Part the First: The Sabotage of American Science. For much of the past forty years I have been in the “business” of writing grant proposals and/or doing research that has been publicly funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. This includes work supported by the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the American Heart Association (AHA) and service on review panels for each of these organizations, including a long stint as the chair of a basic biomedical science review panel for AHA. My personal “batting average” often hovered near the Mendoza Line (.200) but people sometimes forget that Mario Mendoza played Major League Baseball for nine seasons, followed by seven seasons in the Mexican League. My attitude was that it was and remains a privilege to be in the position to apply for this research support and that service to science and the public is what a scientist should do.
We have discussed what has happened over the past year and a half to American science during the second Trump Administration. A final, for now, report has been written by Henry Miller for Science-Based Medicine, Sabotaging America’s Future: The Catastrophic Cost of Federal Research Cuts. Dr. Miller did pioneering research that made modern molecular cloning possible. He knows whereof he speaks:
There is a word for what the federal government has done to American science during the past year and a half: sabotage. Not reform. Not streamlining. Not the “realignment of priorities” the White House prefers to call it. Sabotage — the deliberate, systematic destruction of one of the most productive enterprises in the history of human civilization, inflicted at a time when the nation can least afford it, for reasons that range from the ideological to the incoherent.
Let’s start with MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the foundational engines of American technological power, the place where radar was developed during World War II, where strobe photography was perfected, where the modern internet took shape, where Nobel laureates mentor the scientists who will produce the next generation of breakthroughs.
I experienced that education firsthand. As an MIT undergraduate in the 1960s, two of my microbiology professors were Nobel laureates and three physics professors were veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that ended WWII. As a graduate student (at the University of California, San Diego), I was the co-discoverer of two important enzymes: Ribonuclease H, which plays a critical role in DNA replication; and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in influenza virus that enables it to replicate. Decades later, the latter would be the target of anti-flu drugs.
When MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, stepped in front of a camera to address her community in May, her message was not a complaint. It was a warning. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to a year ago. New federal research funding has decreased by more than 20 percent. Even accounting for non-federal sources — the industry partnerships and philanthropic gifts MIT has scrambled to find — total campus research funding is now 10 percent smaller than it was just twelve months ago. “That is a striking loss,” Kornbluth said, “for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world.”
As the saying goes for those of us in scientific flyover country, when MIT – or Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Berkeley, UCSD, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Penn – catch a cold, the rest of us are trying to survive double pneumonia. Now? Double pneumonia and Long Covid at the same time.
What will be the outcome of this sabotage? Careers stifled in the crib, established scientists losing their research programs that cannot be restarted after serious interruption. This has recently come home to me as I clean out freezer archives of irreplaceable items that formed the foundation of my laboratory’s research. This is a brain drain that cannot be reversed. Who will benefit? China has passed the United States by some measures of research productivity and relevance. Look forward to more of the same. As we have noted here before, science will flourish, just somewhere else. And Americans will eventually stop and wonder what happened. In the meantime:
The United States did not become the world’s scientific superpower by accident. It took deliberate, sustained, bipartisan investment across decades — in universities, in federal laboratories, in graduate education, in the culture of open inquiry. What the second Trump administration has done in under a year and a half is begin to dismantle that inheritance with the gleeful efficiency of an arsonist who mistakes the blaze for proof of his power. The fire is real, and so is the carnage. And the scientists who might have rebuilt what burns are already boarding planes for Beijing, Berlin, London, and Toronto.
What an odd time in this world…but we already knew that.
Part the Second: The Leadership of the American Diabetes Association Loses Its Mind. Just a few days ago several distinguished members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were ejected from their annual meeting in New Orleans for passing out copies of an opinion piece from that had appeared in the journal Diabetes Care, which is published by the ADA:
It didn’t have to be this way.
The condemnations keep coming four days after security officers escorted five diabetes experts out of the American Diabetes Association meeting in New Orleans for handing out copies of an editorial criticizing federal cuts to biomedical research. Expelling the doctors and scientists has shocked people in the field, and the ADA’s communications explaining it have only made matters worse, leaders in diabetes research and practice told STAT.
The organization’s aggressive response to members protesting policies espoused by the Trump administration and Jay Bhattacharya, the National Institutes of Health director who was originally the conference’s keynote speaker before backing out, alarmed longtime ADA members who fear for not just the organization’s integrity, but also for diabetes care and science.
