Part the First: The Sabotage of American Science. For much of the past forty years I have been in the “business” of writing grant proposals and/or doing research that has been publicly funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This includes work supported by the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the American Heart Association (AHA) and service on review panels for each of these organizations, including a long stint as the chair of a basic biomedical science review panel for AHA. My personal “batting average” often hovered near the Mendoza Line (.200) but people sometimes forget that Mario Mendoza played Major League Baseball for nine seasons, followed by seven seasons in the Mexican League. My attitude was that it was and remains a privilege to be in the position to apply for this research support and that service to science and the public is what a scientist should do.
We have discussed what has happened over the past year and a half to American science during the second Trump Administration. A final, for now, report has been written by Henry Miller for Science-Based Medicine, Sabotaging America’s Future: The Catastrophic Cost of Federal Research Cuts. Dr. Miller did pioneering research that made modern molecular cloning possible. He knows whereof he speaks:
There is a word for what the federal government has done to American science during the past year and a half: sabotage. Not reform. Not streamlining. Not the “realignment of priorities” the White House prefers to call it. Sabotage — the deliberate, systematic destruction of one of the most productive enterprises in the history of human civilization, inflicted at a time when the nation can least afford it, for reasons that range from the ideological to the incoherent.
Let’s start with MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the foundational engines of American technological power, the place where radar was developed during World War II, where strobe photography was perfected, where the modern internet took shape, where Nobel laureates mentor the scientists who will produce the next generation of breakthroughs.
I experienced that education firsthand. As an MIT undergraduate in the 1960s, two of my microbiology professors were Nobel laureates and three physics professors were veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that ended WWII. As a graduate student (at the University of California, San Diego), I was the co-discoverer of two important enzymes: Ribonuclease H, which plays a critical role in DNA replication; and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in influenza virus that enables it to replicate. Decades later, the latter would be the target of anti-flu drugs.
When MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, stepped in front of a camera to address her community in May, her message was not a complaint. It was a warning. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to a year ago. New federal research funding has decreased by more than 20 percent. Even accounting for non-federal sources — the industry partnerships and philanthropic gifts MIT has scrambled to find — total campus research funding is now 10 percent smaller than it was just twelve months ago. “That is a striking loss,” Kornbluth said, “for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world.”
As the saying goes for those of us in scientific flyover country, when MIT – or Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, UCSD, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Penn – catch a cold, the rest of us are trying to survive double pneumonia. Now? Double pneumonia and Long Covid at the same time.
What will be the outcome of this sabotage? Careers stifled in the crib, established scientists losing their research programs that cannot be restarted after serious interruption. This has recently come home to me as I clean out freezer archives of irreplaceable items that formed the foundation of my laboratory’s research. This is a brain drain that cannot be reversed. Who will benefit? China has passed the United States by some measures of research productivity and relevance. Look forward to more of the same. As we have noted here before, science will flourish, just somewhere else. And Americans will eventually stop and wonder what happened. In the meantime:
The United States did not become the world’s scientific superpower by accident. It took deliberate, sustained, bipartisan investment across decades — in universities, in federal laboratories, in graduate education, in the culture of open inquiry. What the second Trump administration has done in under a year and a half is begin to dismantle that inheritance with the gleeful efficiency of an arsonist who mistakes the blaze for proof of his power. The fire is real, and so is the carnage. And the scientists who might have rebuilt what burns are already boarding planes for Beijing, Berlin, London, and Toronto.
What an odd time in this world…but we already knew that.
Part the Second: The Leadership of the American Diabetes Association Loses Its Mind. Just a few days ago several distinguished members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were ejected from their annual meeting in New Orleans for passing out copies of an opinion piece from that had appeared in the journal Diabetes Care, which is published by the ADA:
It didn’t have to be this way.
The condemnations keep coming four days after security officers escorted five diabetes experts out of the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans for handing out copies of an editorial criticizing federal cuts to biomedical research. Expelling the doctors and scientists has shocked people in the field, and the ADA’s communications explaining it have only made matters worse, leaders in diabetes research and practice told STAT.
The organization’s aggressive response to members protesting policies espoused by the Trump administration and Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director who was originally the conference’s keynote speaker before backing out, alarmed longtime ADA members who fear for not just the organization’s integrity, but also for diabetes care and science.
