Science

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      We are witnessing the destruction of science in America | Paul Darren Bieniasz

      by

      Like many scientists, I came to the US as a young adult, driven by idealism and ambition. I arrived with all my belongings contained in two suitcases, and just enough cash to cover the first month’s rent on a small apartment. But I also had something of greater value: an offer to work and train in one of America’s top biomedical research laboratories, a chance to participate in the revolution that is modern biological science.In the years that followed, I became an American scientist and raised an American family. Now, I lead a laboratory in one of the US’s great universities. I am a member of America’s National Academy of Sciences. From a scientist’s perspective, I have lived the American dream.My story is not unusual. Many of the best scientists in the world are drawn to the US, joining many Americans who choose to build a career in science. This attraction to American science is because more so than any other country, America values unfettered scientific enquiry. In the US, scientists have greater resources to pursue their work, and scientists are an integral part of a culture that has innovation and dynamism at its core.Simply put, the US is the best place in the world to be for smart, ambitious people to make discoveries, advance knowledge and improve people’s lives. Consequently, the US leads the world in science, by any measurable criterion. Twenty of the world’s top 30 universities are American, most Nobel prizes in science are won by Americans, half the world’s medicines are invented in the US. When “American exceptionalism” is spoken of, scientists, perhaps more so than any other profession, know exactly what is meant.The vast majority of fundamental scientific research in the US is funded by American taxpayers, through bodies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation, that make grants to universities and research institutes. These grants support scientific infrastructure, pay scientists’ salaries and fund specific research projects. While charities and individual donors also make contributions, these are dwarfed by federal support.Public funding for science is essential because most endeavors in science cannot be directly commercialized, and fundamental science is rarely done by the for-profit sector. Moreover, science, by definition, requires trial-and-error experimentation at the edge of knowledge – its outcomes are unpredictable. Therefore, science is, in a sense, inherently inefficient.Nonetheless, science is the only way to generate the foundational knowledge that enables technology, medicine and an understanding of how the world works, that can be applied for the benefit of humanity. The knowledge uncovered by taxpayer-funded science underpins American innovation and exceptionalism.The extraordinary success that has been American science makes it especially distressing to now witness its destruction. The public investment that has made American science exceptional also makes it dependent on political support.For the most part, both sides of the political divide have recognized the obvious value of American science to society and have broadly supported public investment in it. But this no longer appears to be the case.As I write, American science is being throttled. Funds promised for ongoing research projects are being withheld by the new administration. Executive orders of dubious legal basis have been issued that will slash resources for science. Some colleagues have already been forced to terminate the employment and training of the next generation of scientists, as funds previously promised to them are denied. Many more colleagues will need to take similar steps in the coming weeks and months as their research grants are withheld.Many science graduate schools are not accepting new students, many are rescinding earlier offers, and others are dramatically reducing their intake. Make no mistake, the scientific workforce is being gutted. The withholding of scientific resources as a form of punishment for certain high-profile universities has been widely publicized, but it is actually happening in nearly every American biomedical research institution. The US’s capacity to do science, and its ability to draw and retain scientific talent is being discarded.In addition to the withholding of resources, American science is being further corroded by the installation of leadership that does not value or even understand science, and is clearly incapable of effectively leading it.In the past, American science was led by distinguished scientists and administrators who grasped its foundational role in a society whose lifeblood is innovation. Under the new administration, science leadership roles have been assigned to those without notable achievement, whose only real distinction is infamy. We would never have heard of these individuals were it not for their ludicrous pronouncements, poor science or outright quackery.These new leaders are targeting specific areas of great scientific importance for elimination. They have commanded that NIH grant applications be screened for particular scientific terms; for example, projects on vaccines using a particular exceptionally promising technology, that is disfavored based on a whim of the leadership, are being weeded out. Entire programs that are intended to better prepare the US and the world for future pandemics are being terminated.As an example, in my own laboratory, a peer-reviewed and approved NIH project to devise ways to make better vaccines has been prematurely ended, without scientific justification. Meanwhile, the new leadership will embark on studies of their own inclination, ostensibly to address questions of vaccine safety. These issues are already long settled but will be re-examined by individuals with a track record of bias, appointed by leaders with a track record of bias.Finally, within the past few days, a purge of scientists at the NIH has commenced, including the capricious firing of distinguished individuals in management roles. This is clearly and obviously not how science should be done, and this is clearly and obviously not how science should be led. Science in the US is entering a phase resembling the Lysenko era in the Soviet Union.While the destruction of science will not immediately affect many Americans who are not scientists, the impact of its demise on all our children and grandchildren will be dire. Economic development is dependent on scientific innovation, and if the US does not lead the way in science, other countries will take the leadership role. In medicine, consider the impact of science done in decades past on American lives today; the survival of nearly all American children to adulthood is a fairly recent phenomenon that is largely attributable to fundamental scientific discoveries of the recent past.If we continue the destructive course plotted by this administration, medicines that would otherwise have saved lives in future generations, will not be invented. Technologies that would have ensured future employment and prosperity in the US will not be devised. Solutions that allow the generation of power while causing less damage to the environment, will never be developed. Clearly, if we decline to nurture science, the lives of future Americans will be shorter, sicker and poorer. Science may not be the only thing that makes the US great, but it is surely a cornerstone of American exceptionalism, and it is being destroyed by this government.

