Yves here. This article dovetails with part of KLG’s Coffee Break yesterday, where he discussed in some detail the long and arduous process by which bright eyed and bushy tailed youngsters became scientists, and how devastating it is to them personally and to the future of science in the US to have Federal funding severely curtailed. This piece discusses how the various disciplines attempt to hunker down.
By C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the author of Undark’s Selective Pressure column. Originally published at Undark
Scientific institutions are in full scramble. No amount of diplomacy or charity can interpret the modern moment as anything other than an attempt at destroying the foundations of the modern scientific machine. In particular, layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (some of which were reversed, perhaps temporarily, this week) are the ones likely to have the largest immediate impact. We may no longer be able to rely on science-based interventions for infectious disease threats. And should the broader proposed changes from presidential executive orders hold up in court, we scientists should say goodbye and make our peace with the old models. Funding will no longer exist in the amounts that it did. The scientific job force will shrink. We should no longer operate with the assumption that everyone believes us. We need to adapt or die.
What do we do? There is nothing new to say that hasn’t been said during other political calamities: despair only serves our masters, humans have been through worse, the mention of the arc of the moral universe, and other aestheticizing (and often wrong) cliches. And the naive optimism of many scientists — that it just can’t get much worse, because yesterday it was fine — is equally impotent. No one is coming out of the sky to give you your grant money. Your citation portfolio won’t survive this market crash. Your credentials mean nothing. Everything is going to change.
In response, we need to swiftly adopt a harm reduction model, where we use our ingenuity — driven by the same mental muscle that we use in our science — to build a different profession that is still capable of defending and practicing science.
Firstly, the thinning of resources would increase the workload on the scientific workforce that survives. There would be far less administrative support, and because money would be harder to come by, everyone will have to put in more effort to carry out daily tasks. There would be fewer junior scientists to train (or for some, to exploit), especially foreign ones, who are a large and underappreciated portion of that workforce. For example, as a former experimental virologist turned computational biologist, I might have to actually run an experiment with my own hands, rather than relying on one of my often younger and more careful trainees. The direct consequences of this are clear: We will produce less data and make fewer discoveries.
But as bad as this outcome is, the indirect effects could be worse. As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor. One that has been in my and many others’ crosshairs is the relationship between professional science and a peer-review process that is the jury and judge for valuable products. Ask any editor at a journal: Finding reviewers to evaluate manuscripts is akin to pulling teeth. This problem will become a thousand times worse. No one will have time to read your work, rerun your computer scripts, or pore over your methods. There were never great incentives to do so in the first place (service to the great scientific community has always been a minor part of our promotion dossiers), and now it isn’t worth our effort at all, as we all scramble to chase the same shrunken pool of available funding, in the name of reaching professional benchmarks set in a world that no longer exists.
To combat this, the leadership of every scientific institution must immediately do what it should have done decades ago: incentivize service to the science enterprise to a degree commensurate with classical measures of productivity such as publications and grants. What does this mean, and how would it work?
Our newest science celebrities should be those who facilitate the sharing of open data, work for the democratization of information, provide feedback to colleagues, and develop new publication models. As datasets vanish, public repositories such as GenBank can no longer be taken for granted. And if there is less funding for publications, we’ll need innovative measures to ensure that scientific resources are available.
Currently, scientists who do these things live in a world where their efforts come from goodwill, often defying what a scientist is encouraged to do: accumulate attention from powerful peers, find warm bodies to carry out the work, and bring in money. Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects against the participation of those who spend their effort supporting the work of others and innovating on how science is done. If this Titanic sinks, they will be our lifeboat.
Relatedly, scientific results will be under more scrutiny than ever before. And so the longstanding reproducibility crisis will come to the fore, and concerns over it will likely be weaponized as justification for the further subversion of science. In light of this, we should enter a full data-evaluation era in basic science, where we use our statistical talents to fortify results that are already in circulation, so that we can more confidently defend our conclusions. Thankfully, there are models in place to take on this challenge. The systematic review and meta-analysis, popular in the health sciences, must be elevated in stature and become one of the standard products across all of the sciences.
In this era, we’ll need to vigorously defend even the most basic assumptions in our field: the effect sizes of clinical interventions, diagnostic criteria for certain diseases, and predictions for the effect of climate change. If you thought that debating creationists and flat-earthers was bad, I wouldn’t be surprised if even gravity comes up for debate. And while data alone won’t stop this smear campaign, we should be prepared with our most rigorous defenses of everything.
