As someone who has spent most of his working life as a scientific worker and later as an academic scientist, graduate supervisor, teacher, grant reviewer, and administrator, the current devastation being visited upon my colleagues and their institutions is sickening. I have never thought my work was more useful or more important than anyone else’s. But I knew it was for me from the beginning and despite a few bumps in the road, I have been exceedingly fortunate. Still, as so many (at least 90%) of my colleagues have taken up with the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) in their sneering at “working people,” it is difficult to see how things could have turned out differently.
Try as I might, it has been very difficult to pierce their thick PMC bubble of self-esteem. Until now. I remember telling a senior colleague who was most impressed with himself during my first faculty appointment that the “Man” was coming for him, too. Or more likely, those who followed him. I would have had better luck explaining the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology to a particularly dense dog. But as dawn has come up like thunder, the message is getting through. The messenger is not particularly a surprise, and the message has been sobering. For those with fulminate Trump Derangement Syndrome, their world has spun off its axis. For the rest of us, mostly the same thing but with a modicum of understanding.
The reaction of “the people” to the assault on academics has not been a surprise, either. The PMC is good at nothing so much as looking down on the “uncredentialed.” And the people have noticed. Thus, the undisguised glee at the federal government taking a few billion dollars from Harvard. Harvard rejected the demands, but no one there or anywhere has yet seemed able to explain their role as the locus of research and scholarship from philology to astrophysics.
This is disconcerting. It should not be difficult for any academic to explain that the grants and other research support academic institutions receive are a public trust they take very seriously, while using the resources as intended. As I have mentioned before, every dollar I ever spent from a grant was audited in real time. 99% of grantees know the rules and follow them. We teach our graduate students the “elevator pitch,” in which they explain to anyone what they are doing and why it is important – no more than 90 seconds. Few of us have ever really failed with a good faith interlocutor. If the other won’t listen, ignore the flak and keep trying.
And now a Friday afternoon Coffee Break.
Part the First: EPA orders staff to begin canceling research grants. The EPA, which is an obvious target, had to be next:
Following in the footsteps of other federal science agencies under President Donald Trump’s administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week ordered its staff to start canceling grants already awarded to universities and research institutes…Although EPA is not a large funder of R&D compared with other federal agencies, it does provide $35 million to $40 million each year to researchers studying the impacts of pollution and ways to reduce them.
What could go wrong with this? Let us count the ways. I grew up surrounded by salt marshes that at the time were the most productive natural ecosystem in the world in turning sunlight into biomass. In certain places, these marshes were also being destroyed by water pollution. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed during the second Administration of our last liberal President, Richard Nixon. Within a few years the EPA (est. 1970) had forced the reduction of water pollution so well that within a few more years speckled trout had returned to tidal rivers and creeks where they had not been seen in thirty years or more. Several SuperFund sites remain among the marshes as a monument to human stupidity, however. No doubt they have fallen so far down the list as to be forgotten. Along with EPA-supported research:
The STAR (Science to Achieve Results) program, which began in 1995, is EPA’s main source of extramural, competitive research funding. Peer-reviewed, 5-year grants average about $1 million and run up to nearly $2 million. The research spans agency priorities, including air and water quality, climate change impacts, and safer chemicals. More than 100 active grants are subject to immediate cancellation and total $124 million over their duration. It’s not clear whether EPA has notified any recipients of grant cancellations.
EPA declined to confirm it was killing existing grants, telling Science it continues to review awarded grants to check that they are “an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars” and “align with Administration priorities.”
Appropriate use of taxpayer dollars? Administration priorities? Clean air and clean water, undoubtedly. Measuring, mitigating, and adapting to climate change impacts, most certainly. Safer chemicals? Positively, but with safety to be determined by the chemical industry. We do read that RFKJr is banning certain chemical dyes added to ultra-processed food. Good. Now, how about going after Big Food, Mr. Secretary. We’ll wait, for a little while.
Part the Second: Trump team freezes new NSF awards — and could soon axe hundreds of grants. This has also been brewing for a while. The National Science Foundation requires all applicants to include a “Broader Impacts” section in their 15-page proposals. The goal is laudable. Going back to Vannevar Bush’s post-World War II vision for scientific research in the United States, the plan was to fund researchers all across the country in many institutions, small and large, rather than build the infrastructure in only a few places to do this essential work. That grew to include efforts to spread the wealth among recipients who had been largely left out of the process: Since 1980, the US Congress has mandated that as part of its mission, the NSF should broaden the participation of under-represented groups in science.