      Paul Darren Bieniasz is a British-American virologist whose main area of research is HIV/Aids. He is currently a professor of retrovirology at the Rockefeller University More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?

      by

      Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.View image in fullscreen“Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.It’s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, “only modest policy differences between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states”.After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.Yet in the end there was “no meaningful difference” in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states’ more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe.Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers’ unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” and “a recipe for … structural racism”, the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.These measures also had a literal price. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined” – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.View image in fullscreenYet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP.The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid’s Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.“We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,” Lee said. “It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.”The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”.“And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without people referring back to these plans.”He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect “essential workers”, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower.Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid’s spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.View image in fullscreenPolicymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are “in charge” and “doing something”.In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO’s report was “effusive in its praise” of China’s approach, the book notes.“My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,” Lee said. “They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they’re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.” She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned to act as devil’s advocates in internal deliberations.Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for managing pandemics.But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19’s origin, arguing that the “lab leak” hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed.The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial “gain-of-function” methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form.Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we’ve gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. “The reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,” Macedo said.Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a worry that crossed their minds too. “Our response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,” Macedo said.“We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that’s by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.” More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Our lives depend on seeds. Trump’s cuts put our vast reserves at risk | Thor Hanson

      by

      From 1862 until 1923, US senators and members of Congress provided vast numbers of seeds to constituents. At its peak, the congressional seed distribution program delivered over 60m seed packets directly to farmers and market gardeners every year, helping introduce new varieties of everything from wheat and corn to oats, soybeans, flowers and vegetables. A century later, far fewer Americans till the soil for a living, but seeds remain central to our lives.To understand the importance of seeds, try to imagine a morning without them. It would begin naked on a bare mattress, with no cozy sheets or pajamas, and there would be no fluffy towel to wrap up in after your shower. All of those things come from the seeds of the cotton plant. Stumbling wet into the kitchen, you would find no coffee, and no toast or bagel to go with it. There would be no eggs, no bacon, no cereal, no milk. All of those staples come from seeds or from livestock raised on seed crops. And if you thought you might console yourself with a chocolate bar, you can forget it. Cocoa powder, and the cocoa butter that makes it melt in your mouth, are both derived from seeds.Maintaining the seed diversity and abundance we rely on requires constant development of new varieties to combat disease, increase production and adapt to changing conditions. Seed advances are particularly urgent now, as farmers confront the fickle weather of a warming planet while working to meet a projected 50-60% rise in global food demand by 2050. Although elected officials no longer send out seeds through the mail, federal support for these efforts remains vital.In the era of Doge, that support has been flipped on its head.The US Department of Agriculture employs many plant breeders directly and funds many more through grants and partnerships, but the crown jewel of its seed program resides in a bunker-like building in Fort Collins, Colorado. The national seed bank houses more than 2bn carefully preserved specimens in a facility designed to withstand floods, fires, earthquakes, power outages and tornadoes. With over 620,000 varieties from nearly 17,000 different species, it is one of the world’s largest seed collections and a major supplier to the global seed vault in Svalbard, Norway.It is also at risk.While words like “vault” and “bank” imply simply turning the key and walking away, managing a seed collection demands constant activity. Even in cold storage, the specimens steadily degrade and must be tested regularly to make sure they’re still viable. When germination rates drop for any particular sample, those seeds must be planted and grown to maturity – in the right conditions – to produce a fresh supply. That activity takes place at over 20 research stations in locations (and climates) as diverse as North Dakota, Texas, California, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.Known officially as the US National Plant Germplasm System, the seed bank and its network of regional facilities recently lost 10% of their workforce in the Doge firings, including farm managers, research scientists, lab technicians, IT specialists, orchardists and more. Some have since been rehired, at least temporarily, but the program remains in turmoil. Projects interrupted or suspended range from germination trials to seed regeneration, research lending and many longterm breeding programs, weakening the entire enterprise.Plants don’t wait on politics. Any seed varieties lost now will simply be unavailable to improve crops and address challenges in the future. The importance of a robust and diverse seed bank cannot be overstated. To combat the invasive Russian wheat aphid, for example, plant breeders screened over 54,000 wheat and barley samples to find a handful of precious strains with natural resistance.It’s time for Congress to return to the seed business. Without its intervention, backed by the courts, additional firings appear imminent. Undermining the nation’s seed security undermines its food security and embodies the definition of reckless: “utterly unconcerned about consequences”.For those in the seed world, that attitude is hard to fathom. After all, planting a seed is always about what comes next, a conscious act of forethought and optimism. In other words, an act of hope.

