As someone who has spent most of his working life as a scientific worker and later as an academic scientist, graduate supervisor, teacher, grant reviewer, and administrator, the current devastation being visited upon my colleagues and their institutions is sickening. I have never thought my work was more useful or more important than anyone else’s. But I knew it was for me from the beginning and despite a few bumps in the road, I have been exceedingly fortunate. Still, as so many (at least 90%) of my colleagues have taken up with the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) in their sneering at “working people,” it is difficult to see how things could have turned out differently.
Try as I might, it has been very difficult to pierce their thick PMC bubble of self-esteem. Until now. I remember telling a senior colleague who was most impressed with himself during my first faculty appointment that the “Man” was coming for him, too. Or more likely, those who followed him. I would have had better luck explaining the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology to a particularly dense dog. But as dawn has come up like thunder, the message is getting through. The messenger is not particularly a surprise, and the message has been sobering. For those with fulminate Trump Derangement Syndrome, their world has spun off its axis. For the rest of us, mostly the same thing but with a modicum of understanding.
The reaction of “the people” to the assault on academics has not been a surprise, either. The PMC is good at nothing so much as looking down on the “uncredentialed.” And the people have noticed. Thus, the undisguised glee at the federal government taking a few billion dollars from Harvard. Harvard rejected the demands, but no one there or anywhere has yet seemed able to explain their role as the locus of research and scholarship from philology to astrophysics.
This is disconcerting. It should not be difficult for any academic to explain that the grants and other research support academic institutions receive are a public trust they take very seriously, while using the resources as intended. As I have mentioned before, every dollar I ever spent from a grant was audited in real time. 99% of grantees know the rules and follow them. We teach our graduate students the “elevator pitch,” in which they explain to anyone what they are doing and why it is important – no more than 90 seconds. Few of us have ever really failed with a good faith interlocutor. If the other won’t listen, ignore the flak and keep trying.
And now a Friday afternoon Coffee Break.
Part the First: EPA orders staff to begin canceling research grants. The EPA, which is an obvious target, had to be next:
Following in the footsteps of other federal science agencies under President Donald Trump’s administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week ordered its staff to start canceling grants already awarded to universities and research institutes…Although EPA is not a large funder of R&D compared with other federal agencies, it does provide $35 million to $40 million each year to researchers studying the impacts of pollution and ways to reduce them.
What could go wrong with this? Let us count the ways. I grew up surrounded by salt marshes that at the time were the most productive natural ecosystem in the world in turning sunlight into biomass. In certain places, these marshes were also being destroyed by water pollution. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed during the second Administration of our last liberal President, Richard Nixon. Within a few years the EPA (est. 1970) had forced the reduction of water pollution so well that within a few more years speckled trout had returned to tidal rivers and creeks where they had not been seen in thirty years or more. Several SuperFund sites remain among the marshes as a monument to human stupidity, however. No doubt they have fallen so far down the list as to be forgotten. Along with EPA-supported research:
The STAR (Science to Achieve Results) program, which began in 1995, is EPA’s main source of extramural, competitive research funding. Peer-reviewed, 5-year grants average about $1 million and run up to nearly $2 million. The research spans agency priorities, including air and water quality, climate change impacts, and safer chemicals. More than 100 active grants are subject to immediate cancellation and total $124 million over their duration. It’s not clear whether EPA has notified any recipients of grant cancellations.
EPA declined to confirm it was killing existing grants, telling Science it continues to review awarded grants to check that they are “an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars” and “align with Administration priorities.”
Appropriate use of taxpayer dollars? Administration priorities? Clean air and clean water, undoubtedly. Measuring, mitigating, and adapting to climate change impacts, most certainly. Safer chemicals? Positively, but with safety to be determined by the chemical industry. We do read that RFKJr is banning certain chemical dyes added to ultra-processed food. Good. Now, how about going after Big Food, Mr. Secretary. We’ll wait, for a little while.
