It Could Happen Here - How Trump is Killing Science (And You)

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Mia talks with doctors Arghavan Salles and Kaveh Hoda about how Trump's illegal disruptions of federal funding is putting everything from vaccine development to trans healthcare at risk. Call your Congressperson: https://arghavan.substack.com/p/we-cannot-let-the-trump-administrationTik Tok: arghavansallesmdphdInstagram: arghavansallesmdBluesky: arghavansallesmdTwitter: arghavan_salleshttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-house-of-pod/id1225096382See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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On the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Coolzone Media. Welcome to Iqadhafid here, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host Mia Wong, and one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump took power has been a bunch of funding freezes

to the US federal government grant system. And I think to a lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal. But that is unbelievably catastrophic for like, I would go so far to say is like the survival of the human species for reasons that we'll get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on Earth and to get a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does what these funding freezes do and what the sort of threat particularly to the future of American science is I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this. Argyr von Salles, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and Friend of the show. Yeah, come on. Yeah, definitely. I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show,

because it wasn't in my notes. That was ad-living it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kamihota, who is a gastroenterologist and the host of the podcast, House of Pods, and both of you two, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

I'm pretty sure. We may have done episodes of like, that were like about Iran. Yeah. That were less. This is as Persian as it gets. Two Persian doctors talking about Trump is about as Persian as it gets. And and you're not you're not overselling it

This is a large-scale attack on the health care infrastructure of the United States on a massive level So you're not lying. It is a serious serious issue not just for us, but for the whole world Yeah, and what I mean the place I want to start I think is with because it was happening I think in NSF NIH a bit before this happened. But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this memo last week that was a it was nominally a response to this very weird Trump executive order. That's him being like every single program that has to do with civil rights, which is like so my description is anything that has to do with civil rights at all, like gone. His description of it is like DEI and woke. So like anything that has to do with queer people, anything that has to do with like

racial inequality, and they were supposed to like go through and review every single like government grant program for anything and But don't forget, he also included the gender ideology, which is a meaningless phrase, and the Green New Deal is all part of it too. Yep, yep, yep. You know, and this is part of the raft of executive orders, particularly the anti-trans executive orders. But OPM's response to this, again, awful as personnel management response was to just

freeze literally every single grant program in the country. And this was everything from Pell grants and like work study for college students to like food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite And I don't know why this never made it into the press because I'm apparently the only one who went through and read the list But one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites so like we almost like Yeah, why is that included it was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant That like anyone does like and any like program that gives out grants and they froze all of them It's like another one of them that when I when I said this is like this is a threat to all life on earth

I was not I was not joking here One of the other ones was defunding one of the very important international nuclear nonproliferation organizations. Specifically the one that's there to make sure that random people don't get enriched uranium or obtain nuclear weapons. So we dodged a giant nuke-sized bullet. When most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like well you obviously Can't do this is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding Like the Constitution like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress not the president like stop Yeah, but I would just want to clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just grants specifically, it

was like all federal assistance. Yeah. So one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of does this mean SNAP is gone? Does this mean WIC is gone? What about Head Start? What about Meals on Wheels? I mean, there are tons of federal assistance programs out there and they had only made

an exception for social security and Medicare in the memo but not Medicaid and what happened the next day but the Medicaid portal went down right? Yeah it is it's chaotic too because like all the programs you just named were on the list of like programs that they were putting a freeze on but then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them and right and it And it's still not clear. Right, right. Yeah. We just have a judge, we have, we found one judge with a backbone

in the entire country so far and he said, no, you cannot. Yeah. Yeah, I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like attacking that judge, you know? But it is, I mean, what's so confusing to me is, you know, I get it, at least in some part of their weird internal terrible logic

Transphobic logic I I get why they're doing some of the things they're doing but then some of them Don't even make sense within their own whack Internal logic like when they scrub for example the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like like when they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like, gender terms, transgender terms, things like that, they also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't at least on the surface even fit with their attacks on woke ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess to me what's happening and it's what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess but it is happening. I mean they are doing it, they are pushing it even though

they clearly don't even seem to really know what they're doing or even have a great sense internally of what they're doing. I think that's the danger of this right now is that this is revenge, right? They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred and they have been given control of an apparatus they don't understand at all, right? Like that that's how you get defunding nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding like the Barry Goldwater Memorial Grant thing that gives money to kids for writing essays about Barry Goldwater. They don't understand what the state is and what it does.