      Thor Hanson is a biologist and author whose books include The Triumph of Seeds and Close to Home. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We weren’t stuck’: Nasa astronauts tell of space odyssey and reject claims of neglect

      by

      In the end, whatever Elon Musk and Donald Trump liked to insist, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were never stuck, nor stranded in space, and definitely not abandoned or marooned.The world heard on Monday, for the first time since their return to Earth two weeks ago, from the two Nasa astronauts whose 10-day flight to the international space station (ISS) last summer turned into a nine-month odyssey. And their story was markedly at odds with the narrative painted from the White House.Wilmore and Williams were speaking to reporters at a press conference in Houston, hours after a joint appearance on Fox News, and reaffirmed that they never felt neglected or in need of the rescue the president insisted was necessary.Instead, they said, they calmly assumed duties as members of the space station crew – “planning for one thing, preparing for another”, Wilmore said – while a political firestorm over their status raged back on the ground.If anything, the pair of veteran space flyers appeared slightly bemused by, or largely ignorant of the furore that followed their enforced and protracted stay on the orbiting outpost 250 miles above Earth, caused by technical failures on board their pioneering Boeing Starliner spacecraft that returned in September without them.At the press conference Nasa had called to discuss the science activities the astronauts performed during their time in space, Williams and Wilmore gave diplomatic answers to questions designed to elicit their thoughts.“The stuck and marooned narrative … yes, we heard about that,” Wilmore said, before reverting to a carefully worded explanation of how their training and preparations allowed them to pivot seamlessly from the roles of new spacecraft test pilots to routine ISS crew members who splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 18 March on a routine crew rotation flight.“The plan went way off for what we had planned. But because we’re in human spaceflight, we prepare for any number of contingencies. This is a curvy road. You never know where it’s going to go,” he continued.Earlier, in the Fox interview, he pushed back on Musk’s false claim, amplified by Trump, that the astronauts were “abandoned in space by the Biden administration”. Had they felt stuck, stranded or marooned, the interviewer, Bill Hemmer, wondered.“Any of those adjectives, they’re very broad in their definition,” Wilmore said.“So in certain respects we were stuck, in certain respects, maybe we were stranded, but based on how they were couching this, that we were left and forgotten in orbit, we were nowhere near any of that at all.“Stuck? OK, we didn’t get to come home the way we planned. But in the big scheme of things, we weren’t stuck. We planned and trained. Let me comment back on this other [claim], you know, ‘They failed you’. Who? Who’s they?”Williams, too, was reluctant to kick the political football. In orbit, she said, her focus was solely on the work she needed to do.“You sort of get maybe a little bit tunnel-visioned … you do your job type of thing, right, and so you’re not really aware of what else is going on down there,” she said.“I hate to say that maybe the world doesn’t revolve around us, but we revolve around the world, something like that. But I think we were just really focused on what we were doing and trying to be part of the team. Of course, we heard some things … ”The third US astronaut at the press conference, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, who returned to Earth with Williams and Wilmore, backed up his crewmate.“The politics, kind of, they don’t make it up there when we’re trying to make operational decisions,” he said. “As the commander [I’m] responsible for the safety of this crew and getting them back safely.”Musk, the founder of SpaceX, a key Nasa contractor, has continued to push the story, with no evidence, that the astronauts were effectively held hostage in space by Biden for political advantage. It was a SpaceX Dragon capsule that eventually brought them back to Earth, but it was a spacecraft that had been attached to the ISS for months, not one Trump said he directed Musk to “go get the two brave astronauts”.The billionaire became embroiled in a heated online dispute with Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen over the claims, and later attacked Mark and Scott Kelly, both retired astronauts and the former now Democratic senator for Arizona, for calling him out.As for the troubled Starliner, whose future is questionable as Boeing and Nasa engineers continue to evaluate the helium leaks and thruster control issues that brought its maiden crewed mission to a premature end, both Williams and Wilmore said they would be happy to fly on it again.Wilmore, as the Starliner mission commander, said there were questions he wished he’d asked during the flight that he believed might have brought a different outcome, and “some shortcomings in tests, shortcomings in preparation, that we did not foresee”. The astronauts will meet Boeing leadership on Wednesday to give first-hand testimony.The whole experience, he said, was a learning curve familiar to those in “the difficult job we all take part in”.“Could you point fingers? I don’t want to point fingers. I hope nobody wants to point fingers. We don’t want to look back and say, ‘shame, shame, shame’. We want to look forward and say, ‘Let’s make the future even more productive and better’.“That’s the way that I look at it. And what I think the way the nation should look at.” More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump makes sweeping HIV research and grant cuts: ‘setting us back decades’