Part the Second: Trump team freezes new NSF awards — and could soon axe hundreds of grants. This has also been brewing for a while. The National Science Foundation requires all applicants to include a “Broader Impacts” section in their 15-page proposals. The goal is laudable. Going back to Vannevar Bush’s post-World War II vision for scientific research in the United States, the plan was to fund researchers all across the country in many institutions, small and large, rather than build the infrastructure in only a few places to do this essential work. That grew to include efforts to spread the wealth among recipients who had been largely left out of the process: Since 1980, the US Congress has mandated that as part of its mission, the NSF should broaden the participation of under-represented groups in science.
These broader impacts are not discriminatory in any way, shape, or form. They have been an unqualified success in introducing scientific research across the country to underrepresented groups, not only including the usual “DEI” categories but students at rural institutions and those at institutions without large resources, students who were first-generation college students. The number of scientists who have come out of these efforts, people who would never have had the opportunity to become a scientist because of an accident of birth, is uncountable. I have seen this with my own eyes. My colleagues who have received NSF funding will agree. One question though: When an applicant follows statutory directions to include a “broader impacts” section and is successful, how is it proper to later cancel the grant on nothing more than a whim. Asking for a friend.
Last week I attended an undergraduate research day at a large, well-known research university that has become a powerhouse in basic and applied science over the past fifty years. The presenters were a highly diverse group, each one of them excited to have done the research and even more excited to tell their interlocutors about it. I do wonder, though. What will this research day look like in the future? Or will there even be a Research Day for undergraduates in the future? The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship has been cut by 50% as part of the DOGE Craze. The assumption is that industry will do it while at the same time focusing intently on the next conference call with “analysts.” Not. Nor will medical students, except for the 3% of them at large research universities who intend a career in the laboratory, contrary to what some believe.
Part the Third: American science turns in on itself as the New NIH director defends grant cuts as part of shift to support MAHA vision says that the priority now is “the health of the American people” while focusing “limited resources” directly on chronic diseases. No, this is not how it works. No science of any kind stops at the border, and particular not biomedical research. This part is particularly rich:
Jay Bhattacharya, the healthcare economist (not the Stanford MD who btw never qualified as a physician, instead going straight to the Stanford PhD program in economics) broadly explained how NIH will carry out Kennedy’s controversial plan to quickly uncover the causes of autism. He said the initiative will involve grants to “10 to 20 groups of researchers” that, although on a “rapid timeline,” will go through a “normal review process.” Those researchers will harness a newly created “real-world data initiative” that will compile data from a wide range of sources, including Medicare and Medicaid claims, NIH genetics data, and drug records for individuals, and information on environmental exposures.
No scientist would ever make such a claim and would have told his supervisor, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services who was once an effective environmental lawyer, “Scientific research does not work that way.” In any case, years of work on what is now called autism spectrum disorder has shown there is a genetic predisposition to ASD, which is a very broad spectrum. But there is no single “gene” for ASD. Nor is there one environmental “cause.” The epidemic of autism RFKJr speaks of does not exist. More people are identified as being “on the spectrum” than when RFKJr and I were kids (we are contemporaries) because back in those ugly days children with severe conditions were institutionalized. Others were “difficult” and eventually disappeared from school. It was not a good time. As RFKJr well knows, any family can be affected by a neurodivergent member.
I was listening to the news while building a spreadsheet the other day and heard RFKJr say that when he was a kid he never heard of lupus or juvenile diabetes. He gets a pass on lupus, although it was well known. I suppose I knew of it because my fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor, who was a large presence in my English classes through junior high and high school, died of lupus in 1964 at the age of 39. Off topic, but I think she has been cancelled since. But alas, a good man is still hard to find.
Diabetes, the early-onset autoimmune disease that is now called Type 1 diabetes, was referred to as “juvenile diabetes” in the 1950s and 1960s. The Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (now Breakthrough T1D) was started in 1970 to fund research on Type 1 diabetes. At the same press availability RFKJr referred to diabetes as a “mitochondrial disease.” Jay Bhattacharya was on his right and Marty Makary (formerly of Johns Hopkins and now Commissioner of the FDA…I wonder what Dr. Makary thought? There is a very minor subtype of late onset diabetes caused by a mitochondrial mutation that leads to hearing and vision loss, and by dysregulating insulin-secreting cells causes insulin-deficient diabetes (~Type 1). Mitochondrial diabetes account for about 1% of diabetes diagnoses. It is a very serious disease, but not part of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic that is the direct correlate of the obesity epidemic of the past 50 years, which is certainly caused by our ridiculously bad Big Food diet. This is very old news, covered at length by Marion Nestle, Gary Taubes and others. The solution is obvious.
