensory information to figure out where things are in the noisy world around them. How females do this then dictates how they perceive male mating signals (perceptual bias) and helps to explain the kind of biodiversity we see in the world around us.
But...there's more. Astoundingly, these tiny little frogs with rather simple brains and some different architecture (relative to humans anyway) are able to integrate streams of sensory information in a similar way to humans. Specifically, we as humans use lip movements to improve speech comprehension, but we can be fooled by the movement of the lips. In particular, changing the shape or timing of lip movements actually changes the way you hear a sound. It's called the McGurk effect and you can try it for yourself in this link. It'll actually blow your mind!
We found that the frogs actually experience something analagous to the McGurk effect. Further, they are sensitive to a visual cue that lags an auditory cue by more than 200 milliseconds. This is almost exactly the same sensitivity that human listeners have when they begin to notice that an the audio is not synched to the lip movements in a video. Further, the influence of noise also changes how frogs perceive auditory signals. So what this tells us is that there are some fundamental processes in the vertebrate brain that ingrate auditory and visual cues. To date, we still don't have a complete understanding of human auditory perception nor understand very well why humans with hearing deficits have an even harder time hearing in noise. Our work suggesting these fundamental neural processes governing vertebrate hearing can shed some light on human hearing deficits. In fact, our work has spurred a collaboration with a neurophysiologist on exactly this problem.
The next thing we did was to take genetic samples from all of our frogs. So we have a genetic sample linked to the behavior for each frog. We used the genetic sample to run a next ten sequencing analysis that provides a high-resolution look at the genetics of these frogs across their genome. The basic information we can get from this (analysis still in progress) is understanding the movement patterns, mate choice patterns, and overall genetic diversity in the population that can be used for conservation (as amphibians are in trouble everywhere).
Ok, so what else did we do with the money? We provided tuition and a poverty-level wage to fund four students to get their master's degree. One student has gone on to do a Ph.D., one now works for a biotech start up company, one has just been accepted into a Ph.D. program and the fourth is still working on it. In particular, the student now at the biotech start up was the only non-Ph.D. researcher they hired and they hired her because of her strong back ground with the next-gem sequencing. We trained two postdoctoral teaching scholars how to teach in the University setting. In addition to the grad students, we took ten undergraduate students to Panama for three months at a time and taught them how to conduct behavioral and genetic research. So these ten students got a full funded trip and walked away knowing how to conduct behavioral science in the tropics. Most of these students could not afford to do this on their own dime and most were also women and minorities. They've all gone on to careers in nursing, physical therapy, graduate school, or teaching science.
In addition we took our actual genetic samples into the undergraduate classroom and taught 120 undergraduate students how to conduct this cutting edge genetic technique on real samples (not some canned lab we found in a lab manual). Those students now have a very powerful, modern technique in their tool belt that they can put on their CV when looking for grad school or jobs.
We built a display in a museum in Panama that shows the amphibian diversity of that country and to date has reached over 50,000 school children.
Aside from spending money on tuition for students, we hired a small US company to build the robotic frog for us. This company employed 4 engineers to work on the project and in total, we spend around $25K on it. Aside from giving us a robotic frog for the research, the technology has been incorporated by the company into other interactive educational displays. We bought two acoustic chambers (around $40k each) from ETS-Lindgren, an Austin, TX based company. We bought computer/software systems (around $20k) from a Dutch company, but the system came from Virginia employing all US workers. All travel to Panama for the field work was done on US-based carriers. While working in Panama, we paid fees to work at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, which helps to support the US Smithsonian's work in the tropics.
So to briefly sum it all up...we made discoveries of a new mechanism driving biodiversity (perceptual bias). We found that this cognitive process in the frogs is analogous to human audio-visual integration and may help to explain hearing deficits in humans. We trained four graduate students, 130 undergraduate students, and two post-doctoral scholars, providing them with a rigorous scientific education!
), there are many grants that will add up when taken as whole and we need to be "choiceful" in what gets funded and what doesn't - to me there needs to be a clear path to a benefit from the outcome. In my opinion, we don't have the means to fund research for the sake of research (nor should we).
