While federal support for science has remained steady since 2004, reaching $57.4 billion this year, it's actually gone down when inflation is taken into account, says Kei Koizumi, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's R&D budget and policy program.
"Every year there's a little less money to go around," he says. "Institutions that rely on federal funds to keep their research going are finding it much tougher to get that money and are having to get creative in either finding other sources or rethinking what kinds of research they do."
At Scripps Institution, part of the University of California, San Diego, state cutbacks to research funding forced officials to eliminate the $300,000 in annual funding for its libraries of preserved collections, says Lawrance Bailey, senior director of development. The other alternative was to cut staff.
The libraries hold millions of sea creatures, rocks and fossils. To keep the libraries functioning and accepting new specimens, the institution turned to fundraising. But thousands of preserved species "aren't as sexy as funding an expedition or a project to address climate change," Bailey says.
Enter the name-a-species program, despite the objections of some older Scripps scientists who "felt that this was selling out, that to name a species in return for a gift was tasteless at a minimum," he says.
Scientists often name species after a trait like color or habitat, but they have a long history of naming species after each other -- although self-naming is frowned upon -- or for friends and family. Greg Rouse, professor of marine biology at Scripps Institution, says he recently named a sea worm Mesonerilla neridae after his girlfriend, Nerida. It may not sound like a traditional romantic gesture, but "she really liked it," he says. "She was there when we discovered it."
Famous people get their share of names too. For example, a pair of U.S. entomologists named three slime-mold beetle species after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense. It wasn't a joke: Mr. Bush called to thank one of the entomologists, who said he wished to honor the three men.
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