These broader impacts are not discriminatory in any way, shape, or form. They have been an unqualified success in introducing scientific research across the country to underrepresented groups, not only including the usual “DEI” categories but students at rural institutions and those at institutions without large resources, students who were first-generation college students. The number of scientists who have come out of these efforts, people who would never have had the opportunity to become a scientist because of an accident of birth, is uncountable. I have seen this with my own eyes. My colleagues who have received NSF funding will agree. One question though: When an applicant follows statutory directions to include a “broader impacts” section and is successful, how is it proper to later cancel the grant on nothing more than a whim. Asking for a friend.
Last week I attended an undergraduate research day at a large, well-known research university that has become a powerhouse in basic and applied science over the past fifty years. The presenters were a highly diverse group, each one of them excited to have done the research and even more excited to tell their interlocutors about it. I do wonder, though. What will this research day look like in the future? Or will there even be a Research Day for undergraduates in the future? The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship has been cut by 50% as part of the DOGE Craze. The assumption is that industry will do it while at the same time focusing intently on the next conference call with “analysts.” Not. Nor will medical students, except for the 3% of them at large research universities who intend a career in the laboratory, contrary to what some believe.
Part the Third: American science turns in on itself as the New NIH director defends grant cuts as part of shift to support MAHA vision says that the priority now is “the health of the American people” while focusing “limited resources” directly on chronic diseases. No, this is not how it works. No science of any kind stops at the border, and particular not biomedical research. This part is particularly rich:
Jay Bhattacharya, the healthcare economist (not the Stanford MD who btw never qualified as a physician, instead going straight to the Stanford PhD program in economics) broadly explained how NIH will carry out Kennedy’s controversial plan to quickly uncover the causes of autism. He said the initiative will involve grants to “10 to 20 groups of researchers” that, although on a “rapid timeline,” will go through a “normal review process.” Those researchers will harness a newly created “real-world data initiative” that will compile data from a wide range of sources, including Medicare and Medicaid claims, NIH genetics data, and drug records for individuals, and information on environmental exposures.
No scientist would ever make such a claim and would have told his supervisor, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services who was once an effective environmental lawyer, “Scientific research does not work that way.” In any case, years of work on what is now called autism spectrum disorder has shown there is a genetic predisposition to ASD, which is a very broad spectrum. But there is no single “gene” for ASD. Nor is there one environmental “cause.” The epidemic of autism RFKJr speaks of does not exist. More people are identified as being “on the spectrum” than when RFKJr and I were kids (we are contemporaries) because back in those ugly days children with severe conditions were institutionalized. Others were “difficult” and eventually disappeared from school. It was not a good time. As RFKJr well knows, any family can be affected by a neurodivergent member.
I was listening to the news while building a spreadsheet the other day and heard RFKJr say that when he was a kid he never heard of lupus or juvenile diabetes. He gets a pass on lupus, although it was well known. I suppose I knew of it because my fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor, who was a large presence in my English classes through junior high and high school, died of lupus in 1964 at the age of 39. Off topic, but I think she has been cancelled since. But alas, a good man is still hard to find.
Diabetes, the early-onset autoimmune disease that is now called Type 1 diabetes, was referred to as “juvenile diabetes” in the 1950s and 1960s. The Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (now Breakthrough T1D) was started in 1970 to fund research on Type 1 diabetes. At the same press availability RFKJr referred to diabetes as a “mitochondrial disease.” Jay Bhattacharya was on his right and Marty Makary (formerly of Johns Hopkins and now Commissioner of the FDA…I wonder what Dr. Makary thought? There is a very minor subtype of late onset diabetes caused by a mitochondrial mutation that leads to hearing and vision loss, and by dysregulating insulin-secreting cells causes insulin-deficient diabetes (~Type 1). Mitochondrial diabetes account for about 1% of diabetes diagnoses. It is a very serious disease, but not part of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic that is the direct correlate of the obesity epidemic of the past 50 years, which is certainly caused by our ridiculously bad Big Food diet. This is very old news, covered at length by Marion Nestle, Gary Taubes and others. The solution is obvious.
Part the Third, Note Added in Proof: This just in, No new autism registry, HHS says, walking back NIH director’s claim.
The federal health department is not creating a new registry of Americans with autism, a Department of Health and Human Services official said in a written statement Thursday. Instead, the official said, HHS will launch a $50 million research effort to understand the causes of autism spectrum disorder and improve treatments.
