Derek Lowe
Appearances
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
We have things going on for not only infectious diseases, up to and including HIV, but also things for various kinds of cancer that could be treated this way. And the NIH had a big hand in that.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Oh, we don't. That's 100% accurate. I mean, you look at some of the big advances over the past 20 or 30 years, things like CRISPR to edit genomes or mRNA as a therapeutic avenue. And you think, my God, you know, I remember working when we didn't know anything about this. God knows I remember working when we didn't know about it.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
And I think to myself, people 20, 25, 30 years from now will look back at us and they'll say, oh, those poor people. They didn't know about X or Y or Z. No wonder they weren't making progress against this disease. But now my fear is people 20 years from now will look back at us and say, man, I wish we'd been able to learn more, but everything stopped dead. God damn it.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
That is exactly what happens. I mean, he has lived his entire life on the applied end of it. And I should talk because that's where I've lived most of mine, too. In industry, we are driving toward the goal of finding a compound to affect this pathway, this protein, this enzyme in this disease. Very applied. But we are standing on the shoulders of a great deal of basic research.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
And some of that basic research looked pretty good. weird or obscure or even useless at the start. RNA interference, which is a tremendously useful research tool and is also the basis of marketed drugs, RNA interference started out when people had trouble explaining the colors of petunia flowers.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
And I'm sure Elon would have really had a good time making fun of these morons wasting public money trying to figure out why the petunia flowers turned out different than they expected them to. But you never know where this stuff is coming from.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Gila monster saliva. Boy, what a stupid idea. These people are out there taking swabs from lizard mouths and studying that. You can make fun of any of these things. William Proxmire used to be the senator from Wisconsin back in the 60s and 70s. He used to do that all the time.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
He had this thing he called the Golden Fleece Award, where he would pick the stupidest sounding research projects and talk about how those idiot eggheads are wasting your money studying, you know, mosquitoes and, you know, whatever, these tiny little fish that no one cares about. It's an anti-intellectual cheap shot.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I mean, if they had stopped that petunia flower experiment, how long would it have taken us to pick up on the mechanisms of RNA interference, et cetera, et cetera? It's really impossible to say. There are a lot of these studies that are never going to turn out to be much good for anything, but we don't know which ones those are.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Exactly. And I mean, at one drug company where I was working, they sent out a directive that we should try to concentrate on the studies that we thought were most likely to work. And we all looked at that and started laughing. I said, well, that is such a hell of an idea. If only. Yeah, if only we thought of that. Why don't you come down and tell me which ones are going to work? I had a fit.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I got up and more or less yelled at someone. from the main management saying, look, I don't care what it says on the org chart. My real bosses are a bunch of cells growing in dishes and a bunch of rats living in little cages, and they cannot be coached for success like your poster says over there. They do whatever they damn well want, and I have to listen to them.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I have a mixture of alarm and hope. The alarm is because, as we've mentioned, nothing like this has ever happened before. We've never had just a frontal sustained assault on the idea of government scientific funding. And that's just terrifying, and I think that's one of the things it's supposed to be.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
It is supposed to be terrifying and to leave the people involved confused, demoralized, shocked, upset. Well, it is doing that. But at the same time, there's a lot of pushback happening, both in public, in print, and especially in the courts. There are lawsuits flying so hard it looks like it's snowing, asking for injunctive relief, asking for blocks, for stays, for restraining orders.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
And that's what we're going to find out. Will that line of defense hold? I am hopeful that it will. If it doesn't, we're in big, big, big trouble.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
It's really a chaotic picture. I mean, it's very hard to tell. I don't think anyone really knows the full picture.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Yeah, I have been. I've had a number of them communicating with me over several different channels. Morale is as low as it could possibly be. There's just this tremendous amount of uncertainty and distress about what's happening. Nothing like this has ever happened before in these agencies. Everyone involved in these areas is just fearful of what might come next. Meanwhile, at the NSF,
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
They were told that they are looking to downsize between a quarter and a half of the entire NSF workforce. Wow. And the CDC has had a lot of its public-facing databases just taken down. These are vast amounts of public health data that have been accumulated, in some cases, over many, many years. Now, some of the pages on the CDC...
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Websites that went offline last week have since reappeared, such as the tool used to track rates of infectious disease. That disappeared, but it's now back. But some pages have been scrubbed of categories or words. There are a lot of people apparently working right now, like as of today, systematically comparing their archival versions with the updated datasets.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
So people are now trying to figure out how extensive these changes are and what else might have been scrubbed.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Yes. No doubt about it. Yes. And this is just a shame beyond my ability to express because the U.S., I'm not just waving the flag here. The U.S. really has been the world leader in so many areas of basic and applied science for so long that you get to think, well, it's just kind of a law of nature, isn't it? It's always been that way. It always will be. It doesn't have to be. We can screw it up.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Because I don't think that the amount of research is going to be the same if you take the US out of the equation. I don't think the rest of the world can or will suddenly rev up their own research spending to make up for the gap, the huge, huge gap that would be there if you took the U.S. out of the equation. It would be a loss for humanity.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I mean, they are a huge bureaucracy. I'm sure there are inefficiencies in there. I'm sure there are things that take longer than they should and could lose an extra layer of review or something like that. There's no doubt. But I think if you just come in and start hacking with a machete, thinking, well, odds are all the stuff I'm cutting away is just junk. That is going to lead to harm.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
So I feel positive that there are ways these agencies could run more efficiently. Problem is that a lot of the people, and not just now, a lot of the people come in talking about, we just want to make things more efficient, actually have other goals in mind.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Yeah, a lot. Because the way these grants are distributed, you don't always get these things in one big lump sum and go off and work for a few years. A lot of times these things are distributed in portions during the year. There are already people who were expecting to have their grant renewals in the works by now, and it's not. So you had a lot of people
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
doing research funded by these things who are like, how am I going to order supplies? How am I going to pay my graduate students on stipends or my postdoctoral people? What's going to happen to me? It's not like they're getting paid a hell of a lot of money to start with. They are going to have trouble making rent. So how long can you go on like that before you say, I can't. To hell with it.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I've got to go find a job somewhere. I hope I can find a job in industry, but if not, I'm going to find a job at the used car lot. I've got to survive. So you lose a lot of people like that. And getting the band back together after an event like that is not going to be so easy. If this goes on, the damage is going to be tremendous.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I mean, if you start talking about getting rid of a quarter to half of the National Science Foundation, if you start trying to shake out as many employees as you can out of the NIH, you're going to take the greatest success in publicly funded scientific research in history, and you're just going to completely brutalize it.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
I mean, the NIH does a lot of fundamental research in a number of disease areas. You just have to look at the institutes that are under the NIH umbrella. You have the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Cancer Institute, on and on and on.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
They do a lot of very important work themselves, and they fund a lot of very important work on these things. A lot of fundamental research where we're still trying to figure out the causes. And they also do things all the way up to the clinic. They fund some clinical trials of their own to try to answer questions that aren't getting answered. And the thing is, these things take a long time.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Scientific research is really slow. But if you stop it now, you might not even notice for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two, but then you'll start to notice because the progress will slow down. the ideas that get generated for new ways to study or treat these diseases start disappearing quietly, unobtrusively, everything gets smaller and poorer.
Today, Explained
Is science in danger?
Right. For example, some of the fundamental work on the idea of using mRNA vaccines and the hurdles that had to be overcome because it wasn't something that worked the first time. In fact, it didn't work for years and years and years. That came out, a good chunk of it, out of NIH-funded research.