Today, Explained - Is science in danger?

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Funding cuts and research censorship have shaken the foundations of America’s health and science agencies, leaving researchers shocked, confused, and afraid. In this episode of Unexplainable, we ask, what does this mean for the future of science? This episode was hosted and produced by Noam Hassenfeld with help from Byrd Pinkerton, Thomas Lu, and Amanda Llewelyn, edited by Jorge Just and Meradith Hoddinott, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineeered by Cristian Ayala.  Broken lab beakers. Image by robuart for Shutterstock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There are a lot of big stories in tech right now, and somehow it feels like every single one of them has to do with Elon Musk. All week on the Vergecast, we've been talking about Doge and what Elon Musk and his merry band of engineers have been doing to the federal government. And we've been talking about open AI. Specifically, everything new with ChatGPT, Elon Musk's attempt to buy it, and what might happen as AI takes over everything, including the government.

All that on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. Hey guys, today Explained is off for Presidents Day, but we do have a very special episode drop from our friends at Unexplainable hosted by Noam Hassenfeld. This episode is about our current American president and his attitude toward science. It's been three weeks since President Trump was inaugurated. And in that time, America's health and science institutions have been thrown into chaos. There's been funding freezes, communications gag orders, censorship of research.

Things are moving really fast and we still don't have a complete picture of exactly what's going on here. But a lot of scientists are concerned about their research and their careers. Normally on Unexplainable, when we talk about why questions are still unanswered, it's because they're particularly hard to solve, even when scientists have all the time and the freedom in the world to work on them. But we're dealing with a situation here where questions might start going unanswered because

of attacks on science itself. It's feeling pretty unprecedented. So this week on the show, I'm gonna do my best to tell you what's been happening and what it might mean for the future of scientific research. If you haven't been able to keep up, here's a quick recap.

On Inauguration Day, Trump issued 26 executive orders, but the ones on gender and DEI really set off alarms at science agencies. I order the end to all of the lawless diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense policies across the government and all across the private sector and the military. In response to those orders,

the National Science Foundation started circulating a list of keywords that could cause grants to be pulled. And the Centers for Disease Control told their scientists to retract and revise research that included terms like gender, pregnant person, LGBT, biologically female, all kinds of things. The day after that executive order, a memo went out to all the health agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the CDC, and it banned all external communication, unless it had been approved by the Trump administration. Next, the government issued a blanket ban on all federal grants. Two judges blocked that grand freeze, but on Monday the 10th, one of them ruled that some of that money still hadn't been released. The order had been ignored. And researchers, like one clinical psychologist we spoke to, they're worried about the future

of their funding. As an early career scientist, I have a large career development grant under review. This grant is the grant I need to be able to keep my job. I don't have any other funding. And if I don't get this grant, my whole career trajectory is shifted. Even after the judge's order, agencies like the NSF specifically said grants would be awarded, quote, in the context of recent executive orders, which has a lot of people thinking about that list of forbidden terms, especially when it comes to research on things like M-Pox or

reproductive health, like one researcher said in an interview with Katie Couric. As a public health worker, as a physician on the front line, what they're doing is they're making it harder for me to be a good doctor. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been telling researchers at the CDC what to study and what not to study. They've withheld research on bird flu and told scientists to do more research on the health effects of wildfires, at the same time that the president has been criticizing California's response to those wildfires.

And then finally, at the end of last week, the NIH announced its own major funding cut. The National Institutes of Health is going to have to cut funding by $4 billion. It's going to affect local researchers who are working on everything from cancer to HIV. Like lots of things these days, that decision was temporarily blocked by a judge. But scientists, doctors, university administrators, they're confused. They don't know what kind of research is permitted. They're not sure how they're allowed to communicate. They have no idea if they're gonna get paid.

It's really a chaotic picture. I mean, it's very hard to tell. I don't think anyone really knows the full picture. That's Derek Lowe. He's been working in pharmaceutical research for over 30 years, and he writes In the Pipeline, which is one of the most influential and longest-running science blogs out there. Derek's got kind of an insider-outsider perspective on all of this.