“To me, it was inconceivable,” John Buse, a former ADA president, co-author of the editorial, and editor of ADA’s journal Diabetes Care, where it was published. “Now, it wasn’t inconceivable that somebody from the ADA might have approached and said, ‘This is not cool, please don’t do this,’ but it was shocking to me that they deployed the police.”
ADA issued a series of statements over the next two days that defended its actions, but they only made matters worse, Buse and other long-term ADA members said.
What is particularly interesting about this mishegoss is that it was probably a result of the ADA inviting the current NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya MD-PhD, to speak at the conference. Director Bhattacharya has complained that his freedom of speech was violated during the early days of COVID-19 when more than a few actual scientists called out the Great Barrington Declaration for what it was, a political tract from the American Institute for Economic Research that was wrong on the science of coronaviruses, viral epidemiology, and vaccines. Director Bhattacharya was a no-show at the ADA meeting.
It appears that the leadership of the ADA was not particularly interested in the freedom of its members to speak up on a matter of public importance and have also learned more than they wanted to know about the Streisand Effect:
In the wake of clinicians and researchers being kicked out of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) meeting here, at least two of the organization’s leaders have resigned. President-Elect Jennifer Green, MD, and Scientific Sessions Planning Committee Chair Mark Atkinson, PhD, have both left their positions with ADA, several sources confirmed to MedPage Today. Reports of at least two additional experts abdicating their positions with ADA could not be confirmed as of press time.
Regarding the Streisand Effect:
Kahn pointed out that the events as they unfolded brought his editorial more attention than he ever imagined, with page views shooting up to 76,000 as of Monday afternoon, and a flood of views on social media through various channels.
“Our goal was to hand out 1,000 copies of those editorials, and if we got 200 people to read them, we were lucky,” Kahn told MedPage Today. “By the actions of the ADA, we’ve actually got millions of people to think about it.”
Were the attendees likely to have shouted down Director Bhattacharya had he appeared? Unlikely. Would questions have been pointed if they were allowed? Undoubtedly. In any case, the leadership of ADA has apologized, for what that is worth. Here is the video from the Science article (archived link not available).
What an odd time in this world…but we already knew that.
Part the Third: Technology Versus Community. The Amish are widely misunderstood. They are not reflexively anti-technology, but they are serious about how technology should be adopted in community (Donald Kraybill is highly recommended). We should all be so smart. Dixie Dillon Lane takes up Pope Leo XIV, artificial intelligence, and the Amish in her short essay Magnifica Humanitas, Artificial Intelligence, and Amish Country with sensitivity:
Some of the common Amish decisions against technologies may seem insignificant to us, of course; we would never spend time worrying about whether shirt buttons are morally dangerous. But we have our own tech issues to consider. It does not seem insignificant to worry that smartphones might ruin our enjoyment of face-to-face conversation, for example…
The question is whether we are masters of our technology or vice versa. Examples abound. I have watched more than one scientist flounder in his (always a man in this story) quest to automate his research to make it more efficient, when all he was really doing was adding distance between his mind and his data to no good effect. It is a hard lesson for some that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Earlier today I heard a short disquisition on the legacy of Ted Turner. I met him once in Atlanta, briefly, and he was certainly magnetic, this visionary who founded CNN. The question asked by Chuck Reece of Salvation South was whether we really needed a 24/7 news cycle. This was not even a consideration in 1980 when CNN went on the air. But the 24/7 news cycle has changed our politics and not for the better. Whether it had to be this way is moot. But a news detox should be a regular stop in our weekly schedule. Yeah, I know, preaching to the choir here. But sometimes reminders are useful.
Part the Fourth: Did They Really Mean to Do That? Elizabeth Selvin has a story to tell in We published in Nature Medicine in 2025 for free. In 2026, it cost us $12,850:
In June 2025, I led a study that was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine. The cost to publish this manuscript, which reported the results of a randomized clinical trial, was zero dollars. The paper underwent rigorous peer view and extensive edits and copy editing by the editorial staff. This study was the result of years of work by a large team of staff and investigators at Johns Hopkins and was funded by a combination of philanthropy and grants from the National Institutes of Health (your and my tax dollars).
In 2026, I was part of a group that published in Nature Medicine a different NIH-funded study — also the results of years of hard work supported by your and my tax dollars. To comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that went into effect on July 1, 2025, we paid $12,850 to the publisher. This charge was for open-access fees, now required by the publisher, and was non-negotiable.