      by

      The federal government has cancelled dozens of grants to study how to prevent new HIV infections and expand access to care, decimating progress toward eliminating the epidemic in the United States, scientists say.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated at least 145 grants related to researching advancements in HIV care that had been awarded nearly $450m in federal funds. The cuts have been made in phases over the last month.NIH, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, is the largest funding source of medical research in the world, leaving many scientists scrambling to figure out how to continue their work.“The loss of this research could very well result in a resurgence of HIV that becomes more generalized in this country,” said Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School who recently had two of her grants cancelled. “These drastic cuts are rapidly destroying the infrastructure of scientific research in this country and we are going to lose a generation of scientists.”In 2012, the FDA approved pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an antiviral drug taken once a day that is highly successful at preventing new HIV infections. While the drug has been a powerful tool to contain the virus, inequities remain in accessing those drugs and sustaining a daily treatment. Despite major progress, there are still 30,000 new infections each year in the US.Many of the terminated HIV-related studies focused on improving access to drugs like PrEP in communities that have higher rates of infections – including trans women and Black men. One of Marcus’s projects was examining whether making PrEP available over the counter would increase the use of the drug in vulnerable communities.“The research has to focus on the populations that are most affected in order to have an impact and be relevant,” said Marcus.Yet, this may be the justification for defunding so many HIV-related studies. A termination letter reviewed by the Guardian dated 20 March cited that “so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”The National Institutes of Health did not expand on why the grants were terminated in response to questions from the Guardian. In a statement it said it is “taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities. We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”Many researchers were left stunned by the scale of the cancellations since in 2019, Donald Trump announced in his State of the Union address a commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the country over the next 10 years. As part of this initiative, his administration negotiated a deal with drug companies to provide free PrEP for 200,000 low-income patients.“Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” said Trump in his address. “Together we will defeat Aids in America.”Amy Nunn, a professor at the Brown University School of Public Health, said she had even tailored grant proposals to fit the policy goals of the initiative, which included geographically targeting HIV prevention efforts. One of her studies that was terminated focused on closing disparities of PrEP use among African American men in Jackson, Mississippi.“They finally adopted those policies at the federal level,” Nunn said, noting that Trump was the first president to make ending the epidemic a priority. “Now they’re undercutting their own successes. It’s so strange.”Though hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds had been awarded for the grants, the terminations will not recoup all of that money for the administration, since many are years into their work. Some are even already finished.Nathaniel Albright learned earlier this month that an NIH grant supporting his doctoral research was cancelled even though his project had already been completed. A PhD candidate at Ohio State University, Albright is defending his dissertation at the end of the month. Still, Albright is concerned how the cuts impact the future of the field.“It’s created an environment in academia where my research trajectory is now considered high risk to institutions,” said Albright, who is currently struggling to find postdoctorate positions at universities.Pamina Gorbach, an epidemiologist who teaches at University of California, Los Angeles, had been following hundreds of men living with HIV in Los Angeles for 10 years to learn their needs. She had been awarded an NIH grant to better facilitate their treatment through a local clinic. Her funding was cancelled earlier this month as well.“It’s really devastating,” said Gorbach. “If you’re living with HIV and you’re not on meds, you know what happens? You get sick and you die.”Clinic staff in Los Angeles will likely be laid off as a result of the cuts, said Gorbach. Others agreed one immediate concern was how to pay their research staff, since the funds from a grant are immediately frozen once it is terminated. The NIH funds also often make up at least a portion of university professor’s salaries, all said they were most alarmed by the impact on services for their patients and the loss of progress toward ending the epidemic.“This is erasing an entire population of people who have been impacted by an infectious disease,” said Erin Kahle, the director of the Center for Sexuality and Health Disparities at the University of Michigan who lost an NIH grant.Scrapping an entire category of disease from research will have innumerable downstream effects on the rest of healthcare, she added.“This is setting us back decades,” said Kahle. More