He's super well-connected to researchers on the inside of the national science agencies. But because his research isn't funded by the NIH or the NSF, he's not financially tied to what happens. He doesn't have government grants that are gonna get canceled here. And as someone who works on the applied side of science, he knows what can happen when basic research gets disrupted. So he's been following the disruptions over the last couple weeks extremely closely. Oh boy. Distressingly closely. So have you talked to people on the inside?

Have you talked to people at the NIH or the NSF and what it's like over there? Yeah. I have been. I've had a number of them communicating with me over several different channels. Morale is as low as it could possibly be. There's just this tremendous amount of uncertainty and distress about what's happening.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in these agencies. Everyone involved in these areas is just fearful of what might come next. Meanwhile, at the NSF, they were told that they are looking to downsize between a quarter and a half of the entire NSF workforce. Wow. And the CDC has had a lot of its public facing databases just taken down. These are vast amounts of public health data that had been accumulated in some cases

over many, many years. Now, some of the pages on the CDC website that went offline last week have since reappeared, such as the tool used to track rates of infectious disease. That disappeared, but it's now back. But some pages have been scrubbed of categories or words. There are a lot of people apparently working right now, like as of today, systematically comparing their archival versions

with the updated data sets. So people are now trying to figure out how extensive these changes are and what else might have been scrubbed. Do you think this might lead scientists and researchers to try to go do their work in other countries? Yes, no doubt about it, yes. And this is just a shame beyond my ability to express because the US, I'm not just waving the flag here,

the US really has been the world leader in so many areas of basic and applied science for so long that you get to think, well, it's just kind of a law of nature, isn't it? It's always been that way, it always will be. It doesn't have to be, we can screw it up. We can screw it up forever. Why do you think it matters whether the research

is coming out of the US or somewhere else? Because I don't think that the amount of research is going to be the same if you take the US out of the equation. I don't think the rest of the world can or will suddenly rev up their own research spending to make up for the gap, the huge, huge gap that would be there if you took the US out of the equation. It would be a loss for humanity. I'm curious if you think there are any inefficiencies in these

agencies. I mean they are a huge bureaucracy. I'm curious if you think there are any inefficiencies in these agencies. I mean, they are a huge bureaucracy. I'm sure there are inefficiencies in there. I'm sure there are things that take longer than they should and could lose an extra layer of review or something like that. There's no doubt. But I think if you just come in and start hacking with a machete, thinking,

well, odds are all the stuff I'm cutting away is just junk. That is going to lead to harm. So I feel positive that there are ways these agencies could run more efficiently. Problem is that a lot of the people, and not just now, a lot of the people come in talking about, we just want to make things more efficient, actually have other goals in mind.

So there's a lot we don't know here, a lot of confusion. We don't know how much of this is gonna get walked back. Some of it already has been walked back. Right. I'm wondering what kind of damage has been done already? Like even if more things get walked back. Yeah, a lot. Because the way these grants are distributed,

you don't always get these things in one big lump sum and go off and work for a few years. A lot of times these things are distributed, you don't always get these things in one big lump sum and go off and work for a few years. A lot of times these things are distributed in portions during the year. There are already people who are expecting to have their grant renewals in the works by now, and it's not. So you had a lot of people doing research

funded by these things who are like, how am I going to order supplies? How am I going to pay my graduate students on stipends or my postdoctoral people? What's going to happen to me? It's not like they're getting paid a hell of a lot of money to start with. They are going to have trouble making rent. So how long can you go on like that before you say, I can't the hell with it. I've got to go find a job somewhere.