…
The well-intentioned NIH policy change was intended to provide free, immediate, public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research. NIH-funded authors must deposit the peer-reviewed (“author-accepted version”) of the manuscript in PubMed Central, a public access repository, to be made available at the time of publication in the journal (i.e., without embargo). Beginning in July 2025, many nonprofit publishers removed their requirement for embargoes on author-accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central, making articles by NIH authors free and immediately available.
However, some for-profit publishers — e.g., Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley, which publish a combined total of over 7,500 journals — require that authors sign over copyright and control of the author-accepted version of their paper to the publisher and have not changed their requirements for an embargo (typically six to 12 months) in PubMed Central.
Before, scientists could publish through the “subscription route” (with a six- to 12-month embargo period) and avoid any open-access fees. Now, to remove the embargo period, NIH-funded scientists must use the publishers’ “open-access route” to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. For the open-access route, these publishers require fees that range from $4,840 (Wiley, Cancer), $9,550 (Elsevier, The Lancet), to $12,850 (Springer Nature, Nature, and Nature Medicine).
I do not know what to think about this, other than it is absurd. But it is not an entirely new thing. One reason I ran afoul of senior colleagues in my first independent faculty position is that my group published our research in a journal published by the American Chemistry Society (ACS) instead of the purported “flagship” journal of the discipline, of which a senior colleague was a long-time Associate Editor. To me it was an easy decision. The ACS journal did not charge anything at the time (I have no idea if that has changed). The flagship journal charged a minimum of $2,500 (~$4,500 in current dollars) and the paper would have been marked as an “advertisement” because page charges were paid. I remember when this notation began, and it always gave me the creeps.
The current rule of thumb is that a graduate student or postdoc in a biomedical research laboratory will require at least $1,200 a month in supplies. It is not too difficult to see where this is going. The number of graduate students will decrease further, in tandem with the collapse of scientific funding and the redirection of research dollars to “advertisements.” But Elsevier et al. will continue to make bank while the sun shines. So I ask again, did NIH really mean to do that? Probably not. Elsevier is probably not on the president’s radar. But they did it, nevertheless.
Part the Fifth: Science Is Still Pretty Cool, Especially in the Hands of Someone Like Richard Feynman. I have often been accused of being less than adventurous when venturing out to eat. The accusation has merit. Do I tend to go back to the same places? Yes. Do I tend to order what I know will be good? Yes. As it turns out, I have been on the right track all along according to Dr. Feynman. I look at Feynman’s equations and have a bad flashback to the derivation of equations in physical chemistry, but I’ll go with his solution to the “Restaurant Problem”:
Feynman’s notes showed that the optimal strategy involves a quality threshold — a minimum score you require before committing — that starts high and drops as your trip runs out.
The team proved that Feynman’s solution was indeed optimal, then extended it to other versions of the problem: do people actually solve the problem this way?
The answer: People don’t follow Feynman’s optimal curve in reality. Instead of the precise mathematical threshold, participants used a much simpler rule. Their quality bar started high and dropped by the same fixed amount each night regardless of how long the trip was or what the restaurant landscape looked like.
The paper in PNAS, Resolving Feynman’s restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies, with this conclusion:
Richard Feynman notoriously had a good instinct for elegant solutions to problems that provided insights into the physical world. His analysis of how one should choose a meal suggests the same instinct guided him toward problems that offer insight into human behavior. The Feynman restaurant problem has the rare attributes of being analytically tractable while capturing a fundamental tension in human decision-making—the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Its simplicity also means that we can definitively identify the strategy people use to solve this problem: adopting thresholds that decrease linearly in the proportion of opportunities that remain, but adjusting these thresholds up and down for different distributions. More than four decades after Feynman sketched some notes in a Thai restaurant, we have resolved the mathematical puzzle he left behind, and revealed how people naturally approach such sequential decision problems…
Yes, people are smarter than we give them credit for. 90% of the optimum is pretty good. And so it does make sense to order that one burger with the Swiss cheese and grilled mushrooms plus the battered fries to go along with a Drafty Kilt or Ode to Mercy, or two. Now I am hungry, at 1:00 in the morning.
Thanks for reading! See you next week, and don’t forget to turn off the news once in a while and do whatever makes you happy. Do not let this odd time in our world get to you, too much.