And they're just trying to take the whole thing apart and they're trying to sort of rampage their way through it. And it means that we're in this situation now where like for a long time the the line on like trans rights was like, well, you should defend trans rights because they're gonna come for you next. And that's no longer true. What is actually happening here is in order to kill us, they are willing to kill every single... They're willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire you know it's like specifically in order to hurt us right that's the sort of line we're at where you know all of these all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire by people who don't

understand what they're doing and don't care right just out of spite or something for sure out of fight and hate but I want to take a step back and think by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care. Right. Just add a spy or something. For sure add a spy and hate. But I want to just take a step back and think about the fact that all of this is happening because of two versus three executive orders, depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders.

They're not laws in the book. Yeah. Congress did not pass anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and DEIA. For example, those are the terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is or what DEIA is. And then just, I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A, DEIA, and they spell out A as for accessible.

Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and is cool and all of that. But also just like legally it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ADA, which I'm guessing is part of their plan to the extent that there is a plan. But the two key executive orders here are the sex and gender one that's defending quote unquote defending women that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female thereby erasing intersex people completely and that there's really either essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that the only genders that they see are willing to recognize are male and female

thereby erasing trans folks, intersex people, non-binary folks, etc., gender, queer, gender fluid, all of those people. So, for them to go into like the CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is there, eliminate... I'm assuming, I mean, I don't know that this is what's happening, but I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex that's not male or female out of there and then removing gender as a variable because they've said that no grant funding should go to any assessment of gender period.

So that's when you're talking to me about how they're willing to throw everyone under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda about what you're talking about. They're willing to take huge plots of information off of the internet so people can no longer research or position anyone else can no longer access this information just to make sure that there is no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That seems to be like the key thing that they're trying to do with all of this. So they have thrown the entire government into chaos and the lives of millions of people into chaos, all to remove the T in LGBT. Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing,

like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just taken down and destroyed, little parts of it have come back up after the sort of backlash, but what they're doing is staging a digital version of the Nazis burning all of the books at the Institute for Sexual Research. That's explicitly what they're doing is staging a digital version of the Nazis burning all of the books at the Institute for Sexual Research Like that's that's explicitly what they're doing. It's literally the same stuff like it is research on Queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire. Yep

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We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my dog. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please.

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And then me too happen. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was OK. Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how it was going. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class.

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around a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into like how this whole process works? Yeah, so the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living with along with everyone else and what is time,

but the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled. The study sections are meetings where scientists come together. They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions. And then they come together and discuss, they don't discuss all of them, by the way.

They only discuss the ones that have, that seem to have the most merit. And then out of those, they make recommendations for which ones they believe should get funded. So these are a critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people's grants are not getting evaluated, assessed, and recommended for funding. That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're not hiring people or they're having to fire people they already had in or lay off people they already had in their lab. They're not able to continue the important work that they are doing. They may lose their job. Like really truly people can lose their job because they were not able to secure enough funding to support themselves and their labs. So these are really, really important meetings, and those have been canceled for both the

NSF and the NIH for at least the last couple of weeks. And as of yesterday, I saw Dr. Megan Ray said that her, or maybe not her, but that study sections were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today. So there had been some communication around perhaps the freeze of those activities ending on February 1st today that we're recording is February 3rd, and those study sections for today were canceled. On the other hand, NSF, which is obviously a separate organization, has informally, I've heard, decided that they're going to resume from study sections, although

they haven't resumed yet. And if I could add, just to be totally clear with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. For the NIH, for example, the NIH is a big part of the reason we have mRNA vaccines now. They were the ones helping to promote that research for decades before we were able to turn them into vaccines. And it's because of a lot of what they did

that we're able to do that. When we're looking for new breakthroughs, we're looking for something where a patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything? We've tried everything. Isn't there anything that we could at least try or some trial that we could at least try or some trial that we could be involved in?