In this new normal, funding is another area that will require reimagination. In the old system, professional advancement was often tied to raising money. Ask a junior biomedical scientist, and they will tell you advice that they’ve been given in search of promotion: have an active federal grant at the time of evaluation. This might have been presumptuous in a system with copious funding, where effort alone was supposed to be enough to secure grants. (In my view, this has never been true.) But in the new world, that advice becomes plainly stupid: There will not be enough to go around. And so the empire model of science — in which a researcher’s eminence is tied to the accumulation of talent who produce on our behalf — will become less lucrative.
The reason we’ve incentivized extractive practice is because it was financially lucrative to the places where we work. (The debate about whether this is right or wrong is for a different forum.) Universities make money on our National Institutes of Health grants, not because we explain how vaccines work to members of a Baptist church or other populations of non-scientists. But these people who pay for our research understandably shrug their shoulders when the government moves to fire a large fraction of the scientific workforce. Scientists must rethink the targets of our scientific expertise and take on the intimidating challenge of bridging the gap between science and society. Changes here need to be made immediately.
Why has the public gutting of science not caused an immediate political backlash? The authors of the culling have correctly recognized that the public has no idea how science works and has no connection to scientists who aren’t on television. Note that the blame game is irrelevant here: I’m not saying that it’s scientists’ fault. We are doing the job we were trained to do, chasing the prizes that our mentors taught us to chase. In our new world, the expert who carefully engages science journalists and translates findings to our lesser-educated relatives will be just as valuable as the one who generates boatloads of data on the backs of a dozen overworked graduate students. This communicative aspect, now embodied in the science communication movement, must become a formal technical frontier of the scientific enterprise, and not patronizingly summarized as “outreach” or “activism.”
We aren’t lying if we complain that some of these activities aren’t what we were trained for. We spent our lives mastering the methods that allow us to uncover the mysteries of the natural world. My only retort is that such pearl-clutching may reveal that some of us weren’t cut out to be scientists in the first place. Because the truest test of scientific wits is agility; the ability to pivot on a dime. With impressive efficiency, we’ve built atomic bombs, cyclotrons, and mRNA vaccines. We’ve sequenced the genomes of thousands of species.
The good news is that what is required to reduce harm does not rely on developing the supply chain for a rare enzyme or securing taxpayer dollars for a new space station. The bad news is that it involves doing something that is just as ambitious: rethinking the very basics of what the job of a scientist is, why we do our jobs, and what it means to do them well.
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I have concerns. From shallow to deep:
> This communicative aspect, now embodied in the science communication movement, must become a formal technical frontier of the scientific enterprise, and not patronizingly summarized as “outreach” or “activism.”
This is like the Democrats who think messaging is the problem, tho the author is clear it’s not the whole solution. There’s a deeper problem:
> Currently, scientists who do these things live in a world where their efforts come from goodwill, often defying what a scientist is encouraged to do: accumulate attention from powerful peers, find warm bodies to carry out the work, and bring in money. Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects against the participation of those who spend their effort supporting the work of others and innovating on how science is done. If this Titanic sinks, they will be our lifeboat.
Turchin: >> A key theoretical insight that we gained studying models of multilevel selection is that competition between groups (including whole societies) promotes cooperation, while competition within groups/societies destroys it.
The author is conflating science with this particular institutional manifestation, which leads to a chicken-coop problem:
>> Poultry breeding practices are an example of artificial group-level selection. The best way to increase the egg productivity of hens is by selecting groups on the basis of their collective egg-laying ability. Selecting the most productive egg-layers within groups favors antisocial behaviors—hens laying their eggs at the expense of other hens
This is not a new problem. Water Cooler 2018:
> How success breeds success in the sciences [Phys.org].
>> Recent PhDs who scored just above the funding threshold later received more than twice as much research money as their counterparts who scored immediately below the threshold. The winners also had a 47 percent greater chance of eventually landing a full professorship. “Even though the differences between individuals were virtually zero, over time a giant gap in success became evident,” De Vaan notes.
