NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers
science.org
science.org
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
It's not "a general anti-science movement", it's about tight control, everything else is unimportant.
> directly hurt industries like pharma/etc
Not a problem if tight control is in place.
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
I think the plan might be to reinstate science in some form after they have grabbed full control of the country.
The definition of pseudoscience is something that a) claims to use the scientific method and b) is not actually doing it properly. The "other ways of knowing" you talk about don't meet the first condition, but the right wing "alternative facts" do. Saying climate change is fake is a testable claim that contradicts mainstream science. Saying it's caused by spiritual corruption is not because anything supernatural is out of scope by definition.
Science limits itself to the predictable, testable, natural, objective (if you believe in that) parts of the universe because otherwise it would be useless. If the answer to any question can be "because God wanted it that way" then all theories end there. That doesn't mean science denying the existence of God, just indifferent to it and all other spiritual beliefs. A theory that depends on a religion being false would also not count as scientific.
"Other ways of knowing" is an expression used for indigenous knowledge with elements of both science and spiritual views. Nobody is saying that it's fully science or should be treated as such, just that we should respect it and treat it as equal. I don't see how that could be equivalent to anti vax conspiracies.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-flu-vaccine-recruits-h...
See that pesky reality thing.
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
Behind it all.
Big Train of course.
And to understand this thought is to go into the other twilight zone where "vaccine" is a single thing with a single composition with only a single set of properties and effects on the organism.
The list is long. First and foremost, it's never a good idea to forget that wherever there's intelligence there's always also stupidity. Then it's generally good advice not to confuse intelligence for wisdom. And between this and very long lists of cognitive biases, there's always the good old "Fuck ya, got mine!" Rule of Acquisition to remember. Et cetera.
And, many of my friends who were doing PHD they used to follow dems, but are now supporting republicans after they got citizenship....
Because a high IQ and a science degree does not mean that those people make good political decisions. A lot of political decision making is driven by ideology and identity. A lot of high IQ people may have strong mathematical and problem solving skills, but are morons in absolutely every other aspect of life.
I am sure I just naive, I guess we can hope all the international bad will is going away with Trump.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
That said I question both your and grandparents choice to look at only people who chose to vote. 68% of people who could have voted against this did not - either actively supporting it with a vote or deciding that they didn't give a fuck if it happened by not voting. Every potential voter either knew or ought to have known the result of this election result...
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Disclosure: Scientist.
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.
Why? Because we can make more in the private industry, but choose not to. That is why the K exists. Our pay is much less than we can get elsewhere, but we choose to stay for our mission. We leave when forced to by economics. The whole nation loses when basic and clinical science falters. Every major advance, the very fact that we are writing messages back and forth, comes down to basic science that we layed the ground work for, but hey, fuck us, right? We aren't real people. Just elite fucks stealing from real people, I guess. Huh.
The fruits of your labor.
You, along with everyone else, use the fruits of *OUR* labor. Every fucking time you go to the doctor, get an MRI, fuel up your truck, plug in your computer, connect to wifi, use drugs to keep your dick hard, you are demonstrating that scientists helped build this country and this world, every bit as much as the guys digging ditches, building bridges, and picking fruit and cotton (all three of which my grandparents did in spades).
"some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training"... --your ignorance is startling. The people getting these k awards are the best of the best. You cannot get a R01 grant as a post-doc. You cannot even apply. The K is there to find the best post-docs, and give them funding that they can use as a post-doc, and carry over into their first real position. Moreover, that it is "job training" is just an intentional misnomer that has suppressed our wages for decades. Decades ago, a post-doc was the exception, not the rule. It was for scientists who could not find a position yet, or needed a few more months. The expectation was that an undergraduate (4 years) then a 6-7 years of graduate school was usually enough "training". But the desire for cheap labor and the successful production of trained scientists, and consistently lower than inflation growth in research funding created a situation where many of the best scientists were still spending 4-6 years in a post-doc position...a supposed training position, and one that still payed like it.
For example, a relation of mine finished his undergraduate, last year, and is already earning more than I am after 6 years of graduate school, 6 years as a postdoc, and two years as a professor at a top-notch research institution. From an economic decision, I was a stupid fuck. I like what I do, love it in fact, but the system abused me for it. Some fucking elite. Not a real person.