That's where we find these things. These are the things that we're talking about, these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing. Yeah, and between NIH and National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's having a similar thing to this, because Department of Energy funds all high energy physics to this because Department of Energy funds all like High-energy physics research so all of your sort of like particle accelerator or stuff like that

It's not just sort of like the national labs for example That's they get funding from these places although you know national labs are like you know you get your funding from grants Okay, what else but you know I mean this this is this is all the way down to the level of like I mean, this is all the way down to the level of like, undergrads in college chemistry labs. Like they are getting paid out of these grants from National Science Foundation, from the National Institutes for Health. Like all of these institutions pay out everything.

And it's like, this is the basis of how all science, almost all science, like there's some private sector stuff, but the thing is like the giant private, like Bell Labs, right? Like your old school giant private sector, here's our giant R&D thing. Like that's all kind of gone. So, you know, like the only people who are getting funded by this are like weird startup guys. And it's like, OK, look, look, look, look what they've invented

in the last, like, 15 years. It's like cryptocurrency, NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again Theranos don't forget. Yeah, Theranos the metaverse Juicero like they're doing great. They're doing great. And people will be like, oh they invented AI It's like no national labs were using those AI algorithms like a decade and a half ago It's like yeah the generative AI blah blah blah. Okay, we're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI. Go listen to Ed Dittron's entire show. Yeah, see if we're better off flying.

Like, yeah, go listen to that. I mean, I think the bottom line of what you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers who have been funded by the NSF and the NIH. And I will just say, as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have. Like it also was really critical in the careers of researchers to be able to show that their work is worthy of this kind of funding.

And that's part of why I was saying people's jobs, yes, the people we pay off of our grants, but also people like me, our jobs can be really dependent on whether we get this funding or not. And it's a generational thing too, because the students also need this funding. And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right? Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhDs so they can become scientists, that's all also funded by these grants. And if that stuff goes away, it's not just that you're obliterating this generation of science,

like you're kneecapping the next three generations of scientists, because each one of them down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have. Exactly, yeah. Right, and also who would want to go into science if it's gonna be like this?

Yeah, right. If there's just gonna be like some random person who goes into the White House and goes, nevermind, we're not doing that anymore. Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of wins? A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know, they tend to be risk averse people. I mean, there's a lot of people at the CDC that could try to maybe

Sue for you know For not being able to use the terms that they want to use and study the things they want to study And they might even I don't know maybe they could win I don't you talk to a lawyer about that seems unlikely because they're not private sector But to them they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck, too, some of these people that are in the lower levels, people that aren't making a ton of money, they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain. They're not gonna try and rock the boat

when it comes to these things. It's putting them in a really tenuous position already. They're already worried about their next grant, their next, however they're gonna fund their labs. Yeah, and I just wanna highlight that postdocs, I think, are particularly vulnerable about their next grant or their next, however they're gonna fund their labs. Yeah, and I just wanna highlight that postdocs, I think are particularly vulnerable because they are often like this NSF freeze

actually demonstrated this very well. They aren't like as Poppet said, they're definitely often living paycheck to paycheck. And what the NSF freeze did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck because this was happening at the end of the month. So it was delay could not get their next paycheck because this was happening at the end of the month. So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And in particular, I'm talking about postdoc. Yes, it can affect graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding, like one of

the grants that I have actually, we work directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral training programs that fund postdocs. And to the extent that any of those grants are put on hold, that is threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer, who cannot afford to not get paid. And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too, I really doubt they understand this. But you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the US, right? They're who are either international students, international students who are just coming, you know, coming in from other countries. And those people, if you suddenly don't have a grant, you don't have a job.

