Goodbye, American Science

Many people don’t realize it, but a hundred years ago America was something of a scientific backwater. Oh, sure, we had the occasional Nobel laureate, but the center of science was in Europe, particularly Germany. Then in the early 1930’s the Nazis decided that “purity” – of political ideas, of blood – was more important than truth, making life uncomfortable at best and deadly at worst for their scientists. So hundreds of them fled, many of them ending up in the U.S. And – voila! – American science came of age and hasn’t looked back.

If we're not careful, scientists are going to pack up & leave the U.S. Credit: Microsoft Designer

Until now. Now, I fear we’re going to suffer what Germany did, a brain drain that will bode well for some other country’s scientific fortunes.

Once of the first chilling announcements from the Trump Administration was that it was freezing NIH grants in order to ensure they were in compliance with Trump’s executive order banning DEI-related efforts. That froze some $1.5b in grant funding.

Piling on, the Administration announced that NIH grants would limit indirect costs to 15%. Sounds reasonable, you might say, but the vast machinery of U.S. biomedical research uses these “indirect” costs to fund the infrastructure that makes the research possible. Numerous state Attorney Generals immediately filed a lawsuit to block the cuts, claiming:

This research funding covers expenses that facilitate critical components of biomedical research, such as lab, faculty, infrastructure and utility costs. Without it, lifesaving and life-extending research, including clinical trials, would be significantly compromised. These cuts would have a devastating impact on universities around the country, many of which are at the forefront of groundbreaking research efforts – while also training future generations of researchers and innovators.

Oh, and on top of all this, as many as 1,500 NIH employees are in line to be laid-off.  

Credit: M. Scott Brauer for The Chronicle of Higher Education

Katie Witkiewitz, a professor at the University of New Mexico, lamented to The New York Times: “The N.I.H. just seems to be frozen. The people on the ground doing the work of the science are going to be the first to go, and that devastation may happen with just a delay of funding.”

Universities are similarly frozen, not sure when or how much money they can expect. The University of Pittsburgh has paused all Ph.D. admission, until it can better understand its funding future. One has to suspect it won’t be the only such program to do so, and we may never know how many would-be Ph.D. students will simply decide a future in U.S. science is too bleak to risk.

The effects of all this will be long lasting. Bita Moghaddam, a behavioral scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, warned The Washington Post: “Things aren’t going to get slowed down for six months — they may get slowed down for years.”

“The discoveries that aren’t made — you can’t point to them, because they will never be made,” Jeremy Berg, a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, told WaPo. “The hard part is you don’t know what you missed until years later, when something doesn’t happen.”

It’s not just NIH and not just biomedical research at risk. The National Science Foundation laid off some 10% of its workforce. "These arbitrary firings and failure of leadership directly impact the agency's ability to evaluate and fund good science," Mary Feeney, a public policy researcher at Arizona State University, said to NPR. "[It] is demoralizing for those who remain at the NSF, and will negatively affect the government's ability to attract talent to public service in the future."

NSF research funding could also be cut by half or more, as well as more staff cuts.  The cuts disproportionately impact young scientists, the future of our science. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears, reports Katie Langin in Science.

Don’t even get me started on RFK Jr. and his advocacy of junk science.  Don’t get me started on how federal agencies are purging datasets in order to meet vague DEI demands either; short-sighted and stupid.. Don’t get me started on climate change denialism, with the Trump Administration doing its best to kill participation by U.S. researchers on the next major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Science is under attack. “Everyone is in a panic right now,” Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, the director of health for St. Louis, told Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. “And when researchers don't know what they’re allowed to do, science is not going to get done.”

“If you believe that innovation is important to economic development, then throwing a wrench in one of the most sophisticated and productive innovation machines in world history is not a good idea,” Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, told Karen Ho in MIT Technology Review. “They’re setting us up for economic decline.”

Ms. Ho predicts:

For starters, the purging of tens of thousands—and perhaps soon hundreds of thousands—of federal workers is removing scientists and technologists from the government and paralyzing the ability of critical agencies to function. Across multiple agencies, science and technology fellowship programs, designed to bring in talented early-career staff with advanced STEM degrees, have shuttered. Many other federal scientists were among the thousands who were terminated as probationary employees, a status they held because of the way scientific roles are often contractually structured.

She believes that talent will flow elsewhere – such as to China, to Canada, and even, ironically, to Germany. According to a report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), over the past decade or so, Chinese universities have made “significant gains” in listing of world universities, driven largely by research productivity. U.S. universities remain among the best in the world, but number in the top 500 has dropped.   

One can only imagine what such a listing will look like in a few years.