The announcement arrives two days after National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya announced the intent to create such a registry at an all staff meeting, kicking off a firestorm of panic and confusion among autism self-advocates and the broader research community. Much of the fear centered around Bhattacharya’s remarks that the government would pull health data from private sources, such as electronic health records maintained by health care providers, pharmacy data, insurance claims and even wearables like smart watches and fitness trackers.
As the Ol’ Perfesser Casey Stengel asked/exclaimed when managing the first iteration of the New York Mets 63 years ago: Can’t anybody here play this game? No, not really. The Mets finished 40-120, 60.5 games behind the San Francisco Giants, who lost the World Series in seven games to the Yankees. But they left no lasting damage, beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series, and gave us Marvelous Marv Throneberry.
Part the Fourth: With a return to Part III for a moment, “the priority now is the health of the American people,” 25 million deaths: what could happen if the US ends global health funding:
The United States spent roughly US$12 billion on global health in 2024. Without that yearly spending, roughly 25 million people could die in the next 15 years, according to models that have estimated the impact of such cuts on programmes for tuberculosis, HIV, family planning and maternal and child health.
The United States has long been the largest donor for health initiatives in poor countries, accounting for almost one-quarter of all global health assistance from donors. These investments have contributed to consistent public-health gains for more than a decade. HIV deaths, for example, dropped by 51% globally between 2010 and 2023, and deaths owing to tuberculosis dropped by 23% between 2015 and 2023.
But the administration of US President Donald Trump has cut billions of dollars of spending for global health, including dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and freezing foreign-aid contributions — some of which has been temporarily restored.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis and HIV pay no attention to international boundaries. There is no ICE, effective or not, for pathogenic bacteria and viruses. Improvements in the prevention of disease and its management have no geographical boundaries. The way to make America great again is to act like the leader we can and should be. Perhaps the President should go back 30-something years from his apparent idol of tariffs William McKinley to the first Republican President who referred the United States to the “last best hope of earth,” in a much different context, but still…We can afford that a lot more than we can afford our current “all-war-all-the-time” jones.
Part the Fifth: This was bound to happen, as a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain. I must confess, never in my worst nightmare would I have dreamed of this, although if that Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) research fellowship had come through, I would have jumped at the chance and tried to figure out a way to stay (every Southern boy has a streak of Anglophilia in him).
Data from the Nature Careers global science jobs platform show that US scientists submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad between January and March 2025 than during the same period in 2024. At the same time, the number of US-based users browsing jobs abroad increased by 35%.
More than 200 federal grants for research related to HIV and AIDS were abruptly terminated last month. Cuts to grants from the US National Institutes of Health for COVID-19 research were revealed, and the government began a US$400-million reduction in research grants at Columbia University in New York City, because of campus protests supporting Palestinians in the conflict with Israel.
“To see this big drop in views and applications to the US – and the similar rise in those looking to leave – is unprecedented,” says James Richards, who leads the Global Talent Solutions team at Springer Nature, which includes the Nature Careers multidisciplinary science jobs board. As this article went to press, the board hosted 983 live vacancies.
Applications from US scientists seeking career opportunities in neighbouring Canada increased by 41% between January and March 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. By contrast, applications from Canadian researchers for jobs in the United States dropped by 13%.
Chemical engineer Valerie Niemann is one of many looking beyond the United States to develop her career. This month, she moved from Stanford University in California to take up a postdoctoral position at the University of Bern.
This is the future of scientific research not done in the United States. I helped write my first research grant application more than 35 years ago. I was a minor component, but it was funded. It has never been easy to get a grant, but only in the fairly recent past has it become almost impossible. With current cuts it will now be impossible. Or absolutely impossible to count on other than as a lottery, which is the same thing. It has been said that the current Administration has revivified the shade of Trofim Lysenko. A stretch, but research guided by “Administration priorities” does not necessarily turn out well.
Part the Sixth: Some things just should not be done as Winner, winner, lab-made dinner! Team grows nugget-sized chicken chunk:
Researchers have created what they think is the largest chunk of meat grown in the laboratory yet, thanks to a designer ‘circulatory system’ that delivers nutrients and oxygen into the growing tissue.
Shoji Takeuchi, a biohybrid system engineer at the University of Tokyo, and colleagues report growing a single piece of chicken that measures 7 centimetres long, 4 centimetres wide and 2.25 centimetres thick. Weighing in at 11 grams, it is about the size of a chicken nugget. The work was reported today in Trends in Biotechnology1.