And that is really, really bad for your immigration status. Like that, that is enough to get you kicked out of the US. And this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in in sort of labor organizing, right? Or like what one of the threats that universities will make. Usually they do it implicitly. Sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally will be like, okay, if you this postdoc or like you this grad student, like tries to like join this union,

like your legal status in the US is going to be compromised. But that's another sort of risk from this is like those people's ability to stay in the US and not get deported basically. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And then we talk about bringing in, you know, I know there's a lot of internal debate right now between the Republican Party on, you know, bringing in people to work these jobs and bringing in these minds. But this is a clear example of where the United States

has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring in great minds from all over the world to help us work on research and to help us come to work in these labs. I mean, you go to like UCSF and Stanford and you'll see these people working these labs on important stuff. And that's another like, that's something we're going to lose and I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not, you know, something like you say will last generations worth of damage, but it's hard to see how it won't at this point. Yeah, I was just looking up, I 100% agree and to your point about how much of the science

and even other amazing things that are done in the country are done by immigrants. I think it's over just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States. You know, and it's sort of a nationalist thing, right? But like, for 99% of the time for better, like the US has been very, very good at absorbing other country scientists when you know this like we got a you know Okay So like it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the knots like from the actual Nazis but we also expect a bunch of very famous US scientists like we're in the US because they were fleeing the rise of the

Nazis and you know, like we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this. We're like, our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people. Yeah. And I wanted to highlight, I think that's literally all really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to. But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. So one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants, right?

So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall, who knows if when that will get discussed. There are people in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent on or really hoping to get like funding this round. And now they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed. Of course, you never know if you're hoping to get like funding this round and now they they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed. Of course you never know if you're going to get funded but to not even have a chance at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then on the other side

there's people who have been funded and are in the position that I'm in which is not knowing whether I'm going to receive the next payment because the NIH NIH, I have a five-year grant and we are currently in year three. Every year you have to submit a status update on your project and then they determine based on lots of different things including what budget they are given from Congress, how much of the funds that they had originally projected they'll be able to give to you. And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work

that's related to health disparities, health equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now do not know if our work falls under quote unquote DEI or DEIA or gender ideology or all these vague terms that the administration is using. And so we actually don't know whether, like for me, I don't know if I'm going to get my next set of funds in July. So I was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to join my lab.

And I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone knowing that I may lose funds in five months, or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets. And if you play that out over the 300,000 people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that's being done here. Can you tell people what your current grant is?

And, because I think that is pertinent to this conversation. Yes, yes. Yes, you're right. Okay, so my grant is called Ending Sexual Harassment Teaching of Principal Investigators as a Q acronym, ESTOP. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment with the ultimate goal of decreasing the amount

of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research. Oh, they don't want you to do that. Like, oh no. Oh no. Right, because one of the great terrible ironies of this whole thing is that their argument is that they're doing a lot of this to protect women. The sanctity of women or whatever. This is, you know, I'm hopeful that I'm wrong for you.

I hope that this is not the case, but I could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits under woke ideology. And even though it's something clearly that is designed to help not just women, but a lot of women could benefit from this, you know? Yeah. Yeah, and to your point, like everyone is at risk

for experiencing sexual harassment. It's just that the majority of folks who experience it are women or sexual and gender minorities. And so, yeah, I've really obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how they are interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which by the way, is a form of discrimination. Like is that DEI? Is stopping discrimination DEI? Probably. Like who knows? Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this. There was this email that was dispersed

from the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used, that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases, and they included words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, non-binary, they used both just to... Yeah, one with the hyphen and one without the hyphen, yeah. Assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male or biologically female. So anything that terms like that, they're going to scrub. Wait, let me, can I just clarify that? Because actually, it's even worse, I think, than what you just described. Because what they actually said in that email, as I understand it,