I hope I can find a job in industry, but if not, I'm going to find a job at the used car lot. I've got to survive. So you lose a lot of people like that. And getting the band back together after an event like that is not gonna be so easy. If this goes on, the damage is going to be tremendous. I mean, if you start talking about getting rid of a quarter to half of the National Science Foundation,

if you start trying to shake out as many employees as you can out of the NIH, you're going to take the greatest success in publicly funded scientific research in history, and you're just going to completely brutalize it. I am really scared, and my contemporaries are really scared. And no one knows how to handle this. It's an understatement to say this has all been

very hard to take both as an individual scientist early in my career and as a citizen. It's also very hard to know that I'm gonna have to scramble to make sure my graduates can continue making rent and eating. This uncertainty in funding makes an already difficult career even harder. I think a lot of us are going to end up leaving. More than anything else, I'm just really, really sad. The United States was the best place in the world to do science, and that has never felt more threatened in my career than it does right now. Thank you to the researchers who spoke with us about everything that's going on right

now. Coming up in a minute, the ripple effects of a potential war on science. When you sit on your aeroplan points, it's like you're sitting on your next trip, like a sunny getaway sitting on a terrace. But instead, you're sitting on your aeroplan points. So the only place you're sitting is in your car coming back from work. Use your points and go from sipping on your leftover latte to sipping on the local vintage.

So stop sitting on your next trip and start enjoying your Aeroplan points. Hello podcast listeners. I'm Sean Romser. I'm here from the Today Explained show and I've got some news you can use. We're taking Vox Media podcasts on the road and heading back to Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Festival. March 8th through 10th we'll be doing special live episodes of hit shows including our show,

Today Explained. Where should we begin? With Esther Perel. Your show today explained where should we begin with Esther Perrell, pivot a touch more with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, not just football with Cam Hayward, and more presented by Smartsheet. The Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest is open to all South by Southwest badge holders. I'll be the guy in a Mr. T costume. We hope to see you at the Austin Convention Center soon. You can visit voxmedia.com slash S-X-S-W to learn more.

That's voxmedia.com slash S-X-S-W. This week on ProfG Markets, we speak with Alice Han, China economist and director at Greenmantle. We discuss the potential impact of tariffs on China's economy, how Tesla is faring against BYD and how a Trump presidency could shape China's foreign and domestic policies. Trump is the biggest dove in a house full of hawks. Everyone else around him wants to push him towards being more hawkish on China, on trade, on tech, on military.

And I sense that, you know, whether it's Rubio or Hegseth or Woltz, they're going to try to push the agenda of being tougher on China and having more deterrence vis-a-vis Taiwan. You can find that conversation exclusively on the ProfG Markets podcast. So, Derek, if this stuff doesn't get walked back, what do you think the future of scientific research in America could look like? I mean, the NIH does a lot of fundamental research in a number of disease areas. You just have to look at the institutes that are under the NIH umbrella.

You have the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, on and on and on. They do a lot of very important work themselves and they fund a lot of very important work on these things. A lot of fundamental research where we're still trying to figure out the causes. a lot of fundamental research where we're still trying to figure out the causes. And they also do things all the way up to the clinic. They fund some clinical trials of their own to try to answer questions that aren't getting answered. And the thing is, these things take a long time.

Scientific research is really slow. But if you stop it now, you might not even notice for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two, but then you'll start to notice because the progress will slow down. The ideas that get generated for new ways to study or treat these diseases start disappearing. Quietly, unobtrusively, everything gets smaller and poorer.

I wonder if you can give me an example, maybe, just to drive this home for the audience of something that came out of the NIH or the NSF in the last few years that maybe we wouldn't get if the agency was cut by a half or a quarter. Right, for example, some of the fundamental work on the idea of using mRNA vaccines and the various hurdles that had to be overcome

because it wasn't something that worked the first time. In fact, it didn't work for years and years and years. That came out, a good chunk of it, out of NIH-funded research. We have things going on for not only infectious diseases, up to and including HIV, but also things for various kinds of cancer that could be treated this way. And NIH had a big hand in that. I don't know.