The meat hasn’t yet been made with food-grade materials, so it isn’t ready for consumers’ plates and the team hasn’t tasted it. But the researchers are talking to several companies about developing the technology further.
Mark Post, chief science officer for the company Mosa Meat in Maastricht, the Netherlands, who unveiled the world’s first lab-grown hamburger in 2013 (at a cost of $325,000), says the work is “an extraordinary engineering achievement”.
Once again, can implies ought. Yuck! And that’s all I have to say about that.
Part the Seventh: Scientific good news in a dreary time in the form of a breakthrough in stem cell research that has been coming for a long time, Phase I/II trial of iPS-cell-derived dopaminergic cells for Parkinson’s disease. There is still a long way to go, but if there is a neurological syndrome that can be cured with stem cells, Parkinson’s is the prime candidate. The cause is known. Specific cells in the brain stops making dopamine. If they can be replaced with new cells, the disease can be cured.
Parkinson’s disease is caused by the loss of dopamine neurons, causing motor symptoms. Initial cell therapies using fetal tissues showed promise but had complications and ethical concerns. Pluripotent stem (PS) cells emerged as a promising alternative for developing safe and effective treatments. In this phase I/II trial at Kyoto University Hospital, seven patients (ages 50–69) received bilateral transplantation of dopaminergic progenitors derived from induced PS (iPS) cells. Primary outcomes focused on safety and adverse events, while secondary outcomes assessed motor symptom changes and dopamine production for 24 months. There were no serious adverse events, with 73 mild to moderate events. Patients’ anti-parkinsonian medication doses were maintained unless therapeutic adjustments were required, resulting in increased dyskinesia. Magnetic resonance imaging showed no graft overgrowth. Among six patients subjected to efficacy evaluation, four showed improvements in the Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale part III OFF score, and five showed improvements in the ON scores. The average changes of all six patients were 9.5 (20.4%) and 4.3 points (35.7%) for the OFF and ON scores, respectively. Hoehn–Yahr stages improved in four patients. Fluorine-18-l-dihydroxyphenylalanine (18F-DOPA) influx rate constant (Ki) values in the putamen increased by 44.7%, with higher increases in the high-dose group. Other measures showed minimal changes. This trial (jRCT2090220384) demonstrated that allogeneic iPS-cell-derived dopaminergic progenitors survived, produced dopamine and did not form tumours, therefore suggesting safety and potential clinical benefits for Parkinson’s disease.
These results, on a small sample that is necessary when using human subjects in such a study, are extremely promising. The transplants were safe and effective, if only incrementally. But all biomedical science is incremental. The paper is very technical but succinct. A few technical details:
- iPS: induced pluripotent stem cells. Pluripotent means these stem cells retain the ability to develop into virtually any cell type when they are induced to do so with an effective protocol. This has been one of the biggest obstacles to stem cell therapy over the past 20+ years.
- Allogeneic means the stem cells were derived from another individual and therefore could be rejected as a transplant. This did not happen in this trial. Very promising.
- The stem cells did not become metaplastic (change type) or form tumors, which is another concern in such therapy. Also very promising
Stem cell therapy hype is slowly giving way to results. But one last thing in keeping with the theme of the day. Look at the authors. They are from the Japanese equivalent of Harvard/Yale/Johns Hopkins/UCSF. Expect much more of the same in years to come from other laboratories in Europe, Australia, Canada, and especially China.
Until next time…
Re: part the fifth, we just had a promising recruit withdraw her application after receiving her offer letter. She plans to finish her postdoc and return to Europe to apply for a position there. I’m sure she won’t be the only one.
Also, part the fifth: “research guided by “Administration priorities does not necessarily turn out well.”
Can someone list the specifics of the Administration priorities and relate them to specific defunding that has been done already and the future defunding to come? Thanks in advance.
Thanks and thanks for the intro. However “MAHA” may not be entirely wrong in saying that we spend huge effort and money on heroic medicine while many die from chronic diseases that have known and preventable causes. And it’s also true that the face of government sponsored medicine the last few years has been Anthony Fauci who, according to IMDoc at least, is no description of a hero.
Also the experience of science for many people would be our current healthcare system which has quite a few issues.
Still one can’t defend Trump’s lazy and mostly mindless version of reform which is really about cutting taxes for people like him when they should be greatly raised. The PMC have been the beneficiaries (salary wise) from a system that is all about money and now the ever more extreme nature of the beast is coming back to wreck everything seemingly. Seems grim.