is that there's all these researchers who work at the CDC. So they said, if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any scientific or medical journal that has any of these words in it, you must retract that manuscript. So it's even much, much broader than just what's on the CDC's website. It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done, any research I just said that they've done, that they are in the process of publishing, they have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these god-awful words that are actually words that are used routinely in science, but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical would their

manuscript be without these words? I mean, it's terrible. The other thing that blows my mind about this is how incredibly inefficient, maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous it's going to be. Who's going to be doing this? Who's going to be looking over this? To my knowledge, there's only been one political pointy in regards to this, and that's at the CDC. It's Susan Monera, the acting director there at the CDC. It's all Monera is the acting director there at the the CDC and it's all

going to go through that one person. All every study is going to go through that one person. It makes no sense. I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced. It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people, but how are they even enforce this? We're going to find out with your grant, I guess. Yeah, I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions and it's just, you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right? Is that like the the problem for them with medical research about trans people

is that everyone who's doing this, who isn't a like unbelievably rabid anti-trans person from the beginning, you know, looks at everything that they want to do to trans people and goes, this is going to kill unbelievable numbers of us. And I think like part of what they're doing here is they're trying to before any of this stuff would come out, they're trying to stop scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out and that's yeah unbelievably bleak thing to live through I guess. Yeah, I'm so sorry. It sucks.

I mean honestly I wish I could say something more. It's really terrible. I will say this like genuinely because it never happens obviously the best the best thing you could do for trans people is like something that involves the fall of the regime like the second best thing is like hire us because no one does it and we can't no one can get jobs right and and but like like the third minimum thing after like money or like housing is like like check in on the

trans people in your life because nobody actually ever does it and it means a lot and it's not gonna like stop the wrath of the state but like I don't know all people feel less alone this this has been the Mia trans public service announcement it's now over I think that's great advice in other friends of the show Margaret Killjoy and she also you know, when you hire people, you hire trans people, put them front of house, make it visible. And then when you go and you frequent these places,

let them know that's part of why you do it. Like, I like that you guys are doing this. I'm here to support that. I mean, cause we're talking about money, we're talking about people's livelihoods are at stake. And we have to show that these are people that are not only employable, but could benefit your business.

Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either, aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is a scientific, it is inhumane. It will harm people. Yeah, people are gonna die. People is inhumane. It will harm people. Yeah, people are going to die. People probably have already died. If you're trans and you're listening to this fucking don't die, think about how good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's graves in like eight years.

It's going to rule. But it is. It is. I agree. It is. And dad, to Argavan's point, it is dumb on every metric. I can't think of a single metric in that these actions are not hurtful and going to harm us in the long run.

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Problem. My oldest daughter, her first day of ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh dad, all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slum flower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.

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How does the grant process actually work? And what is it? Because, you know, this process is the difference between you like having clean water to drink and like that study that was going to determine if your water is clean or not, not happening. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, first thing I will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities. And there are grants as small as like 1000 or $5,000 and grants

as large as multimillion dollars. And the processes actually are, I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different. Because as you can imagine, for a smaller grant, the amount of work that you have to do to earn that grant, generally, is a little bit less. But I can speak in the most detail to the NIH review process and specifically to these grants that they call R01. These are kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individual researcher often. And the way this works is, first of all, I want folks to understand, it takes a year from the time that you apply until the time that you get money can take up to a full

calendar year. And so you put in an immense amount of effort So I'll use myself as an example. I apply for a grant in October huge amount of effort I don't know how many hours leading up to that grant submission and then I just sit and wait for months months and months before There's even a study section if study section happens. And then after that, it's still a couple more months before I might get information. It depends, of course, there's some variability there. But it's a long, long process is what I'm trying to say. And the way the process starts is often you will send what's called a letter of interest to the

agency that you're applying to. So as you said earlier, it's the National Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own notice of funding opportunities or NOFOs that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time. And then people will send a letter of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own grant program officer and you will send a letter of interest, maybe you get some feedback and then you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I just want to say that it is more work than probably anything else I've ever done except maybe my dissertation. And so it's a huge amount of work.