David Ehrenfeld, over a decade ago, was advocating plumbing and auto mechanics as a support system for ecologists, who were never top-of-the-heap for funding. A precedent for the citizen-scientists our dear Lambert much admired. But that can’t work for big expensive projects.
And there’s the problem. The author is describing navigating a class system, not a laboratory. And that class system is breaking down. “We aren’t lying if we complain that some of these activities aren’t what we were trained for. We spent our lives mastering the methods that allow us to uncover the mysteries of the natural world.” No, you didn’t, you spent your life mastering navigating the class system. “My only retort is that such pearl-clutching may reveal that some of us weren’t cut out to be scientists in the first place.” I find this frankly offensive, an example of terrible messaging, and a glimpse into the fatal flaw of this piece.
Thank you. The “explaining to Baptist churches” sticks out along with
“With impressive efficiency, we’ve built atomic bombs, cyclotrons, and mRNA vaccines”
At least two of those might not be regarded as unambiguous good things.
But one should say that if this is about a class war then in this particular instance it’s an internecine war since one set of rich people is cutting the funding for another set of at least well off people (the PMC). It’s doubtful those Baptist peons have much to do with it.
Traditionally pure science was produced by people who were already wealthy or had wealthy patrons while governments were more interested in power related discoveries like those atomic bombs. Perhaps things will move back in that direction.
> it’s an internecine war since one set of rich people is cutting the funding for another set of at least well off people (the PMC).
Exactly. Both Janet and I had seen administrator ratios rising in hospitals and academia. I went to look it up, the term of art is ‘administrative bloat’, which n-grams says took off in 1986. But there was also an AEI article from a couple of days ago, focusing on universities. Admin = symbol manipulators = PMC. Stacks of rice bowls swaying like a Jenga towers. All those administrators, standing on the shoulders of adjuncts. See also: ‘Econned’ on CDO’s.
Indeed, all that and more- the mastery of science by government has a huge downside that 18th and 19th century science did not. When science can be bent to government PR needs, it can no longer be considered “science”, but rather an adjunct to propaganda. The CDC and Covid, the armaments industries getting a whopping share of science investment, the channeling of climate investigations, all have had the foot of government on scientists necks. My fear is that we need a Heinlein moment to consider the cooperative and responsibility needs of science, but that needs the eradication of money as the goal as well as the means.
In other words, a change in the culture and principles of the society.
This article focuses on implications for professional researchers; I think that there must be massive macroeconomic consequences as well, in terms of reduced flow of new discoveries (funded at public expense) which can be developed into new products.
Perhaps the people behind this are actually closet radical environmentalists, and this is actually a surreptitious de-growth strategy.
I definitely don’t recall the same wave of protests on campuses in early 2016 when Hilary stole the primaries.
“Scientists” were either apathetic or even happy about the whole thing.
Well, actions have consequences, as people say,,,
I have to say, I saw a disressing decrease in the ability of academics to “think outside their lane” in the 20 years leading up to 2016. The “west” continued to churn out good academic papers, but the people I liaised with and/or taught, showed a worrying lack of ability to exercise critical thinking, particularly when it went into stuff outside their field.
Thus, ability to understand broader socio-economic factors was increasingly absent. How many of them who knew the Cliff Notes of Wealth of Nations knew that Smith (along with a bunch of the original Classical Economists) were heaily in favour of Land Value Taxation; that Smith in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” expressed doubts about specialisation, wondering what it might do to workers’ mental health etc.
I saw the “black and white” thinking that now characterises the echo chambers in social media begin to show itself when teaching way back before 2005. It only ever got worse. It didn’t get challenged because, as you say, the academics were “happy about the whole thing” and it didn’t threaten them. Now Trump is after them. You reap what you sow.
Right now there is basically nobody to have a non-technical conversation with. It is rare, increasingly rate in fact, individuals you might stumble upon with that capability, the rest is pretty much bots.
As a result “intellectual life” on campus basically does not exist.
Presumably in the humanities and political “science” departments they do discuss bigger picture issues, but I don’t get to see that.
Worse, it is now starting to transfer into the technical scientific work. The appetite for doing new things and pushing boundaries has largely evaporated in the most recent generation of students. With obvious implications.
“Why has the public gutting of science not caused an immediate public backlash?”
And the answer from the same essay may be “If you thought that debating creationists and flat-earthers was bad, I wouldn’t be surprised if even gravity comes up for debate.”
