Annika Barber (Scientist and Molecular Biologist)
Appearances
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
I had never even heard of the Federal Register in my American taxpaying voting life. What is the Federal Register? The Federal Register is where all notices of open public meetings that may be happening in the federal government are required to be posted. And for some reason, NIH study sections do have to be posted to the Federal Register at least 15 days before they meet.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
There are tens of thousands of scientists whose grants depend on this happening who are all wondering what's going on.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
So let's see. Right now we are at 182 meetings that have not happened.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
You know, if we assume roughly 100 grants would have gotten reviewed at each meeting, you know, we're talking about at least 18,000 grants that didn't get reviewed. Wow. Wow. And that's 18,000 grants across all kinds of things. I mean, you know, very basic science. You know, just scrolling through here, I've got things like adaptive immunity and bacterial virulence.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
But then we also have things like addiction risk and learning and memory and decision making and therapeutic immune regulation. We have training neuroscientists and physician scientists. And we have studies looking at dentistry and eye diseases. Those aren't meeting.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
I also track how many days of the year my husband eats pizza and I make a chart of it. He's really into pizza. So sometimes I just like to have data.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
We all made the time and people were there and people gave the same quality of review that I have always experienced in these meetings and the same level of scientific discussion, but it felt so real.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
weird to be having these scientific discussions in this climate where you could only wonder like, yeah, you know, we have all these amazing scientists in this room reviewing the future of the next five years of research in the areas of molecular neurogenics, but is any of this going to be funded? Are any of these studies going to go forward? Is the NIH going to give these people any money?
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Did anybody ask? Did anybody ask? No. No. No, every grant gets 15 minutes for discussion and we needed to get through 50 odd grants. So there's no time to think about anything else.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Why? Why do you do that? So my husband really can't go 24 hours without talking about pizza. So last year I accused him of talking about pizza every day and he swore he didn't. And I was like, I really think you do. And so starting in January of this year, I said that for 2025, I was going to log every day that I heard him say the word pizza as well as every time he ate pizza for the year.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
You know, it feels like we're fiddling while Rome burns, talking about some cool genes and worms and mice and all the interesting genome-wide association studies that we could do if money keeps existing. And yeah, are we chumps? Are we participating in furthering something or nothing? Are we just wasting our time?
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
And so I need the data of how bad is it? You know, I think a lot of us are used to approaching problems as something that we can...
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
not necessarily solve with data, but that we can find the edges of with data and get our arms around the problem and define the problem by figuring out what the data are and what the... But it might be possible that that's not going to happen in this case, that there might not be... That does say I'm starting to get that vibe.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
Yeah, you know, it becomes one of those things where, you know, can you graph chaos? Maybe not. Can you feel better trying to graph chaos? Also, maybe not.
This American Life
859: Chaos Graph
He actually eats less pizza than I would expect for the amount he talks about pizza. Like the consumption to discussion ratio is not what I expected it would be. He's only had pizza 14 times this year.