“To me, it was inconceivable,” John Buse, a former ADA president, co-author of the editorial, and editor of ADA’s journal Diabetes Care, where it was published. “Now, it wasn’t inconceivable that somebody from the ADA might have approached and said, ‘This is not cool, please don’t do this,’ but it was shocking to me that they deployed the police.”
ADA issued a series of statements over the next two days that defended its actions, but they only made matters worse, Buse and other long-term ADA members said.
What is particularly interesting about this mishegoss is that it was probably a result of the ADA inviting the current NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya MD-PhD, to speak at the conference. Director Bhattacharya has complained that his freedom of speech was violated during the early days of COVID-19 when more than a few actual scientists called out the Great Barrington Declaration for what it was, a political tract from the American Institute for Economic Research that was wrong on the science of coronaviruses, viral epidemiology, and vaccines. Director Bhattacharya was a no-show at the ADA meeting.
It appears that the leadership of the ADA was not particularly interested in the freedom of its members to speak up on a matter of public importance and have also learned more than they wanted to know about the Streisand Effect:
In the wake of clinicians and researchers being kicked out of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) meeting here, at least two of the organization’s leaders have resigned. President-Elect Jennifer Green, MD, and Scientific Sessions Planning Committee Chair Mark Atkinson, PhD, have both left their positions with ADA, several sources confirmed to MedPage Today. Reports of at least two additional experts abdicating their positions with ADA could not be confirmed as of press time.
Regarding the Streisand Effect:
Kahn pointed out that the events as they unfolded brought his editorial more attention than he ever imagined, with page views shooting up to 76,000 as of Monday afternoon, and a flood of views on social media through various channels.
“Our goal was to hand out 1,000 copies of those editorials, and if we got 200 people to read them, we were lucky,” Kahn told MedPage Today. “By the actions of the ADA, we’ve actually got millions of people to think about it.”
Were the attendees likely to have shouted down Director Bhattacharya had he appeared? Unlikely. Would questions have been pointed if they were allowed? Undoubtedly. In any case, the leadership of ADA has apologized, for what that is worth. Here is the video from the Science article (archived link not available).
What an odd time in this world…but we already knew that.
Part the Third: Technology Versus Community. The Amish are widely misunderstood. They are not reflexively anti-technology, but they are serious about how technology should be adopted in community (Donald Kraybill is highly recommended). We should all be so smart. Dixie Dillon Lane takes up Pope Leo XIV, artificial intelligence, and the Amish in her short essay Magnifica Humanitas, Artificial Intelligence, and Amish Country with sensitivity:
Some of the common Amish decisions against technologies may seem insignificant to us, of course; we would never spend time worrying about whether shirt buttons are morally dangerous. But we have our own tech issues to consider. It does not seem insignificant to worry that smartphones might ruin our enjoyment of face-to-face conversation, for example…
The question is whether we are masters of our technology or vice versa. Examples abound. I have watched more than one scientist flounder in his (always a man in this story) quest to automate his research to make it more efficient, when all he was really doing was adding distance between his mind and his data to no good effect. It is a hard lesson for some that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.
Earlier today I heard a short disquisition on the legacy of Ted Turner. I met him once in Atlanta, briefly, and he was certainly magnetic, this visionary who founded CNN. The question asked by Chuck Reece of Salvation South was whether we really needed a 24/7 news cycle. This was not even a consideration in 1980 when CNN went on the air. But the 24/7 news cycle has changed our politics and not for the better. Whether it had to be this way is moot. But a news detox should be a regular stop in our weekly schedule. Yeah, I know, preaching to the choir here. But sometimes reminders are useful.
Part the Fourth: Did They Really Mean to Do That? Elizabeth Selvin has a story to tell in We published in Nature Medicine in 2025 for free. In 2026, it cost us $12,850:
In June 2025, I led a study that was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine. The cost to publish this manuscript, which reported the results of a randomized clinical trial, was zero dollars. The paper underwent rigorous peer view and extensive edits and copy editing by the editorial staff. This study was the result of years of work by a large team of staff and investigators at Johns Hopkins and was funded by a combination of philanthropy and grants from the National Institutes of Health (your and my tax dollars).
In 2026, I was part of a group that published in Nature Medicine a different NIH-funded study — also the results of years of hard work supported by your and my tax dollars. To comply with the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy that went into effect on July 1, 2025, we paid $12,850 to the publisher. This charge was for open-access fees, now required by the publisher, and was non-negotiable.