Part the Third, Note Added in Proof: This just in, No new autism registry, HHS says, walking back NIH director’s claim.
The federal health department is not creating a new registry of Americans with autism, a Department of Health and Human Services official said in a written statement Thursday. Instead, the official said, HHS will launch a $50 million research effort to understand the causes of autism spectrum disorder and improve treatments.
The announcement arrives two days after National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the intent to create such a registry at an all staff meeting, kicking off a firestorm of panic and confusion among autism self-advocates and the broader research community. Much of the fear centered around Bhattacharya’s remarks that the government would pull health data from private sources, such as electronic health records maintained by health care providers, pharmacy data, insurance claims and even wearables like smart watches and fitness trackers.
As the Ol’ Perfesser Casey Stengel asked/exclaimed when managing the first iteration of the New York Mets 63 years ago: Can’t anybody here play this game? No, not really. The Mets finished 40-120, 60.5 games behind the San Francisco Giants, who lost the World Series in seven games to the Yankees. But they left no lasting damage, beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series, and gave us Marvelous Marv Throneberry.
Part the Fourth: With a return to Part III for a moment, “the priority now is the health of the American people,” 25 million deaths: what could happen if the US ends global health funding:
The United States spent roughly US$12 billion on global health in 2024. Without that yearly spending, roughly 25 million people could die in the next 15 years, according to models that have estimated the impact of such cuts on programmes for tuberculosis, HIV, family planning and maternal and child health.
The United States has long been the largest donor for health initiatives in poor countries, accounting for almost one-quarter of all global health assistance from donors. These investments have contributed to consistent public-health gains for more than a decade. HIV deaths, for example, dropped by 51% globally between 2010 and 2023, and deaths owing to tuberculosis dropped by 23% between 2015 and 2023.
But the administration of US President Donald Trump has cut billions of dollars of spending for global health, including dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and freezing foreign-aid contributions — some of which has been temporarily restored.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis and HIV pay no attention to international boundaries. There is no ICE, effective or not, for pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Improvements in the prevention of disease and its management have no geographical boundaries. The way to make America great again is to act like the leader we can and should be. Perhaps the President should go back 30-something years from his apparent idol of tariffs William McKinley to the first Republican President who referred the United States to the “last best hope of earth,” in a much different context, but still…We can afford that a lot more than we can afford our current “all-war-all-the-time” jones.
Part the Fifth: This was bound to happen, as a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain. I must confess, never in my worst nightmare would I have dreamed of this, although if that Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) research fellowship had come through, I would have jumped at the chance and tried to figure out a way to stay (every Southern boy has a streak of Anglophilia in him).
Data from the Nature Careers global science jobs platform show that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024. At the same time, the number of US-based users browsing jobs abroad increased by 35%.
More than 200 federal grants for research related to HIV and AIDS were abruptly terminated last month. Cuts to grants from the US National Institutes of Health for COVID-19 research were revealed, and the government began a US$400-million reduction in research grants at Columbia University in New York City, because of campus protests supporting Palestinians in the conflict with Israel.
“To see this big drop in views and applications to the US – and the similar rise in those looking to leave – is unprecedented,” says James Richards, who leads the Global Talent Solutions team at Springer Nature, which includes the Nature Careers multidisciplinary science jobs board. As this article went to press, the board hosted 983 live vacancies.
Applications from US scientists seeking career opportunities in neighbouring Canada increased by 41% between January and March 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. By contrast, applications from Canadian researchers for jobs in the United States dropped by 13%.
Chemical engineer Valerie Niemann is one of many looking beyond the United States to develop her career. This month, she moved from Stanford University in California to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Bern.
This is the future of scientific research not done in the United States. I helped write my first research grant application more than 35 years ago. I was a minor component, but it was funded. It has never been easy to get a grant, but only in the fairly recent past has it become almost impossible. With current cuts it will now be impossible. Or absolutely impossible to count on other than as a lottery, which is the same thing. It has been said that the current Administration has revivified the shade of Trofim Lysenko. A stretch, but research guided by “Administration priorities” does not necessarily turn out well.