Things aren’t frozen everywhere. Ms. Ho points out: “China has made a remarkable ascent to become a global peer in scientific discoveries. By some metrics, it has even surpassed the US; it started accounting for more of the top 1% of most-cited papers globally, often called the Nobel Prize tier, back in 2019 and has continued to improve the quality of the rest of its research.” 

If you’re not worried, read Ms. Hao’s The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled. Read Ms. Wu’s The Erasing of American Science. Read Ms. Langin’s U.S. early-career researchers struggling amid chaos. Then tell me you’re not worried.

Science will go on. Scientists will continue to invent the future. But it doesn’t have to be here, and, if we’re not careful, it won’t be.

Patients are NPCs

I found a new way to think about patients in an opinion piece by Ezra Klein: they’re NPCs. For those of you unfamiliar with gaming, NPCs are those characters in video games that aren’t controlled by live players; they’re part of the game, serving as background for the actions the actual players take.

When it comes to healthcare, we are, alas, just NPCs

Not a very flattering metaphor.

Mr. Klein’s article is neither about healthcare nor gaming, but about politics: The Republican Party’s NPC Problem — and Ours. Conservatives, Mr. Klein explains, accused liberals of being NPCs -- passive, conformists, deferential – whereas they were the live players, willing to take chances and make things happen. He goes on to explain why this is not at all accurate, especially in the Congress, but this paragraph is what really struck me:

It’s a genuine failure of Democrats that they didn’t put more energy into making the government faster and better when they were in charge. How did the Biden administration pass $42 billion for broadband in 2021 and have basically nothing to show for it by November of 2024? How did it get $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers but build only a few hundred chargers by the end of the term?

I.e., Democrats had some good ideas, took action to try to make them happen, but failed in the delivery. Good intentions matter, but are necessary, not sufficient.

Marc J. Dunkelman makes a similar argument in The Atlantic: How Progressives Broke the Government (an adoption of his new book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back). Here are a couple of the relevant passages, aimed at the Progressive movement:

Progressives are so fearful of establishment abuse that reformers tend to prefer to tighten rather than loosen their grip on authority. The movement discounts whatever good the government might do in service of ensuring that it won’t do bad. And that’s driven well-intentioned reformers to insert so many checks into the system that government has been rendered incompetent.

At present, progressives are too inclined to cut public authority off at the knees. And that’s why they so often feel like they can’t win for losing. Their cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism’s political appeal.

America can’t build housing. We can’t deploy high-speed rail. We’re struggling to harness the promise of clean energy. And because government has failed in all these realms—because confidence in public authority has waned through the years—progressives have found it difficult to make a case for themselves.

What does any of this have to do with healthcare, much less NPCs? It’s this: we talk a good game about health care, especially Democrats, but we consistently fail to deliver. Pick your poll: Americans are critical of the healthcare system in general, of the quality of care, and especially its costs.  Americans hate Big Pharma, we hate health insurers, and our trust in doctors and hospitals has plummeted, especially since COVID.

U.S. researchers develop innovative, life-saving treatments, but we often can’t get them to the people who need them most. U.S. produces miraculous prescription drugs, but we pay far more for them than anywhere in the world. Healthcare professionals and institutions urge us to get preventive care, to seek care when needed, and to go to the ER in a crisis, but put us in a queue when we try to do any of those. “Complicated” is perhaps the kindest description one could use for our healthcare system.

Every healthcare organization claims to “put patients first.”  It’s all about the patients. Except, of course, it isn’t. Healthcare has been invaded by private equity, which offers no pretenses about its priorities. If your health care or health insurance is delivered by a publicly traded company, it can say all it wants about patients but its mission is to deliver for its shareholders. Even supposed non-profit healthcare institutions are increasingly acting like for profits, and if you don’t believe that, ask your local hospital how many patients it has sued for nonpayment.

Democrats tout Obamacare as evidence of improving the healthcare system, and it is a great improvement over what it was before, but no one believes it “fixed” anything. Tell that to the residents of the ten states that have still not expanded Medicaid, or to the twenty million who would lose Medicaid coverage under proposed House Medicaid cuts. Tell that to the millions of Americans whose bankruptcy is directly tied to their medical debt.

Who would put up with all this? NPCs, of course.

The “live” players in the healthcare system are the ones making money; patients are the means to that end. We may be the ones suffering, but that suffering makes other parties’ money. The game isn’t about our health; the game is about returns on investment. If you don’t believe that, you probably still believe Facebook is all about connecting the world and Google is all about making the world’s information accessible. We’re the product; we’re in NPCs in their game.

We need a healthcare system that works for patients, one that treats us like individuals with unique challenges, not like nameless NPCs.