Scientists should not take it personally – the current regime did not intend to sabotage science – and medicine – in particular. They came in with the intention to sabotage everything. Or so I have concluded, by application of Lawrence Berra’s strategy – “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
I’m in physics rather than the life sciences, so my perspective is different. But when I complain to friends outside of higher education about the uncertain future universities face, I’ve learned not to expect automatic sympathy. In some business circles especially, it seems academics, including scientists, have developed the reputation of being an entitled elite. Describing a 20% cut as catastrophic can easily come across as whining.
I somehow moved back to the town where I graduated from Uni. As a townie I can tell you that you are correct about lack of sympathy. And we’re not even business people. Still not in favor of the research cuts though, and I agree with others it’s not personal, and also fully intentional.
Archive.org seems to have this archived.
As always I appreciate the Friday update and lament the destruction of US scientific research.
Open access is a solution to what shouldn’t be problem – publishers holding published research hostage behind copyright walls. Unfortunately it turns out that the publishers are not giving up their privileged position and will have their cut one way or the other.
I am not sure what to do with publications that insists on science being their servant, rather than the other way around, but maybe their value will shrink like medical frymbial with runctitional features with every AI slop article that gets published until they manage to destroy themselves.
Wasn’t there a time when scientific books were published by academic presses (i.e. Universities), and scientific magazines by learned societies — instead of for-profit publishing houses?
yes, and in the wild west days of the intertubes, one could gain access to all of the scientific journals for free(i have hard drives of the stuff that i can no longer access,lol).
then elsivier came along and bought up everything, put it behind a paywall…then springer, and so on.
that happened, maybe, 20+ years ago.(i am timeless)
and was a major indicator to me that we were entering a new…and purposeful…Dark Age.
this was a big part of me becoming a doomer.(ie: it wasnt just peak resources)
it was also why i became somewhat rabid about book acquisition…building that library over there, in that broken down trailerhouse. 3k+ books, from pulp fiction to source material…its a backup drive for western civilisation.
because ive read things like “A Canticle for Liebowitz”(sp-2), and Margarette Attwood(sp-3), and so on.
and didnt see them as a manual for how to proceed, but a warning for how not to.
For the most part, yes. Perhaps the first person to find extractable “value” in scientific publishing and turn it into a perpetual money-making machine was Robert Maxwell, famously the father of Ghislaine. He established Pergamon Press, which is now part of Elsevier, around 1950. Some of the first and most recondite research I read in the 1970s was published in Pergamon journals and books.
When I first began reading Nature, it was still a MacMillan publication. Now it is a publishing behemoth and part of Springer. The offshoots have lessened its influence. Science is still published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science but has also spawned a family that has diluted its influence. Cell was started by Benjamin Lewin in 1974 (MIT Press) and was a sensation. Now, as it has morphed into a multiple journal thing owned by Elsevier.
The golden age of these journals was probably the early 1980s when every issue of each had the latest on HIV/AIDS. I think waiting for the print version each week or every other week served biomedical science better. But back then scientists and their supervisors could actually read and appreciate the content instead of only count the number of entries in a CV. As the late, great Sydney Brenner put it, there was a time when a scientific paper had to be Neuroxed instead of Xeroxed and placed in a file folder.
i am, and was back then, coming at all this from a very different place than you did.
you did, and maybe still have, institutional access.
my local library had none of that.
and i could never afford it.
that brief, shining moment when it was all just right there,,,,was like an orgasm, really.
i immediately went crazy downloading a whole buncha stuff that i intended to read later…but now cannot, due to incipient luddism(ie: i have no idea how to access those hard drives)
(when one lives on a farm, one gets used to swallowing the occasional flies in ones beer)
and a fwiw, screw worm was found in a goat in gillespie county, texas, just to my south.
i mean, thats where we sell excess sheeps, and where we have them butchered($3/#, last time a year ago), and where i go every first of the month when i get paid.
my lower legs are constantly scraped and scratched.
given my unorthodox sexual past, it would be sorta apropos if i ended because of a screw worm.
amfortas, I’ve often wondered if your place is closer to Grit, Art, or Koockville. Be sure to squash any larva you find.