Yes indeed, very well known causes, of which Trump administration is more than willing to underline now:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-trump-health-adviser-blames-231816878.html
How much of medical research is funded by venture capital? I read that venture capital is drying up in general. Is it realistic to expect private investors or even corporations to replace government grants for scientific research? It would certainly curtail the types of research funded.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to assign work. Here is Google’s AI (sorry) answer:
While precise percentage is difficult to pinpoint, venture capital plays a significant role in funding medical research, particularly in the biopharmaceutical and digital health sectors. Venture capital investments in these areas have seen a rise in recent years. For instance, in Europe, healthcare and biotech accounted for 32% of funding in Q1 2025. In a study focusing on biopharmaceutical R&D, approximately 75% of venture capital investments were allocated to clinical trials studying small-molecule drugs. Additionally, a study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that private sector funding, including venture capital, accounted for 95.5% of funding for 41 investigational therapies.
Can you ask your AI what cuts have been made or are anticipated to the bioweapons portion of the biopharmaceutical grants and research? Asking for a friend.
Basic medical science: none!
Venture capital takes market risk and execution risk. In the lifesciences, the FDA approval process means that it also has to taken a significant dose of clinical risk, funding multiple years of studies to understand if a drug candidate is actually viable as an approved drug (not too many deaths, side effects, enough patient benefit etc).
However, VC money wants to maximise the return on those study dollars so it focuses on early clinical studies, those that can demonstrate a clinical signal sufficient for Big Pharma to licence the programme and fund the late-stage registration studies.
The drug development pathway is therefore a relay race: grant funding and a much-reduced Big Pharma activity covers basic medical science and venture capital funds early-stage clinical trials, looking to demonstrate enough clinical signal that Big Pharma will licence the compound and fund the late stage studies.
There is a missing step in that description, of “translational medicine’: basically taking a promising drug target or drug candidate discovered in grant-funded basic science and getting something going in animal studies and ideally first in human studies.
This area is a mess in funding terms: there is some funding for translational medicine from basic science grant bodies, who recognise that collecting interesting target like stamps is not enough, and some funding from clinical grant bodies, and some from venture capital but usually only very brave, focused funds (often investing money for diseases specific foundations) or from business angels.
Mr Market is not reliable in funding the crucial translational medicine steps necessary to get a trialable drug candidate so it is definitely not going to fund “this is interesting…” open questions in basic medical research.
I tried to answer this for you but Skynet ate my homework. Sorry.
The short answer is no, it won’t.
Venture capital is only interested in putting well characterised candidate drugs through early in man studies and then flipping them to Big Pharma for late-stage registration studies, to get approval. Grant funding churns out basic research (” this is interesting…”), some of which highlights potential drugs / druggable targets.
The missing piece between basic science and early in man studies is called translation medicine. Is my target really druggable? What is toxicity, side effects, treatment effect size etc. Right now it depends on grants (fewer in number than basic science) and very early-stage investors like business angels because the risks of failure are so high. It tends to undertaken by university spinouts, often while still inside the lab.
It is the most fragile stage of the healthcare life cycle because you are trying to midwife a commercial business from an academic project and so you need both academic and commercial people to cooperate and somehow you need to fund them….
In the introduction, the writer states “It should not be difficult for any academic to explain that the grants and other research support academic institutions receive are a public trust they take very seriously, while using the resources as intended.”
One fundamental disagreement I have with that sentence is that academics and scientists have not taken public trust seriously. In fact, they have gone further and taken advantage – for their own profit – of public trust. It irks me when I remember how scientists sat on their hands (and wallets) when Covid was raging the country and now they are asking for our trust again. I have a masters and hubby a PHD, though we are not “scientists”, we can read scientific journals or specific papers and understand them. When I meet someone who says “I work at the CDC (for example)” I quickly loose respect for them. Where were they when the MSM and the Fauci (Fauxci) promoters were ignoring, diminishing, firing and cancelling scientists who doubted or debated their “scientific findings”. Why didn’t they speak out? Why didn’t they resign en masse? Where were they?
It will take more than a generation of scientists to exhibiting honesty and eventually (hopefully) re-earn the pubic trust. Perhaps someone born yesterday will grow up and trust American scientists, but not me. I wasn’t born yesterday.
Not every scientist is the same.