The R01 includes, for example, a one-page specific aims page, which is you have the entirety of the study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims. And if that doesn't get the reviewers attention and if they don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may be the end. You may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that. And then you have a 12 page, these are single space pages, single space pages, half inch marten, 12 page research strategy. I don't know how many thousands of words that is,

but I'm just telling you 12 single-spaced pages is a lot of text about your research. And it's like one of these puzzles where it has to be exactly right, and you have these figures, and you have to get them exactly the right size and the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything,

so that it all magically fits in these 12 pages. Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problems. And so you may have spent months writing this grant and because you had the wrong font size or the wrong margin, that they can literally choose not to even read it. And then you're then having to wait till either six months later if there's another opportunity or sometimes a full year later before you can try again. Also, it's worth noting, you also have to like do a bunch of science. Like if it was just you must do 12, you must write 12 pages of stuff and format it, it would probably be okay. But like you also

have to do science, like both for it and also while you're doing it. science, like both for it and also while you're doing it. It's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant, we all celebrate it for them because we're all so excited because we know it's not easy. What's funny about that is the Republicans make it seem like all you have to do is put in a couple terms like, you know, non-binary and you automatically get a grant. They have no idea how challenging it is. No, it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say say whatever you're doing is cancer research like that's the

actual thing right like so sometimes you could like defraud the DOD by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflage but like it's not it's even that is like it makes it like 1% more likely that your endless hours of work. Yeah, I wish I could just write woke ideology on these two football pages and then like get a grant. But yeah, to your point, you have to,

part of what's in those 12 pages is what is the work that you've done that builds up to the work that you're proposing to do? And that's the whole section called preliminary studies. And what's in there varies depending on what kind of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested different things on that demonstrate, for example, that you are able to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to

you in this study and that you have the specific methodological skills for whichever type of, say, cellular analysis or whatever it is that you're doing that you have those skills that you have the equipment that you're able to actually carry out that research because part of what they're evaluating is can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work? Last thing they want to do is give you millions of dollars and have you fall flat on your face because you don't have the skills that are needed. So you have these pages, part of those full pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing. And a lot of times to your point, that work may or may not be funded. You may have to, if you're like at an academic institution, you might be using your startup funds, you might be trying to get smaller

foundation grants or something to be able to do that work so that you can prove to the funding agency that you're able to do it. And then in addition to the spell-tasting, there are a bunch of additional documents that are required. Like there's currently, this will probably change, but currently there's like a diversity plan. There is a how are you going to treat participants who are women and minorities? There's like an age document. There's a page about resources and facilities. There's all these additional documents, which again, all have their own specific formatting requirements.

There's a project narrative, which is shorter, and then a project summary, which is longer, I think, or I could have those backwards. But wait, so by all these additional pages, it's not just the specific aims and just the research strategy. It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification.

And like, you could just go on. But I think you start to understand that there are many, many files that go into a single grant application and it represents often months of work for an individual and their collaborators and if you have for example another institution you're collaborating with they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork as well and there's a contract between the two and all this is done just to have a chance at getting funded. Yeah, and you know the the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that like all of this work that you're doing,

you know, you have no idea whether like again all of this, in some cases unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months, could just not happen. Yeah. And also, like, it's worth noting, too, like, you also have to like, when you're figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like, working out whether or not your grant even has a chance of getting approved, like that it like is something that is that is it that is a long term decision that determines like what, like, you know, what colleges you go to, like what institutions you end end up at, all of that kind of stuff. And that thing being, all this stuff being up in the air. And for people who run labs, trying to figure out,

can you, so I don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do. So can you afford to bring in and sponsor another, support another graduate student? Can you afford the support of another postdoc? These are all long-term decisions. These aren't just like, okay, I'm going to hire some for two months until I find out the next thing. It's like you want to commit to people, especially trainees. So it makes it very difficult

