Could you answer this question with $1.5 million?

[CelticMuscle]

"In stark contrast, among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.?

If so, then please apply to the US government as this study has been highlighted by Sen. Coburn (R-OK) as an example of wasteful spending

[fridge]

I know this seems wasteful, but it's actually an artefact of the way science funding works in the US. Professors are not paid in the summer, so 3 months of the year they need grants for their salary. Suppose they also need a graduate student to do the research. In salary alone, you are now talking:

60k$US/a + 120k$US/a * 3 / 12 = 90k$US/a

Please be remembering that most of that salary for the grad student is going to be clawed back in tuition.

Because Americans have to pay healthcare costs, that's actually going to be another 30-40%, but most never see it because it doesn't get taxed and their employer covers it, but it has to come out of the grant:

90$US/a * 1.4 = 121k$US/a

The university will also charge an overhead on any grants received. Since US universities don't typically have access to public funding, they have to charge an overhead. This is effectively what the university is charging a professor for space, power, library, Internet, journals, etc. That ranges between 10-30%.

121k$US/a * 1.4 = 170k$US/a

And a typical master's student run is 2 years, so:

121k$US/a * 2a = 242k$US

So, we're at about a quarter of a million and we haven't even bought supplies, fees for accessing some data archives, the cost of publication (all of which need to go through that university overhead). And since getting a grant is very hard, most academics over-size their grants to cover all the activities in their lab because they won't have any other way to fund their other graduate students.

Getting up to 1.5M$US happens really, really fast the way that funding is structured in the US.