Our show talks a lot about unanswered scientific questions, you know, what we don't know. Right. And I feel like a lot of questions might end up unanswered that didn't need to end up that way. And this might be a case where we don't know what kinds of things we're going to end up not knowing. Oh, we don't. That's 100% accurate. I mean, you look at some of the big advances over the past 20 or 30 years, things like CRISPR to edit genomes or mRNA as a therapeutic avenue, and you think, my God, I remember working when we didn't know anything about this. God knows I remember working when we didn't know about it. And I think to myself, people 20, 25, 30 years from now will look back at us

and they'll say, oh, those poor people, they didn't know about X or Y or Z. No wonder they weren't making progress against this disease. But now my fear is people 20 years from now will look back at us and man, I wish we'd been able to learn more, but everything stopped dead. God damn it. Yeah. Elon Musk is playing a big role here through his Doge cost-cutting mission. And I know he's criticized what he sees as the inefficiency of a lot of scientific research. He had this quote where he said something like, most scientific papers are pretty useless. And I guess it seems to me like maybe he is misunderstanding how science works. That if you're going for efficiency, you may end up throwing the

baby out with the bathwater. That is exactly what happens. I mean, he has lived his entire life on the applied end of it. And I should talk because that's where I've lived most of mine too. In industry, we are driving toward the goal of finding a compound to affect this pathway, this protein, this enzyme in this disease. Very applied. But we are standing on the shoulders of a great deal of basic research. Some of that basic research looked pretty weird or obscure or even useless at the start. RNA interference, which is a tremendously useful research tool and is also the basis

of marketed drugs, RNA interference started out when people had trouble explaining the colors of petunia flowers. And I'm sure Elon would have really had a good time making fun of these morons, wasting public money, trying to figure out why the petunia flowers turned out different than they expected them to. But you never know where this stuff is coming from. Yeah, I mean, GLP-1s like Ozempic, out different than they expected them to. But you never know where this stuff is coming from.

Yeah, I mean, GLP-1s like Ozempic, you know, they come from saliva. We got from Gila monsters. Gila monster saliva. Boy, what a stupid idea. These people are out there taking swabs from lizard mouths and studying that. You can make fun of any of these things. William Proxmire used to be the senator from Wisconsin back in the 60s and 70s. He used to do that all the time. He had this thing he called the Golden Fleece Award where he would pick the stupidest sounding research projects and talk about how those

idiot eggheads are wasting your money studying, you know, mosquitoes and, you know, whatever, these tiny little fish that no one cares about. It's an anti-intellectual cheap shot. I mean, if they had stopped that petunia flower experiment, how long would it have taken us to pick up on the mechanisms of RNA interference, et cetera, et cetera? It's really impossible to say. There are a lot of these studies that are never going to turn out

to be much good for anything, but we don't know which ones those are. Yeah, we can't just do the studies that are gonna work. Exactly, and I mean, at one drug company where I was working, they sent out a directive that we should try to concentrate on the studies that we thought were most likely to work. And we all looked at that and started laughing. I said, well, that is such a hell of an idea.

Yeah, if only. Yeah, if only we'd thought of that. Why don't you come down and tell me which ones are gonna work? I had a fit. I got up and more or less yelled at someone from the main management saying, look, I don't care what it says on the org chart.

My real bosses are a bunch of cells growing in dishes and a bunch of rats living in little cages. And they cannot be coached for success like your poster says over there. They do whatever they damn well want and I have to listen to them. I know we're right in the middle of all of this and it could change in two days.

Yeah. What's your sense of alarm when it comes to this whole situation right now? I have a mixture of alarm and hope. The alarm is because, as we've mentioned, nothing like this has ever happened before. We've never had just a frontal sustained assault on the idea of government scientific funding.

And that's just terrifying. And I think that's one of the things it's supposed to be. It is supposed to be terrifying and to leave the people involved confused, demoralized, shocked, upset. Well, it is doing that. But at the same time, there's a lot of pushback happening,

both in the public, in print, and especially in the courts. There are lawsuits flying so hard it looks like it's snowing, asking for injunctive relief, asking for blocks, for stays, for restraining orders. And that's what we're going to find out. That's what we're going to find out. Will that line of defense hold? I am hopeful that it will. If it doesn't, we're in big, big, big trouble. ["The Last Supper"] That was Noam Hassenfeld, who also produced today's episode, thanks to him.

Editing by Jorge Just and Meredith Hodinat, mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala, music from Noam, production support from Bird Pinkerton, Thomas Lu and Amanda Llewellyn, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Thanks for joining us this President's Day. Today Explained will be back in your feeds tomorrow. you