There definitely is some group think in academia, particularly when people go outside their topic of expertise. As in, probably the vast, vast majority that study physics, history, etc bought into established dogma during COVID. I don’t know why that is. In many cases I just don’t bother arguing with people — I pick my battles.
There is group think in every industry, even nonprofit ones. This is because they all sit on the same zoom meetings, go to the same conferences, read all the same papers, sit on the same webinars viewing the same PowerPoints. It doesn’t matter if it’s your local arts group or the aerospace industry – it turns into a hive mind so that people can line up their next jobs, burnish their resumes, show off to peers.
Challenging the party line gets you labeled a troublemaker because you’re raining on everyone’s parade and threatening comfortable incomes/business models. Because the echo chamber exists everywhere you go, it can be assumed to be human nature. Your management might encourage staff to “think outside the box”, but they don’t mean think outside the box of our business model and profit margin. There is science and then there is the business of science. Hard to separate the two because we all like keeping a roof over our heads.
Except, “Science is Real” and it’s not supposed to be about feeding your family. It’s just devolved into being more and more like every other money-grubbing profession.
> academics and scientists have not taken public trust seriously. In fact, they have gone further and taken advantage – for their own profit – of public trust.
Yeah, like Battacharya. An economist, not an epidemiologist or even a doctor, who parlayed his eugenicist business-friendly attention grab into a plum government appointment.
Sheesh.
Re Part the 4th and that $12 billion that the US spends on global health. I suggest that three American women, Mackenzie Scott, Melinda Gates and Laurene Jobs together could cover half of that each year if they so chose, $6 billion total.
Current net worth of each: $25 billion, $30 billion, $14 billion.
This spending is truly the definition of “effective altruism”.
Or, should the low and middle-income countries successfully decouple from the Dollar (read: IMF and the World Bank) they could save that sum in the annual interests (~100 billion) of their debts alone.
Global annual health expenditure in about $10 trillion, so that $12 billion is a rounding error, really. And also proof that a small amount can make a big difference if it’s used smartly.
I do wonder what’s going to come out of those autism studies. I’m not sure if it’s possible to run a clean experiment, and if it were I’m not sure one could do it with a DOGE discount.
The rate of autism among US kids is 1 in 31, so if your sample size is n=100,000 you expect 3,000 autistic kids. The statistical (Poisson) noise on 3000 is about 55, and a 10% effect is about 300, so an N=100,000 experiment would be quite powerful. But good luck getting that adequately funded.
You find what you are looking for. If I tell you to look for everything blue in the room, you will identify everything blue. But then if I tell you to close your eyes and tell me all the brown things in the room, you’ll falter because you weren’t looking for brown things.
if you want to examine every non-functional kid, you’ll find a fair bit of autism, it just got labeled something else previously. There’s no question that our food supply is crap, but eliminating testing and environmental regulations is probably not going to fix it.
It’s about more than the food system. It’s about liability-free pharma cartel pushing more and more vaccines on younger and younger children. And it’s more than just autism this entirely preventable evil is causing. Perhaps Bobby Kennedy can get something useful done but this will take organized effort to overcome.
I read this from yesterday’s links on autism https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/answering-questions-autism-robert-kennedy-jr , it seems to contradict strongly your claim that “The epidemic of autism RFKJr speaks of does not exist.”
I’m not an academic or a scientist, so its difficult to parse contradictions like these.
I taught in public schools for over 20 years. Autism is up.
As KLG says, I did in fact have an institutionalized cousin, born circa 1960 or so.
But my experience with my peer cohort, born about the same time, their children and grandchildren, and two of the journal articles linked in the tablet piece do show a marked increase factoring for diagnostic and institutional changes.
There are plausible theories from gut biome changes to the germ cell theory the tablet author is pursuing. With estrogen mimicking compounds, god knows what range of new chemicals and micro plastics, it’s not hard to imagine dozens of possible causal paths.
The link for Trofim Lysenko goes to the same page as the Japanese authours page.
That mention of Trofim Lysenko was a nasty blast from the past. He caused all sorts of damage to Russian science over many decades. But he used political influence to cement his commanding position leaving actual scientists unable to challenge him. Jay Bhattacharya may be taking notes here. I have said that American science is in danger of becoming a backwater and the mention of those researches heading overseas is no surprise. You can’t expect them to spend the most productive years of their scientific careers spinning their wheels while they wait for political change to come again. But actually there is one way that it could get worse. You may see a nationalist movement like Germany experienced back in the 30s where they will start talking about ‘American mathematics’ and ‘American biology’ and ‘American physics’. It could very well happen unfortunately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Travel day. Just noticed this. Thank you, Rev, for the comment and the link, which is what I intended.