    • 250 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      RFK Jr says they are poisoning us, influencers call them unnatural – but what is the truth about seed oils?

      by

      It’s curious that something so bland could cause so much controversy. Most of us have a bottle of seed oil, normally called vegetable oil in the UK, in our kitchens – a nearly tasteless but very useful fat that has been a commonplace cooking ingredient for decades.And yet this previously unremarkable golden liquid has sparked online furore and vicious debate. Nutrition influencers on social media have described it as “toxic”, “inflammatory”, “unnatural” and the root cause of the obesity epidemic.The US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has caused controversy with his views on subjects from vaccines to fluoride in drinking water, has said the population is being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and urged people to revert to “traditional” fats such as butter, lard and beef dripping for better health.Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that fast food chains were promoting their shift away from seed oils after Kennedy’s criticisms. He even made a televised visit to a branch of Steak ’n Shake to praise its decision to cook fries in beef tallow instead.So should we really be ditching our bottles of vegetable and sunflower oils and covering everything in lard?Seed oils have been in widespread use since about the 1950s and, as well as being used for home cooking, are also in many ultra-processed foods. They include rapeseed (known as canola in the US and generally labelled as vegetable oil in the UK), sunflower, soya bean, corn, grapeseed, rice bran, sesame and safflower. While you can buy cold-pressed seed oils, the most common production method involves using a solvent (normally hexane) to extract the oil from the plant. It is correct that hexane is a toxic substance, but it is almost entirely removed from the final product by the refining process – the EU allows a maximum residual limit of 1mg per kilo.The refining process includes bleaching and deodorising, both of which critics have jumped on to claim that seed oil is “unnatural” and therefore “bad”.Tom Sanders, emeritus professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London, who has spent his career researching dietary fat and health, explains: “The processing actually takes out potentially toxic material.”Sarah Berry, professor of nutritional sciences at King’s, agrees: “The end product, in my opinion, is very safe to eat.”The next allegation against seed oils is that they are “inflammatory”. This assumption is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the science, says Berry.View image in fullscreenSeed oil critics claim that the type of omega-6 fatty acid present in them (called linoleic acid) can be inflammatory, whereas omega-3 – the other essential polyunsaturated fatty acid, found in foodstuffs such as oily fish, flaxseed and chia seeds – can reduce inflammation.“Because the enzymes used to convert omega-3 into anti-inflammatory chemicals are the same ones used to convert omega- 6, their argument is that having too much seed oil will mean the enzymes are stolen away from the omega-3,” says Berry.“This isn’t true. It’s true from a theoretical biochemical pathway. It’s true in mice upon unrealistic stimuli. But it is absolutely not true in humans.” In fact, randomised, controlled trials show that linoleic acid has either a neutral or, in most studies, an anti-inflammatory effect in humans.