Our healthcare system is not sustainable as is. Credit: Harvard Health

Our government – at the state, local, and federal level – is not delivering. Our major institutions are not delivering. And our healthcare system is most definitely not delivering. I have to modify all that; if you are in the 1%, things are pretty good. Otherwise, though, you’re just an NPC in their world.

We need leaders who won’t just talk a good game but play it well. Last year Democrats campaigned as though health care meant abortion access, transgender care, and capping prescription costs (e.g., transferring them to the insurer, and into premiums). Not bad goals, but not getting at root problems either.

Mr. Dunkleman argues:

Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. That should be the progressive movement’s north star.

Similarly, conservative Bret Stevens, in the most recent The Conversation with liberal Gail Collins, asserts: “A better motto for Democrats, I think, is “Effective government,” which is primarily about delivering the services people need or expect and not just about saving money, which seems to be the central criterion of “efficiency.””

That needs to be more than a motto, and not just for Democrats.  Healthcare would be a great place to start.

The World Is a Little Off-Center

I’m not going to write about the NIH cuts, devasting though they will be (to researchers, universities, and all of America). I’m not even going to touch on healthcare, or even technology per se, as I usually do. Instead, I want to write about some really cool Science, emphasis on the capital “S.”

Earth’s inner core, it seems, is not always the same shape.

The inner core was previously considered to be solid. (USC Graphic/Edward Sotelo)

Now, in case you forget your high school geology, we live on the Earth’s surface, which rests on the crust, followed by the mantle (which accounts for 84% of the earth), and then, some three thousand miles down, is the core. Think about that carefully: three thousand miles down. By comparison, Mt. Everest is less than 30,000 feet high. The deepest point in the ocean is 36,000 feet down. The deepest hole we’ve ever bored into the earth is 40,000 feet.  Three thousand miles is a looong way down. So, no, we’re never going to get to the core (despite what movies you might have seen). We may get to Mars or even the stars, but not the core.

And it’s big. It’s about 70% of the size of the moon. As one expert put it, “it’s like a planet within a planet.” It is about a third of the Earth’s mass, since it is primarily made of metals (mostly iron and nickel). It’s incredibly hot, close to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit at its surface, which is about the temperature of the surface of the sun. There’s the inner core, which is basically solid, and the outer core, which is molten. The inner core is only solid, despite the temperature, due to the high pressure it is under.

Now researchers from USC are telling us that the inner core is not quite as solid as we’d thought; it changes shape. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and principal investigator of the study, says: “What we ended up discovering is evidence that the near surface of Earth’s inner core undergoes structural change.”

Scientists studying the core had previously found that the core didn’t spin at the same speed or even in the same direction as the rest of the earth, both of which are mind-blowing in themselves. (It’s that spinning, by the way, that generates the magnetic fields which prevents life on earth from being scorched by radiation.) Pretty cool stuff, but the researchers now state: “Previous research has proposed that the inner core has undergone either rotational or shape changes through time, but not both simultaneously.”

If you’re wondering how we can possibly know anything about the core, researchers analyze seismic waves, using them kind of like a form of radar. In this case, USC researchers analyzed what are called “earthquake pairs” – earthquakes that happen in the same place and at about the same magnitude but at different times. “But as I was analyzing multiple decades’ worth of seismograms, one dataset of seismic waves curiously stood out from the rest,” Professor Vidale said. “Later on, I’d realize I was staring at evidence the inner core is not solid.”

“Basically, the wiggles are different,” Dr. Vidale told The New York Times.

“This is kind of the first time we’ve seen the evidence for this kind of motion,” he told The Washington Post. “The surface of the inner core is moving around in ways we hadn’t detected and still don’t understand very well.”

The hypothesis is that, though it may be solid, the edge of the inner core isn’t solid enough to withstand the gravitation pressures from the outer core and the mantle. “Even though that inner core part is really solid, [this boundary] is really soft,” Guanning Pang, a co-author and geophysicist at Cornell University, explained to WaPo. “Maybe as soft as jelly.”

They call these changes “viscous deformation.” Dr. Vidale told Live Science: "We sort of expect that the motion could be on the order of hundreds of meters, maybe a kilometer or two, and we don't know how broad. It could be hundreds of kilometers across."

Wow.

No everyone is convinced. “The offered interpretation is sound,” Hrvoje Tkalcic, a professor of geophysics at the Australian National University who was not involved with the research, told The New York Times, “although it is not the only possible explanation, as the authors acknowledge.” Dr. Vidale acknowledged that the paper is not the final word: “We’re pretty sure we were right, but this isn’t a bulletproof paper. How sure? I sort of put it at 90 percent.”

Bruce Buffett, a geoscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work, told Live Science: "Maybe everyone's a little bit right."