…
The well-intentioned NIH policy change was intended to provide free, immediate, public access to publications resulting from NIH-funded research. NIH-funded authors must deposit the peer-reviewed (“author-accepted version”) of the manuscript in PubMed Central, a public access repository, to be made available at the time of publication in the journal (i.e., without embargo). Beginning in July 2025, many nonprofit publishers removed their requirement for embargoes on author-accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central, making articles by NIH authors free and immediately available.
However, some for-profit publishers — e.g., Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley, which publish a combined total of over 7,500 journals — require that authors sign over copyright and control of the author-accepted version of their paper to the publisher and have not changed their requirements for an embargo (typically six to 12 months) in PubMed Central.
Before, scientists could publish through the “subscription route” (with a six- to 12-month embargo period) and avoid any open-access fees. Now, to remove the embargo period, NIH-funded scientists must use the publishers’ “open-access route” to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy. For the open-access route, these publishers require fees that range from $4,840 (Wiley, Cancer), $9,550 (Elsevier, The Lancet), to $12,850 (Springer Nature, Nature, and Nature Medicine).
I do not know what to think about this, other than it is absurd. But it is not an entirely new thing. One reason I ran afoul of senior colleagues in my first independent faculty position is that my group published our research in a journal published by the American Chemistry Society (ACS) instead of the purported “flagship” journal of the discipline, of which a senior colleague was a long-time Associate Editor. To me it was an easy decision. The ACS journal did not charge anything at the time (I have no idea if that has changed). The flagship journal charged a minimum of $2,500 (~$4,500 in current dollars) and the paper would have been marked as an “advertisement” because page charges were paid. I remember when this notation began, and it always gave me the creeps.
The current rule of thumb is that a graduate student or postdoc in a biomedical research laboratory will require at least $1,200 a month in supplies. It is not too difficult to see where this is going. The number of graduate students will decrease further, in tandem with the collapse of scientific funding and the redirection of research dollars to “advertisements.” But Elsevier et al. will continue to make bank while the sun shines. So I ask again, did NIH really mean to do that? Probably not. Elsevier is probably not on the president’s radar. But they did it, nevertheless.
Part the Fifth: Science Is Still Pretty Cool, Especially in the Hands of Someone Like Richard Feynman. I have often been accused of being less than adventurous when venturing out to eat. The accusation has merit. Do I tend to go back to the same places? Yes. Do I tend to order what I know will be good? Yes. As it turns out, I have been on the right track all along according to Dr. Feynman. I look at Feynman’s equations and have a bad flashback to the derivation of equations in physical chemistry, but I’ll go with his solution to the “Restaurant Problem”:
Feynman’s notes showed that the optimal strategy involves a quality threshold — a minimum score you require before committing — that starts high and drops as your trip runs out.
The team proved that Feynman’s solution was indeed optimal, then extended it to other versions of the problem: do people actually solve the problem this way?
The answer: People don’t follow Feynman’s optimal curve in reality. Instead of the precise mathematical threshold, participants used a much simpler rule. Their quality bar started high and dropped by the same fixed amount each night regardless of how long the trip was or what the restaurant landscape looked like.
The paper in PNAS, Resolving Feynman’s restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies, with this conclusion:
Richard Feynman notoriously had a good instinct for elegant solutions to problems that provided insights into the physical world. His analysis of how one should choose a meal suggests the same instinct guided him toward problems that offer insight into human behavior. The Feynman restaurant problem has the rare attributes of being analytically tractable while capturing a fundamental tension in human decision-making—the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Its simplicity also means that we can definitively identify the strategy people use to solve this problem: adopting thresholds that decrease linearly in the proportion of opportunities that remain, but adjusting these thresholds up and down for different distributions. More than four decades after Feynman sketched some notes in a Thai restaurant, we have resolved the mathematical puzzle he left behind, and revealed how people naturally approach such sequential decision problems…
Yes, people are smarter than we give them credit for. 90% of the optimum is pretty good. And so it does make sense to order that one burger with the Swiss cheese and grilled mushrooms plus the battered fries to go along with a Drafty Kilt or Ode to Mercy, or two. Now I am hungry, at 1:00 in the morning.
Thanks for reading! See you next week, and don’t forget to turn off the news once in a while and do whatever makes you happy. Do not let this odd time in our world get to you, too much.