Re the police ejecting protestors at the American Diabetes Association annual meeting. I have seen several videos of police removing people from town hall meetings for asking questions that those political leaders did not want to answer. All perfectly illegal but they did it anyway. Looks like this idea is spreading to higher echelons of society. So will there be a police presence at all future scientific meetings to provide a chill effect? Want nothing to do with AI but if I did, I would take a well known image and insert two aggressive police moving in on this well known guy-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Speech_(painting)#/media/File:%22Freedom_of_Speech%22_-_NARA_-_513536.jpg
Isn’t it great how it all blew up in their faces though? That gives a glimmer of hope.
In order to be a bit more historically complete, it is important to remember that schools like MIT were also home to such Pentagon linked luminaries such as Carl Robnett Licklider, an early associate and follower of Norbert Wiener.
Licklider initially worked on a key flagship weapon in America’s postwar arsenal–a continent-spanning digital air-defense computer network called SAGE. In the early 1960s, Licklider started working at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) and the agency still exists today as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency). Licklider ran the Command and Control Research Division in APRA.
Licklider also collaborated closely with MIT’s Ithiel de Sola Pool. In 1966, Pool organized a new project largely funded by APRA that was called Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential which became known as Project Camelot during the Vietnam War.
Schools such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford and many of its professors were key players in the creation of what Jacob Siegel has called the Information State, which has evolved into a new political regime–a parallel system of government that has been set up and designed expressly for the purpose of controlling the information environment to shape public opinion.
For all the gory details, see Jacob Siegel “Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control,” (2026) and an earlier work by Yasha Levine “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet” (2018).
Vannevar Bush was the father of the National Science Foundation and set the stage for the ascendance of American science after WWII. He was an MIT man through and through. It was a given that MIT and similar institutions would work hand-in-glove with the Military Industrial Complex to build American hegemony. Every one of the Best and the Brightest who gave us the War in Vietnam described by David Halberstam were from Harvard-Yale-Princeton-Berkeley-Oxford et al. On the other hand, Richard Lewontin (Columbia and Harvard) was a brilliant evolutionary biologist who could be strident, i.e., leftist at all times, but he resigned from the National Academy of Sciences because of the Academy’s work for the Pentagon and the National Security State.
Re Feynman. When I read this a week ago I tried applying it to some weird things a colleague was doing. And it gave me new insights that are probably true. Who would have thought. Mathematics rules!
Thank you, KLG, for the paragraph and links on the Amish and technology.
My husband’s farming family has always had strong relations with their Amish neighbors, and, after their deaths, I inherited my Amish friends from them. One of the things I admire most, and certainly one which distinguishes them from their English neighbors, is their strong community structure.
Among my friends, who are very conservative, the basic structure is their church group. This consists, roughly, of the number of adult people who can fit comfortably into the front room of an Amish house, for their regular Sunday all-day meetings (half church service and half socializing and sharing a meal and endless pie and coffee.). The church group is further defined by distance: ten miles is probably the limit for the Sunday buggy ride.
The Sunday afternoon socializing, men in one room or porch, women in another, is where many problems are discussed, and solutions agreed upon. The group is just the right size for ease of communication and sharing of ideas. And gossip.
The Sunday noon meal is prescribed: beans and bread, with an array of pickled and savory side relishes. A poor family can afford this meal, and a more well-off family is quietly prevented from making a show of their status.
I am fascinated by the tensions between the sense of security, supported by structures of community and solidarity, and how that is reinforced by the suppression of displays of individuality. What does one gain, versus what does one give up.
I had a discussion this week with my friend, L, a single woman who runs a dry goods store. (The local Amish community has a number of small bulk food stores and dry goods stores, usually located in a small building between the house and the barn.). I had mentioned the increasing homeless populations all across the nation. The concept was foreign to L; there are no homeless Amish. No hungry Amish children. And, although almost every Amish family owns an arsenal of hunting rifles and bows, they have a strong prohibition against violence. In word, as well as deed.
I don’t believe that we English can make deliberate choices about the adoptions of new technologies, weighing the pros and cons of AI and announcing: “Nope, we’ll pass on this one, for now. Come back in five years and try again.” We simply do not have the social mechanisms in place to discuss and decide. Yes, we have voting; but we have all seen how this process is corrupted by money and marketing.
Thanks KLG, another informative article.
More just basic science shrinkage:
The impacts of the Ocean Observatories Initiative sensors being shut down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5hndDlkMEc
Yeah, science, what’s it ever done for ya!? /sarc
Yes, indeed. No different from turning up the radio when the drive train in your car starts making an ominous noise. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt and several other countries in East Africa.