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Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants.
A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks.
Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts.
Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement.
Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...
She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations.
Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.
What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.
> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?
Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.
If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.
Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.
A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical
Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.
Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.
Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.
> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,
That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.
I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?
There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.
Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.
> Benefits of exchange of information
You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.
Ironically, the one deceptive truth I can think of here is still worse than wrong. Big pharma does hold fancy events, including at conferences, as part of how they attract and fund drug trials. However, cutting basic cancer research and the people who do it means the only people who will be left are the big pharma party people that you seem to dislike.
Actual academic conferences are very different. Budgets are much tighter than in medical conferences, or even in tech conferences. Academics usually have to adhere to the same rules and restrictions as government employees. For example, having wine and/or beer at the conference dinner sometimes depends on private sponsors, as government money cannot be used for alcoholic drinks.
Until you name the conference, I'm just going to label this as conservative bullshit.
I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this.
It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired.
The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff.
The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people.
People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them.
Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.
Interesting choice of words but it throws all the rest of your assessment into doubt.
Especially your idea that your wife's research is worthy and then all the rest is less worthy.
The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system
None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research.
Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue.
And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.
(That seems to be the primary mission of Jhpiego, where 90% of the layoffs occurred)
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
Of value to who exactly? Trump and Musk? RFK Jr?
mRNA vaccines seem pretty valuable to me, for example. They did to the Nobel committee.
My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.