This seems very relevant.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/25/the-untold-story-of-cdcs-disastrous-war-on-opioids/
And if we are allowed to suggest links that used to go in the Water Cooler (Coffee Break at the Water Cooler?) here’s an interesting discussion on why robot hands lack the dexterity of the real thing.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/robot-dexterity-still-seems-hard
Interesting overview of one aspect of the state of the art in robotics.
Thank goodness Jack Williamson’s all-too-capable, all-too-benevolent humanoids are still a long ways off.
https://www.qwant.com/?q=the+humanoids+by+jack+williamson
I know the idea of lab grown meat turns some people off, but if you consider the cheapest, most quickly grown and most artificially boosted “real” chicken available to consumers, I wonder how much practical difference there is between the two.
When I occasionally have a cheap takeaway chicken curry here in the UK, the pieces of chicken therein are often in taste and texture no more than chunks of indeterminate protein.
Lab grown chicken chunks in comparison would at least avoid a lot of animal suffering and reduce the risk of food borne pathogens.
The problem is the energy consumption required to produce lab-grown meat. Anything that adds to our energy consumption adds to the polycrisis either through the burning of fossil fuels or the extraction necessary to build solar or wind power generation.
From a UC Davis study:
So according to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/), at least a dozen Americans boasted a net worth of $100 billion or more in 2024, so any one of them could have (still could, actually) fund the entire US outlay of $12 billion for global health without breaking a sweat. This is obscene on so many fronts that I won’t bother to enumerate them.
KLG: Many thanks for this multilayered (or as we now write, “nuanced”) observation: “I was listening to the news while building a spreadsheet the other day and heard RFKJr say that when he was a kid he never heard of lupus or juvenile diabetes. He gets a pass on lupus, although it was well known. I suppose I knew of it because my fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor, who was a large presence in my English classes through junior high and high school, died of lupus in 1964 at the age of 39. Off topic, but I think she has been cancelled since. But alas, a good man is still hard to find.”
We are roughly the same age, so I was reading Flannery O’Connor in Catholic high school in the Great Lakes States and then at the private “we’re-Ivy-adjacent” uni in the same region. From my perspective, O’Connor was a Catholic in a region, the U.S. Southeast, where there were hardly any Catholics and where anti-Catholic prejudice has been strong. Which may explain her theological twists — into a kind of literary Hieronymus Bosch with peacocks.
So don’t call me Hulga.
RFKJr is being coy: I recall juvenile diabetics — a few guys at my high school who had to be especially careful.
Lupus. I won’t give RFKJr a pass: By the time of O’Connor’s death, the immune system had at least been “discovered.” A hundred years earlier, in 1864, the immune system existed only as “resistance” to certain diseases. In a sense, the trial and error of vaccines and widespread vaccination brought the outline of the immune system forward. RFKJr knows this.
Some years back, I was doing research on some unorthodox but very Catholic mystics, who engaged in otherworldly battles in the borderlands of northeast Italy. Health was a central concern, and as I read documentation from the 1500s and 1600s, I was reminded that the immune system was then an unknown. People took to their beds. People became catatonic. People “lost control” of a limb. Now, it all would like symptoms of an auto-immune disease. Back then, it was a malign touch of the spirits.
I think some basic information is in order and an observation on my part.
Lupus – comes in multiple varieties – there is Systemic Lupus Erythematosis, Discoid Lupus, and then several other subvarieties. They are all diagnosed fairly easily with a test that is called ANA – or anti-nuclear antibody. It must be noted this is NOT a +/- test – the clinician must be trained to interpret it – and the results can change over time in idividual patients. This has been true of this test since the very beginning. The ANA test today is a bit different than it was decades ago as far as methodology – but the sensitivity and specificity are largely the same. The ANA test was first introduced and described in 1948. This discovery is a remarkable story that I have taught for decades because of the cleverness of the researchers at the Mayo Clinic who did the work on the LE cells in the bone marrow of lupus patients. The testing procedure became widely available in just a few years. By 1952-3 or so, it was widely being used all over the USA. As a youngster, I heard all kinds of stories from medical veterans of the era that they were using this test in massive incidence in the 1950s. All the patient needed was a fever – and an ANA was ordered. The test is a bit labor intensive in the lab – so the stories of the trouble this massive ordering caused are rather legion. This led to very specific algorithms on ordering the test. There are all kinds of reports of SLE and discoid lupus and lupus of the newborn in the medical literature of the 1950s using this test and many others to diagnose patients. So by the mid-1950s this was a very well-known clinical syndrome and diagnostic testing was available. Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 and RFK Jr was born in 1954. Both of these people would have therefore lived in a time where this diagnosis was being made and observations could be made.
