Carl Zimmer
Appearances
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Honestly, you could hand out a Golden Goose Award every day. Pretty much anything that is some kind of technology making life better in some way, it all started in basic science.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
So what I've been doing is trying to distill for myself, just summarizing what my fellow journalists have been digging up.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I don't think we know yet, honestly. There are lots of efforts to push back that are happening now. There are a number of lawsuits. There may be more lawsuits, but we don't know how judges will rule. We don't know at this point if the Trump administration is going to really adhere to what the judges say. But I can say... Government scientists are getting laid off in the tens of thousands.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Opportunities for young scientists are getting wiped out. Grants are being eliminated. Universities are suddenly having billions of dollars of research suddenly pulled. You know, there was a big diabetes program at Columbia. There was a program on, you know, studying chronic fatigue. These have been going on for years. They're gone.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
For example, the Trump administration has put forward a budget in which NASA's science budget would be cut in half, which experts have described as kind of an extinction level event for science at NASA. This is all the stuff that you read about in the newspapers, like, you know, what did we discover on Mars? Or there is a space telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It is built.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
If it gets into space, it will be able to give us an incredible picture on the whole universe, including the evolution of galaxies. An even better look at planets around other solar systems might help us find life on other solar systems. In the proposed budget, that telescope is dead. It gets no funding.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
That's absurd. Then the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's climate science program, that is being proposed to be shut down. Just shut down. Fully, fully. Shut down. The EPA. At the EPA, they have research scientists who do science to understand the threats to human health. There's movements to have all 1,000 of them laid off.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
The EPA will not have a research science staff if this follows through. You know, the Centers for Disease Control, for example. Center for Disease Control used to have an office full of experts on lead poisoning. And in fact, Milwaukee has just had a lead poisoning emergency and they would like to have CDC send their experts. There are no lead poisoning experts at the CDC.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Yeah, NSF, their proposal is to cut it in half. Half. And Department of Health and Human Services. That's the department that houses the National Institutes of Health. 10,000 people have been fired. That has included lots of people involved in doing basic research on biomedicine.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Trying to make a coronavirus vaccine that is going to be able to give us some protection against other strains of COVID or maybe some entirely new coronavirus.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
They've made a lot of progress, and a lot of that progress came with a deeper understanding of how the immune system works. So they've learned a lot of basic science along the way, and it has been delivering a lot of promise.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
And that grant has just been pulled with no explanation. That research is now over. There are projects looking for antivirals for a range of different viruses that might start the next pandemic. That's been canceled too. And those scientists aren't even sure if they'll be able to write up their results. Like you may not find out what they've done. There's just too many to choose from.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
I mean, I've been talking with a researcher who has, you know, a massive program on understanding tuberculosis and the immune system. You know, this is the most deadly infectious disease we have these days. It kills over a million people a year. His grant was canceled and honestly, he's not sure why.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
This huge program that could give us new insights about tuberculosis and might eventually lead to new treatments is just gone. Just gone. So there are definitely very short-term impacts of what this administration is doing. Cutting off the supply of drugs for HIV or halting a clinical trial potentially give a treatment for cancer.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
These people are in the middle of these trials and they're just stopping. So those are really short-term things.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Um, that's, that's not great business. You'd be waiting a long time for those drug companies to pick up all that basic research that governments like the United States have been covering for decades. And a lot of this stuff, you know, when it's dropped, it's really difficult to ever start it up again. You don't bounce back from this sort of, this sort of shock to the system.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
You know, there was a poll that Nature did recently. They've asked hundreds of scientists about, you know, what effect all of this chaos is having on them and their thoughts about their future. And 75% of these American scientists said they have been thinking about maybe moving forward.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
35 years of being a science writer. I haven't seen anything close to this.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Really, I mean, at this point, I'm thinking we're well on our way to the United States losing its prime position in science. All right.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
Maybe we can talk about happier things at another time, but this is what we need to be talking about now.
Radiolab
The Age of Aquaticus
It's like mostly blue, but then there's this subtle light blue. It's pretty funky.