It now seems necessary to say a few words about resentment–mine and perhaps the writer of this essay.
A significant part of my being has always radiated with revenge and anger especially when confronted with arrogance and condescension. It leads me to the endorsement of a “tit for tat” reaction–not that healthy, but it happens. Consequently, on an emotional level, I have no sympathy for you not getting funding; in fact, taken you apparent attitude toward your lessors, I kind of like it that you may not get the dough for all your important scientific research.
Assistant Professor Ogbunu, do you have any thoughts about resentment, mine or maybe your own?
I’ll speak as someone who has been profoundly worried about the arrogance of my peers in academia. We would (in my 2001-2009 period funded by the UK MRC) have to have a “member of the public who is directly affected by this stuff”. The “member of the public” was never someone (during ANY of the annual reviews I presented at) who could possibly question what we were doing or why.
Now I’m a carer – having been a PhD supervisor to a student whose purported project was to construct a carer quality of life instrument – I really “get” how angry the populus is. I GET why people like you are angry. I’m angry too. So much of the work on quality of life I did has been repurposed or skewed. Why would the average person accept this?
If you want some unequivocal stuff – look up the scoring of the ICECAP-A quality of life instrument and query why levels 3 and 4 are the same score. We got it OKed by our peers. But I could say a LOT about the construction of the instrument. If I had £££££ to fight lawsuits, which I don’t. So I’ll leave it to you to query the scoring.
5000 years ago, there no “man-made” toxins in this beautiful and perfect world we live on.
Today, on a Sunday in 2025, in New Zealand, there or poisons and toxins everywhere I look. The food, the water, the air, the house…… I honestly feel like a little rat who has wandered into a McMansion. Rat poison, rat traps, rat listening devices, ultrasonic rodent repellants…… omnipresent.
“Science” murdered my darling mother. She was recruited as a 14 year old girl, into ….
…”Radium, encased in capsules and inserted into nostrils at the end of long sticks, ……. experiments …. at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore …”
“Food scientists” spray all of the oats with glyphosate just before harvest to increase yields….”Quaker Oats sued over glyphosate found in its ‘all natural…”
My naive daughters-in-law buys “healthy oat bars” for my precious grandchildren.
“Scientists” today are like a bunch of 9 year old kids, with a bottle of scotch, Moms revolver, varius ammo, a lighter, a hammer and uncle’s mariwanna stash….
and absolutely no adult supervision.
IMO, herd them, two by two, into a rocket ship to Mars, and let them create “Paradise” there. We do not need their “innovations” here….
I always thought Steven King did a great job of talking about this class in the Dark Tower, book 5ish, where he described a group of psychics/mages, called the Breakers (I think), who were employed to do direct harm to the world by the Big Evil of that world. They knew that they were doing harm, but it was pleasurable to do the job, and they were rewarded well, so they kept doing it.
That’s a common misunderstanding.
What is the difference between “man-made” and “natural” toxins?
Sarin gas bad, curare poison good, because… reasons?
The “natural” world is full of toxins, specifically designed to hurt other organisms, so that they don’t eat whatever is producing those toxins. Especially plants, which cannot move and are thus largely defenseless, have evolved to produce a lot of them. Which is why mammals in turn have evolved a wide array of enzymes to deal with those toxins, and the herbivores tend to have a lot more of those enzymes than the carnivores, in which they tend to get lost. This is why chocolate is toxic to dogs while we can eat it — we became omnivores evolving out of largely herbivorous monkeys relatively recently, while the dog lineage has been strictly carnivore for quite a while.
Glyphosate is a totally harmless substance in the grand scheme of things.
Second common misunderstanding — the evil corporations have divorced us from the “natural world” just because they are evil and/or wreckless, and if we could only “go back to nature” it will be paradise on earth. No, it will be a Malthusian bloodbath because “going back to nature” means the carrying capacity of the planet drops by one or two orders of magnitude. That will happen anyway because right now it is artificially maintained based on the extraction of non-renewable resources, which by definition will not last. But that does not change the point that if you want no GMOs and herbicide and pesticide traces in your food, you better start figuring out how to exterminate most of the rest of humanity without triggering civilization collapse and with you surviving. Because GMOs, herbicides and pesticides are the means through which the current population is sustained.