You are free to have the dumb as fuck position that we should not publicly fund science. You are also free to be ignorant as fuck about the real condition of working scientists, but I am also free as fuck to tell you that you are wrong.
I don't even blame you. Scientists are the favorite target of those who want to manipulate others through propaganda. If you respect scientists, not implicitly trust, but believe that most are serious and relatively trustworthy to tell you the truth as far as they can honestly discern, then propagandists can be ignored. So we get attacked and abused. Knock us down so that their talking heads can be the only arbiter of truth.
Finally, I agree, wholeheartedly that there is a lot of poverty and homelessness. I grew up in it. being it. But scientists are the wrong target for your ire. Funding research is a huge return on investment [1]. We can make improvements in how it is conducted, sure, but we shouldn't be the target of your ire. We create jobs. We create wealth. And then others make money off the fruit of our labor. Gobs of it. And we are actually trying to solve problems like homelessness to find interventions for drug abuse and mental health.
So what ever. I get your pain, but reject what you say with every particle of my being.
[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/in-praise-of-science-investmen...
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.
If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo
Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.
Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?
What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
That's just a cover story--don't be fooled.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.
More examples: IBM, Kodak, Xerox...
Built at Bell Labs in 1947, getting a Nobel prize for Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain a few years later?
It's hard to think of a part of any economic engine that doesn't rely on transistors for the last many decades.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.
These can be very transactional, they take your money and if they have a notional place of work (not so necessary in the era of WFH) you give them a broom closet somewhere as an "office" which they will never visit.
Or at the other end of the spectrum they try to actually be helpful, perhaps because they actually did want to do whatever it is you wrote on the hiring paperwork, and this might even be a productive relationship, at worst it's a distraction for anybody whose interest you've struggled to maintain and don't want to let go. Hey, go help uh, Doctor Frankenstein with his project to (checks notes) invent a new machine to replace Geese for some reason.
Given Apple's wealth I'd expect some mix of "Vanity Hires" and people who really are expected to do important strategic work for the $$$. As I described, to some extent you can't tell. If you've never heard of them, maybe that's just because you don't know their area of expertise, and equally even if they seem to be working their backside off, maybe they're just like that and Apple was astonished that they actually showed up and started working.
Scientists (and common people) should strike back and fund a political party in the next week of being fired. Or two, or five. If all your voting options lead to your death, create new options.
That, and only that, would send the correct message. A message than the current dinosaur politicians will hear. Every scientist fired and interviewed should casually mention the idea of thinking about creating a new party as the only way to solve this crisis.
Lets voters decide.
And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.
Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]
Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.
I’ll add, the perverse incentives of publish or perish is also responsible for an aimless and irresponsible churn that lead us into the reproducibility crisis. So really the ship has been falling apart in every regard for a very long time. Not it’s just impossible to ignore. Not to mention, the obvious cost and waste of the institutions and life ending debt… it’s just all a mess
Where you’re right is that the rights attach is, well, that… an attack. The cruelty IS the point.
The progressives are just bumbling do gooders who push things too far. But this is kind of treating them with kiddie gloves. Again, look at the major international story today.
The right is trying to tear something down that they see as broken.
Both parties are, as usual, culpable and ignorant of their own contributions to the degradation. They are both childish in their own way, and both willing to put themselves and their beliefs before the mission of academia, which of course, if not about “you” (them)
I’m being somewhat sarcastic, given I see an overwhelming representation of internationals in the American grad/phd programs I’m familiar with. But I honestly don’t have insight across every department. I’d be interested what people have to say about this across STEM throughout the country. Anyone have a rough idea on the trend lines?
https://facts.mit.edu/enrollment-statistics/ https://hai.stanford.edu/assets/files/hai_ai-index-report-20...
I know international representation has generally increased in academics due to their cash cow status with higher tuition rates and most restricted employment options… but I don’t know if this applies specifically to PhD and grad just the same
If so, then the bigger story here is, why is America producing fewer and fewer high academic achievers (PhD, grad, high school reading level, all the way down to lower ed)