“The idea that linoleic acid is some sort of toxic thing is absolute nonsense,” says Sanders. “It’s an essential nutrient. Of the essential fatty acids it’s the most important one. If you’re deficient, it impairs immune function and platelet function doesn’t work.”It also has a potent cholesterol-lowering effect, says Berry, who is chief scientist at nutrition company Zoe. “It has been shown to reduce blood cholesterol significantly. Because of this and based on the current evidence I would say that not only are seed oils not bad for us, they are a healthy part of our diet.”Sanders attributes much of the decline in cardiovascular disease we’ve seen in the past 50 years to our increased consumption of seed oils. A few weeks ago, a study that followed 200,000 adults over 33 years found that those who replaced a tablespoon of butter a day with the same amount of plant-based oil such as soya bean or rapeseed had a 17% reduction in risk of death from all causes. The study, which was published in JAMA Internal Medicine also found a 17% reduction in risk of death from cancer.“Our study found that higher butter intake was associated with increased deaths from all causes and cancer, while higher intake of plant-based oils was associated with lower deaths from all causes, cancer and cardiovascular disease,” said lead study author Yu Zhang, a graduate student at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.Priya Tew, from Dietitian UK, says some of the confusion might have come from a 1960s study: “It showed men with heart disease had a higher intake of seed oils. But this was through margarines that also contain trans fats, which we know increase the risk of heart disease.”A similar logic applies to the argument that, as our intake of seed oils has risen – which it has more than 200-fold over the past 50 to 70 years – so too have our rates of chronic disease.“Association does not mean causality,” says Berry. “Think what else has changed; our food landscape is almost unrecognisable compared with 70 years ago. It’s estimated 60% of the seed oils we consume come from ultra-processed food which has many other chemicals that are unhealthy for us and processes that affect the healthfulness of the food.”In other words, it’s not the seed oil that’s the problem.Berry’s recent statements about seed oils have landed her in hot water. After appearing on a podcast explaining that seed oils are healthy, she received relentless hate mail, including being told she’s “the most hated scientist in America”.“It nearly got to the point where I was going to stop speaking out on the topic so I didn’t have to be subjected to such horrible comments and meanness. But then I thought, that’s exactly what they want. They want to shut down the real evidence, so it just galvanised me to speak out about it even more.”As always, with nutrition, it’s better to consider overall diet than to hyper-fixate on one ingredient. But these kind of messages don’t tend to get as much traction. “Human nature is such that we are more susceptible to risk and scare headlines,” Berry says. “They’re going to get more clicks than a balanced, boring nutrition scientist like myself saying seed oils are fine as part of a balanced diet.”Sanders says you don’t have to ditch your seed oils and you shouldn’t swap them for butter or lard. “The seed oil scare is all just gossip. It’s not based on any good science at all.” More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed | John Naughton

