Derek Lowe
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Derek Lowe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's really a chaotic picture. I mean, it's very hard to tell. I don't think anyone really knows the full picture.
Oh, boy. Distressingly closely.
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,
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...
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.
So people are now trying to figure out how extensive these changes are and what else might have been scrubbed.
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.
We can screw it up forever.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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