for people who run labs to make those decisions to bring people in because we don't want to let people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequences that people will bring in fewer people because that's less risky than bringing in more people and then having to either cut their funding or let them go or whatever later on when you don't get the resources that you need. And I want to just point out that institutions here

have a major role to play and not all institutions and by that I mean higher education institutions and not all of them are equally resourced obviously, but we all know that there are quite a few in this country that have massive endowments. And so what is the plan there and what is the support for the folks at their institutions? And I'm not trying to oversimplify what is in fact a very challenging issue, but it would be nice, it would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time, we remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postdocs, etc. And we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or

withheld, let's just say. It would be nice if some of these very important prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco. Yeah. That's all I ask. Okay, two, I want to highlight two, it's very early yet in this game, but Brown did come out, I think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend,

stating clearly that they remain committed to their values of academic freedom. Right, so that's the way to say it, right? Like we support our staff and employees and students, faculty, doing whatever work they think is important. I think that that was their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the principles of DEI, but who knows?

But that's what they said. But Princeton, Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton. And I forget the exact wording and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to support people from different backgrounds, etc. So that's two that are trying to do something.

Yeah, I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful. Also, I got to put in my word of Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions. I thought they resolved it. I thought they actually gave them the... No, they didn't. They didn't get the pay increase? Yeah, it's not resolved yet. I thought the hot dog was still $ though. So that's important for me Read Jamie Loftus's book raw dog. I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law. Yeah But even the nfl came out today and said that they're not going to end their dei programs any time soon

NFL known for being That is a thing though, right if you if you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, like look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and like who their past heads for the last like decade have been and that will give you an indication of like why it's like that. So yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely. I can tell. Unfortunately, it've become a footballer. Also I kind of owe the NFL Players Association because they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive.

Yeah, it was very sweet. Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over because the funding rates are so low. And so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit later. And again, as I pointed out, it's not like this is a rolling submission process where any day of the week you can submit. I think for most mechanism, again, there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but it's at most twice a year. So like if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback. By the way, sometimes you don't even get feedback because if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you don't even get discussed. So you may not get feedback, but let's say you get feedback, then you try again, and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you try again. and then maybe you try again.

So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded once. And to Kave's point about efficiency, I mean, if you think about it that way, it's extremely inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard to get these grants. And for some of the folks right now who are kind of in limbo waiting for study sections to review them, this might be their third or fourth submission

of something. And they were really hoping this was going to be the chance because at some point, you can't keep pursuing unless you have some other independent income. Like often at some point, you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So you have to think about what breakthrough is being put on hold or will never be identified because of all of this, because someone might have been waiting and maybe they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve this freeze,

and maybe they end up switching their career path into something completely different. And I'll just say, like even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded. That was a very competitive grant. It was not a federal grant, it was a foundation. Very competitive.

And we were delighted. We were, I mean, just thrilled to get funded. And then we could not in the end take the grant. We did not do the work of the grant because he ended up not being able to find an appointment that was gonna work for him in academia. So he went to industry. And so that work never got done.

To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah. I would love for it to be done, but those are the types of consequences that we're talking about when we're looking at what's happening with these funds and the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that funds will be revoked from people.

They really change the course of not just individual lives, but of science. Yeah, and I mean, like the most visual example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in 2019 and couldn't do it because they didn't, their PI didn't have funding for work on a coronavirus thing.

It's like, oh, it wouldn't have been useful if they'd gotten that grant. Like. Yeah. So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up I do I do have one thing that I want to plug which is Something you were talking about earlier Which is putting which is these institutions like coming out and backing their scientists, right? And that's that's a thing that you can do you can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing

And so I it might be over by now, but like literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital. Yeah, Langone. Because they've cut off care to trans youth. They cut off gender affirming care. Yeah. And so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, the entire federal government, right? People running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there,

being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing. And, you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of these places, and you can confront them and you could be like, okay, you're either right here right now, you're going to be a coward, and you're going to go along with this, or you're going to go back your own people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that you were either right here right now You're going to be a coward and you're going to go along with this or you're going to go back your own people Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that and that's something that you could do right now And I just want to add we didn't talk about this earlier But when we talked about the CDC and everything that's been removed one thing that's relevant to that is that there's an office for research On women's health. It's the only

