Unexplainable - Is science in danger?

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Funding cuts and research censorship have shaken the foundations of America’s health and science agencies, leaving researchers shocked, confused, and afraid. What does this mean for the future of science? For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, that sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news.

to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's unexplainable. I'm Noah's Hassanfeld. 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 Unexplanable 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 going to 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 grant 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 Mpox or reproductive health. Like one researcher said in an interview with Katie Couric. As a public health worker, as a physician in 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 criticized. 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 going to 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 going to 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 datasets. 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 U.S. I'm not just waving the flag here. The U.S. 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 U.S. or somewhere else? Because I don't think that the amount of research is going to be the same if you take the U.S.

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 U.S. 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 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 where 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 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 to how much of this is going to get walked back.

Some of it already has been walked back. Right. I'm wondering what kind of damage has been done already, 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 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 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 going to be so easy. If this goes on, the damage is going to be tremendous. I mean, if you start talking about getting read of a quarter to half of the National Science Foundation, if you start trying to shake out as many employees as you can 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'm 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 going to 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. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper-class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in

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Their mile high tea with all the little cakes and sandwiches is a showstopper. Go to Virgin Atlantic.com to learn more. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this.

But for me, it's out of 2028. question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington.

His plans for immigration reform and more. 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

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. 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 the 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. 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 a hundred percent 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, you know, 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 did,

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 it and say, 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. Like, 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, and this disease. Very applied. But we are standing on the shoulders of a great deal of basic research, and 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. from. Yeah, I mean, GLP1s like OZemPEC, you know, they come from saliva. We got from Gila monsters. Helam 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 going to 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. If only. Yeah, if only, we thought of that. Why don't you come down and tell me which ones are going to 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, you know, 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. 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. Will that line of defense hold? I am hopeful that it will.

If it doesn't, we're in big, big, big trouble. This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassanfeld. We had editing from Jorge Just and Meredith Hodnott, who runs the show, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from me, production support from Bird Pinkerton, Thomas Liu, and Amanda Llewellyn, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Special thanks to Ethan Link. and as always, thank you to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show.

If you're a scientist or a researcher or just someone who cares about the future of science, we'd love to hear what's happening around you or what you think is happening and how you're feeling with all the chaos going on. If you're up for it, send us a voice memo to Unexplainable at Vox.com, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode. You can also support this show by leaving us a review or a rating wherever you you listen, or you can do us one better and join the Vox membership program today. You can go to Vox.com slash members to sign up.

And if you signed up because of us, send us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.