That’s how science words; theories are only as good as the next set of facts.

"We'll need to keep accumulating the data and keep searching for the inner core behaviors," Xiaodong Song, a geophysicist at Peking University who coauthored important earlier work on the inner core, told Live Science. "I won't be surprised by future surprises about the inner core behaviors as we keep searching." Dr. Tkalcic believes we should build “seismological infrastructure in remote areas of the planet, including the ocean floor” to help accumulate such data.

In case you’re wondering, the results don’t offer any immediate practical benefits.  The researchers think they may help improve our understanding of Earth’s thermal and magnetic fields, but we’re a long way off from being able to do anything with that understanding. Again, that’s how science works. History suggests that this kind of knowledge will end up being useful someday.

I think it’s great. A part of the Earth that is crucial to our existence yet can’t be directly experienced can be indirectly measured, detecting what are relatively minuscule variations. We still don’t fully understand it, but we understand it better today than we did yesterday.

Gotta love scientists!

DEI Is Now a Four Letter Word

I’d love to be writing about something fun. Something that makes us think about things in a new way, or something exciting that will take us into the future. There are lots of such things happening, but there’s too many Orwellian actions happening that I can’t be silent about.

Diversity, we’re told, is actually a pretext for racism – against white people. Equity is foolhardy at best and pernicious at worst. Inclusion only matters if you are the “right” kind of person. “Meritocracy” is the new buzzword; we want only the “best and brightest,” with none of the lowering of standards that we’re being told comes with trying to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to prove their merits.

The Trump Administration has declared war on DEI. It has fired scores of workers whose jobs involve DEI, has asked other workers to inform on people they think may be involved in DEI, and is searching out even workers who attended diversity training (mandated or not). All that would be horrifying enough but it isn’t ending there.

Federal websites are being cleansed of any references to anything that might be construed as DEI. Pages are being edited, or taken down entirely. The NIH has ground to a halt until the appropriate authorities can ensure that no grants are being even to anything that might possibly be related to DEI. The CDC has been forced to pull papers from its researchers that are up for publication for similar review.

The Atlantic reports: “the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content.”

Thousands of pages of data from the CDC and Census Bureau have “disappeared,” and the same from other agencies. Health data is prominent among the missing. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, told Science: ““I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”

Just one example

Elon Musk, who has no official power yet seems to have control over government IT and the data it contains, is shutting down U.S.A.I.D., who provides almost $40b annually in health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty, and other social mission programs. Previously the Administration had shutdown, then reinstated, PEPFAR, a vital international HIV program that has been credited with saving millions of lives.

The President and his team even tried to blame last week’s Washington D.C. plane-helicopter collision on DEI.  That’s just “common sense, ok,” according to President Trump.

As if all that wasn’t enough, The Washington Post reported:

Late Friday, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the agency to stop commemorating cultural celebrations such as Black History Month. The message to staff was headlined: “Identity Months Dead at DoD.”

On Thursday, the FBI directed janitorial staff at Quantico to paint over a multicolored mural that once featured the words “FAIRNESS,” “LEADERSHIP,” “INTEGRITY,” “COMPASSION” and “DIVERSITY.”

I can’t even…

The breadth and depth of the changes caught many off guard, but people are starting to respond. Stat reports that CDC’s advisory board has demanded to be told why information has gone missing from CDC websites, and when it will be restored. “Silence is not an option right now,” said one advisory board member, Daniel Dawes. “I try to use the term unprecedented sparingly, but I believe this is an unprecedented moment. There will be dire consequences if they do not restore this information and it may not come back if we do not speak out.”  

The Guardian reports that a union representing 5,000 NIH researchers filed a legally binding demand to bargain over the sweeping changes. Marjorie Levinstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a union bargaining committee member, told The Guardian: “We cannot do our research effectively, and this is putting into question delaying research on cancer and diabetes, on drug addiction, on heart disease. And this is going to delay medical breakthroughs that the American people deserve.”

Alexander Jordan Lara, a postbaccalaureate fellow at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and also a member of the union’s bargaining committee, added: “We were anticipating changes, and that it would be a new relationship we would have to manage but I don’t think anyone expected this firehose.”

We should have expected it.

Let’s be clear what all this is. “His attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly,” Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive said.

When I heard “meritocracy,” I think of an exchange in the TV adaption of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. When the rich employer criticizes her minority employee about her life choices, the latter responds: “You didn’t make good choices. You had good choices. Options that being rich, and white, and entitled gave you.”

Somehow the meritocracy never see that.

And let’s be clear where this is all going.  As George Orwell’s 1984 said:

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Sadly, we’re only beginning to understand.

As Professor Dawes said, silence is not an option now. Make yourself heard.