Resource dedicated to women's health in the entire National Institutes of Health We do have a national Institute children's health. We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an awful lot of research on women's health. We love the US government. It gets worse. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which is I would say one of the most prestigious academic organizations that existed, a review of funding for women's health research at the NIH and they put out a report in December. It's pretty scathing if you read it and they shared that from

2013 to 2023 research for women's health was like 8.8 percent of the entire NIH budget. As a reminder women are half of the population and just as a reminder and they called for almost $16 billion of additional funding to go to women's health research in the coming five years and the creation of an Institute for Women's Health. So what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted. It's gone. So their funding and opportunities pages gone, their bios about their staff are gone. Their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last 25 years gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity and mortality gone.

The importance of including women and minorities in clinical trials gone. Their page on health equity gone. You get the picture. So all of that except for just a very bare minimum landing page and a link to the office of, I forget the official office, but that's an office that works on autoimmune diseases. Like everything else is gone. And so I did create a script if anybody wants to call their member of Congress, I have a script for that and the CDC pages that people can use in terms of actions. That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point. And I think that the more we are emphatic in our messaging that none of this is okay, that we demand to have these resources back online,

and that we demand to continue funding research on health disparities for all the different groups affected, I think the better the chances that that actually happens. So stuff out there if anybody wants that. Yeah, well, we'll put links to that in the description. Also, I'm going to put it a personal plug to call your congressperson to yell at them about all of the anti-trans stuff because they're, they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is slipping back and forward between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass a defense bill that like ban chance people from the military and

We're gonna stop things from happening And so this is a thing that can go either way and getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help with this So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, do that do that too when you're caught while you're calling with the CDC multiple things. Mm-hmm different calls even Yeah, you might just want to put them on speed dial and make it, you know, on your drive. If you go into work, maybe every day on the drive, you're just calling, hi, here's the issue of the day, because there is no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating about. Yep, yep, yep. So speaking of things in bios, where can people find you to, for stuff that you want to promote, the way you do, et cetera, et cetera?

I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing, uh, which is most of them are terrible, but I I'm on the talk. If you just put my first name, usually I'll come up, big talk, Instagram, Twitter. I know, I know. And a blue sky. And, uh, I'm not the only one I don't really do is Facebook. You're too cool for that. Oh, I have a sub stack.

That's where the script is. Now I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook. You're too cool for that. Oh, I have a sub stack. That's where the script is. Now, I'm not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook. I mean, listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool kids are on any of these things. You can find me on Blue Sky at kavemd. And more importantly, you can listen to my podcast,

The House of Pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine. We tried to make healthcare more relatable. You know, sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or griffs and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will like it. Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argovan here to musicians like Portugal the Man or a lot of the Cool Zone family

that you all know and love, Prop and Robert and hopefully Mia soon. So find it anywhere you get your podcast, the House of Pod Yeah, and you can find all of the we've talked about like a staggering number of the other shows that we do in this one but yeah, you can you can find our other shows where there are podcasts and God I'm so bad at plugging these things you think it's my living but no can't do it. So you're out of 10 absolute failure. Ah It's my living but no can't do it zero to ten absolute failure. Ah But yeah, thank you to both for coming on and I I hope you get your grant hard to find cuz fuck that like Christ. Oh Thank you. Well, if I if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will I will let you know maybe we can talk about it Yeah, yeah

I will let you know maybe we can talk about it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm down. We should start a podcast. Yeah, this is a big good app to hear. Go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities, your local police department. I make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the

biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives

you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys

navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections.

Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. I'm Erica.

And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms, but not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here.

If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast. Every Wednesday. On the Black Effect Podcast Network. The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast. We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him.

From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.