      by

      At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia.Those pro-Gaza demonstrations so irked the Trump regime that it demanded the return of $400m of federal research funding. When Columbia sought a meeting to discuss the matter, it received a letter setting out the conditions that it would have to accept before the government would deign to talk. These included a stipulation that Columbia must “begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years”.The bullying of Columbia is the canary in the coalmine which reveals the Trump-Musk junta has it in for American universities. There are two reasons for their hostility. The first is that, as elite institutions devoted to freedom of inquiry and the telling of uncomfortable truths, they are anathema to the new autocrats in Washington. The second is that some of them (the so-called Ivy League) are fabulously wealthy, being for the most part hedge funds with nice universities attached. And if there’s one thing that Donald Trump cannot abide, it is large pots of money that he and his ghastly tribe can smell but not touch. So if the aloof trustees of Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al think that their august institutions lie beyond his reach, perhaps they should understand that Trump looks on them much as Henry VIII looked on the rich monasteries of his heyday.Many teachers and researchers in US universities are now fearful of what lies ahead. No line of inquiry is safe from the raging firestorm of Maga intolerance. Many of the most vulnerable areas of inquiry lie in the health sector – LGBTQ+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, immunology, and so on. But there’s also endangered research on environmental issues and the climate crisis, socioeconomic inequality, plus the humanities, social science and astrophysics.The looming crisis in the US is beginning to remind people in Europe of the 1930s, when the UK and the US began to realise that Jewish scientists needed to be rescued from the Nazis. About 2,000 scientists and academics fled the fascist countries between 1933 and 1941, fearing for themselves or Jewish family members. Then, universities in the US and the UK made space for and welcomed a whole generation of geniuses – Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Max Born, Rudolf Peierls, Francis Simon, to name just a few. Likewise, members of the Frankfurt School were rescued and installed in New York, where they became mightily critical of American capitalism but at least lived to tell their particular tale. As did Thomas Mann.Now, in a different age, there are stirrings in Europe to provide safe places for American researchers. In France, Aix-Marseille University is welcoming American scientists whose work has become untenable after the Trump administration’s cuts in certain academic sectors. The Free University of Brussels (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, which are open to American researchers working in socially relevant fields. The fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5m) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme. It’s also aiming to attract American professors looking to relocate. VUB, with its Francophone sister university ULB, is providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.This is the beginning of something hopeful. But it also raises the question of what UK institutions are doing to meet the coming challenge. The answer, at the moment, seems to be nothing much. Perhaps that’s because most of British academia still can’t get its head around the idea that the US is now an enemy, not an ally, and that the “special relationship” is yesterday’s story.What I’ve been readingHow I accidentally got sent Trump’s Yemen textsJeffrey Goldberg’s astonishing story about the White House security leak in the Atlantic.Philosophy and fatherhoodA curious tendency among western philosophers explored in an intriguing post by Doug Muir.AI has learned to reason … … or has it? A lovely explainer by Melanie Mitchell.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Trump and reality: from promoting alternative facts to erasing truths | Editorial

      by

      What does the public need to know? The Trump White House boasts of being the most transparent administration in history – though commentators have suggested that the inadvertent leak of military plans to a journalist may have happened because senior figures were using messaging apps such as Signal to avoid oversight. Last week, it released thousands of pages of documents on John F Kennedy’s assassination. Donald Trump has declared that Kennedy’s family and the American people “deserve transparency and truth”.Strikingly, this stated commitment to sharing information comes as his administration defunds data collection and erases existing troves of knowledge from government websites. The main drivers appear to be the desire to remove “woke” content and global heating data, and the slashing of federal spending. Information resources are both the target and collateral damage. Other political factors may be affecting federal records too. Last month, Mr Trump sacked the head of the National Archives without explanation, after grumbling about the body’s involvement in the justice department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents.The impact is already painfully evident. Cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have affected not only climate records but also an extreme weather risk tool. The purge’s results are absurd as well as damaging. A webpage on the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, appears to have been marked for deletion because it was mistaken for a reference to LGBTQ+ issues.Yet the disparity between the data dump on the Kennedy assassination and the removal of other material is not a contradiction. It speaks volumes about the administration’s approach to truth and knowledge, which it regards as contingent and a matter of convenience. (Tellingly, it is also axing the body that provides most federal funding to libraries.)The 1963 presidential assassination is not only an event around which multiple theories circle but one that helped feed a broader culture of conspiracy theorising and distrust in authority. That has metastatised to the bizarre and extreme claims embraced and even promoted by Mr Trump or figures around him, including birtherism, Pizzagate and QAnon. These increasingly fantastical narratives have had real-world consequences. Facts, science and rationality itself are under attack.In his first term, Mr Trump’s aides shamelessly promoted “alternative facts” while decrying actual facts as “fake news”. The Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over those four years. This time round, his administration is removing existing sources of information. Websites, datasets and other information vanished from federal health websites – such as that for the Centers for Disease Control – last month, though some has since reappeared. One scientist called it “a digital book burning”. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned that “critically important science conducted at many US agencies, institutions, and universities [is] under increasing assault”.Ad hoc preservation of essential national information and records is usually the work of those faced with the destructive force of foreign invasions, jihadist insurgencies or dictators. But as this bonfire blazes, a motley but committed array of individuals – “nerds who care”, in the words of one – are fighting back by preserving data before it is deleted. Their admirable effort to defend the truth deserves support.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More