Part the Sixth: Some things just should not be done as Winner, winner, lab-made dinner! Team grows nugget-sized chicken chunk:
Researchers have created what they think is the largest chunk of meat grown in the laboratory yet, thanks to a designer ‘circulatory system’ that delivers nutrients and oxygen into the growing tissue.
Shoji Takeuchi, a biohybrid system engineer at the University of Tokyo, and colleagues report growing a single piece of chicken that measures 7 centimetres long, 4 centimetres wide and 2.25 centimetres thick. Weighing in at 11 grams, it is about the size of a chicken nugget. The work was reported today in Trends in Biotechnology1.
The meat hasn’t yet been made with food-grade materials, so it isn’t ready for consumers’ plates and the team hasn’t tasted it. But the researchers are talking to several companies about developing the technology further.
Mark Post, chief science officer for the company Mosa Meat in Maastricht, the Netherlands, who unveiled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger in 2013 (at a cost of $325,000), says the work is “an extraordinary engineering achievement”.
Once again, can implies ought. Yuck! And that’s all I have to say about that.
Part the Seventh: Scientific good news in a dreary time in the form of a breakthrough in stem cell research that has been coming for a long time, Phase I/II trial of iPS-cell-derived dopaminergic cells for Parkinson’s disease. There is still a long way to go, but if there is a neurological syndrome that can be cured with stem cells, Parkinson’s is the prime candidate. The cause is known. Specific cells in the brain stops making dopamine. If they can be replaced with new cells, the disease can be cured.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the loss of dopamine neurons, causing motor symptoms. Initial cell therapies using fetal tissues showed promise but had complications and ethical concerns. Pluripotent stem (PS) cells emerged as a promising alternative for developing safe and effective treatments. In this phase I/II trial at Kyoto University Hospital, seven patients (ages 50–69) received bilateral transplantation of dopaminergic progenitors derived from induced PS (iPS) cells. Primary outcomes focused on safety and adverse events, while secondary outcomes assessed motor symptom changes and dopamine production for 24 months. There were no serious adverse events, with 73 mild to moderate events. Patients’ anti-parkinsonian medication doses were maintained unless therapeutic adjustments were required, resulting in increased dyskinesia. Magnetic resonance imaging showed no graft overgrowth. Among six patients subjected to efficacy evaluation, four showed improvements in the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale part III OFF score, and five showed improvements in the ON scores. The average changes of all six patients were 9.5 (20.4%) and 4.3 points (35.7%) for the OFF and ON scores, respectively. Hoehn–Yahr stages improved in four patients. Fluorine-18-l-dihydroxyphenylalanine (18F-DOPA) influx rate constant (Ki) values in the putamen increased by 44.7%, with higher increases in the high-dose group. Other measures showed minimal changes. This trial (jRCT2090220384) demonstrated that allogeneic iPS-cell-derived dopaminergic progenitors survived, produced dopamine and did not form tumours, therefore suggesting safety and potential clinical benefits for Parkinson’s disease.
These results, on a small sample that is necessary when using human subjects in such a study, are extremely promising. The transplants were safe and effective, if only incrementally. But all biomedical science is incremental. The paper is very technical but succinct. A few technical details:
- iPS: induced pluripotent stem cells. Pluripotent means these stem cells retain the ability to develop into virtually any cell type when they are induced to do so with an effective protocol. This has been one of the biggest obstacles to stem cell therapy over the past 20+ years.
- Allogeneic means the stem cells were derived from another individual and therefore could be rejected as a transplant. This did not happen in this trial. Very promising.
- The stem cells did not become metaplastic (change type) or form tumors, which is another concern in such therapy. Also very promising
Stem cell therapy hype is slowly giving way to results. But one last thing in keeping with the theme of the day. Look at the authors. They are from the Japanese equivalent of Harvard/Yale/Johns Hopkins/UCSF. Expect much more of the same in years to come from other laboratories in Europe, Australia, Canada, and especially China.
Until next time…