What the US is losing

I just read this article on Pro Publica that I think every concerned US citizen and resident should read: Science Shattered. Although the focus of this article is on NIH grants and the politicized freezing of many of those grants, it is safe to say that something similar applies to other US grant funding agencies (e.g., NSF). To put it bluntly, the current White House "administration" (if you can call it that) has politicized the grant funding process, defining what is and what is not "scientific" based upon some ideological litmus test or perhaps sheer disdain for the work scientists do. As you read through this article, really spend some time digesting the stories these affected scientists tell. The termination of their grants obviously has negative implications for the careers of the principal investigators, their post-docs and graduate students, and any support staff involved, not to mention any third party vendors. But get past that for a moment and think of what those of us living in the US lose: basic research that could lead to medical breakthroughs or insights on human behavior that may have implications for therapeutic interventions. In this current regime, any research project with a word such as "gender" so much as mentioned is on the chopping block for being too "woke". In other words, if your research does not follow the current ruling party line, it has no place here.

Once those grants are gone, the luckier labs will find an alternative source of funding and continue to do their work in the US. Others will find their research programs snuffed out for good, thus ending careers of scientists at all levels from those who are principal investigators all the way to post-docs and graduate students depending on that funding for their own related work, including theses and dissertations. Many affected scientists will simply leave the US and continue their work elsewhere. The implications for the public are dire. The work affected discussed in the Pro Publica article will impact public health, and not for the better. Work that could have led to more equitable health outcomes, once abandoned, will ultimately lead to a loss of lives that was entirely avoidable. Then again the ruling party not only does not prioritize such research but has shown a doctrinaire opposition to the work being carried out at all.

The reality is that we have had federal grant funding through NIH, NSF, etc. for as long as I can recall. These agencies have objective criteria for awarding grants that are divorced from partisan politics. These agencies fund projects where the principal investigators have demonstrated that their work is going to be rigorous, doable based on the funding request, and will make a significant contribution to that specific scientific discipline. That's not to say that politics is not involved, as whoever occupies the White House and the composition of Congress certainly determines how much grant funding will be prioritized. Some years there is more funding available. Some years there is less. That said, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, at least until the Trump era, there has not been a political litmus test applied to projects in order to be funded. Some Congressional representatives have voiced skepticism about the value of specific funded research projects, but the general zeitgeist has traditionally been one of not dictating what can and cannot be funded - only the amount of funds to allocate for grant funding. My understanding of science that has to toe a particular ruling party line tends to be disastrous (see Trofim Lysenko and what came to be known as Lysenkoism during the Stalin era as a cautionary tale). The political appointee in charge of the Department of Health is well on the way of creating his own version of Lysenkoism. So we will lose out on new and more effective vaccines, better treatments or cures for any number of diseases, effective means of prevention when it comes to health and mental health problems, etc. 

For a long time I have told my students that mixing partisan politics with science is an awful idea, and that eliminating funding for research that might not be convenient for partisan reasons is nothing short of stupidity. The bad news in the US is that those of us who have to live here are going to lose access to research funding that we once could count on, and that ultimately it is the citizens and residents of the US who will suffer as a result. The good news is that the sciences, like nature itself, abhor a vacuum. If the US government has decided to embark on a self-imposed lobotomy (to use a phrase Carl Sagan once used to describe the waning days of the Roman Empire as it descended into a dark age), other nations will use the opportunity to fill the void. That means a lot of US scientists will end up moving to the EU, China, India, or wherever the funding exists for them to do their work. So in the long run, the sciences will be just fine. The bad news for any of us in the US is that we will find ourselves no longer first in line when a new discovery has tangible applications. Whoever discovers a cure for some form of cancer may well be located outside the US, and it is quite likely that those living in the US will never have a chance to benefit from that discovery, or if we do, only after a long wait. That will simply be the new normal.

Most Americans have been ignorant about what the sciences do for a very long time. Science education at the K-12 level has been a joke for decades. Science reporting has been dramatically scaled back since the 1990s. Americans live with the benefits of the discoveries made by scientists who had NIH funding (or NSF or equivalent federal agencies) without having any understanding of what was involved to make those discoveries or applications possible. Ignorance is not bliss. Instead, those who do not understand what they have been given and what they stand to lose are prime targets for demagogues, and we are experiencing the consequences as I write this. I have no doubt that some version of "science" will continue in the US, but it will become increasingly poorly funded and done in a way in which the answer is predetermined and the challenge is to create the "evidence". American science will become increasingly less trustworthy. I really want to be wrong here. I hope I am wrong. Regrettably, the only way to be wrong is if the US is able to successfully undo the damage that three and half more years under the current White House regime will do. I am not exactly optimistic that American politicians are up to that particular task. But hey, there's always the EU, China, India, UAE, etc. For scientists, these are all viable options. The US will no longer be a leader in the sciences. Maybe it was inevitable.