The issue is that I too have seen just a huge explosion of lupus issues since not only my youth, but also my young doctor days up until today. It is absolutely unmistakeable. I have no idea why – I have theories – but individual doctors cannot make these kinds of studies.
The same can be said for Type I DM. It is just exploding in incidence over the past 10-20 years – and especially the past 5. As one index – in a similar size patient panel that I had in 1995-1999 – I had the following numbers of admissions for DKA and ICU care – often the initial sign of Type I DM in young people – 0-2-2-3-0. The numbers over the past 5 years – 2019-2024 – 2-6-9-11-10. I have almost exactly the same amount of young people – if not more – than I did back then. So.something is up. Not sure what if any are the underlying cause or causes. Interestingly I live and work in a place with much better overall health and fitness than I did back then. I think it is very likely multifactorial. I can see it in my own life. When I was a kid in elementary school decades ago – there was 1 kid who had Type I DM. The teachers made a big deal about it – how we all had the responsibility to keep an eye on that person, etc. My kids today – in a much smaller school – there are 7 kids with type I DM.
Thank you, Doc. The increase in T1DM is much talked about in my tutorial groups of preclinical medical students. Other tutors seem to just let it go.
If RFKJr has said he had never heard of T2DM he would actually have been the “smart person” he projects. In my understanding the differences between T1DM and T2DM had to wait on Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson invented the radioimmunoassay that allowed insulin levels to be measured; Berson did not share in the Nobel because he had died. T1DM: Insulin insufficiency, T2DM: Insulin resistance. The increase in autoimmune diabetes is a scary puzzle. The epidemic of T2DM, including among children, is no puzzle at all and can be stopped in its tracks by reversing the epidemic of obesity, which can be called diabesity. This is old news, but the solution is too simple to warrant any real attention.
Thank you, DJG. RFKJr clearly makes it up as he goes along based on his severe ‘essence of disunderstanding’, in the neologism of a friend. The writers at Science-Based Medicine view him as an ‘extinction level event‘ for NIH and therefore basic and clinical biomedical research in the US. Along with Jay Bhattacharya, very possible. The current plan for the National Science Foundation seems to be a 50% cut in that budget, which would be an extinction-level event for non-biomedical science in the US. The NSF Director has resigned.
If you can find it and have the time, the collective biography by Paul Elie – The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) – of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, each a Catholic with a large presence in the 20th century, is quite good in my view. Lore is that Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks lived out their life after her death in Memorial Park in Athens, GA. In which doubtful case, I saw them often in the 1970s. “Literary Hieronymus Bosch with peacocks” is perfect. I don’t get tired of reading her. Last time I was in Milledgeville, Georgia, I stopped by to visit her house, which is pretty much as she left it. My favorite quote from Ms. O’Connor: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
It seems there has not only been an huge explosion of lupus issues but also a huge explosion of sneering issues by the PMC over the past 75 years.
If the PMC bubble of self-esteem is not deflated, by perhaps painful self-reflection, the legitimacy crisis it faces will only accelerate.
Thank you for the reference to Richard Nixon as “our last liberal president.” I couldn’t agree more. It might sound heretical at first until we recall that Nixon established the EPA, and signed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, he established OSHA, he ended the draft, he initiated detente with the Soviet Union, and negotiated the first SALT accord, he recognized China, he saw the the right to vote lowered to the age of eighteen, and he pulled US troops out of Vietnam and the war ended shortly after he resigned. It is enough to make one think that Watergate may have been a Deep State operation after all.
One thing the valuable update missed is that at 10% indirect costs, a grant is a money loser (NASA didn’t release its call for proposals this year – a first). This will kill NSF, NIH, and any other agencies to which this rate is applied. Evidently, that is the point.
The best way to understand the current policy is a cultural revolution ala Mao, which tossed the baby (STEM) out with the bathwater (PMC arrogance).
Given that the US is only treading water to remain competitive with China in a few remaining areas, a 4-year hiatus will complete the loss of competitiveness. Given that technological process is exponential…