Michelle Dang

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, the unprecedented and sometimes rather strange things that have been happening to science in the US recently. Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard, so they say. But recently they've also been courting some controversy. Rose Rimlett, Senior Producer at Science Versus, tell us about the milkshakes.

Okay, so time for some good news. But to get to the good news, we will need some more bad news. So grants looking into COVID research have been cut. And when your team at Nature asked...

Health and Human Services, why they told you the HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago, which is quite startling because according to the CDC, more than 6,000 people died from COVID in the U.S. in the past three months. And then there's folks with long COVID.

Right. Right.

There was another big reversal, which is that big chunks of this study called the Women's Health Initiative had also been on the chopping block. We've talked about this study on this show before. It's basically tens of thousands of women being tracked for more than three decades. Super, super important study. Certain parts of that study had been terminated.

But then there was this huge outcry from scientists saying, some senators, even some celebrities, and the department decided to refund it. This is a time, though, when a lot of researchers have been scared into silence. And, you know, I think as reporters, both of us have experienced this, where we'll reach out to someone who just says, not right now, I can't talk to the press.

But do you think this actually tells us that your best chance of getting research is to speak up in this moment, as hard as that might be?

And I think for some scientists, they might be feeling like, hey, I didn't sign up for this, you know, to be running these campaigns to try and get my funding back. In fact, we talked about this a little bit with Seema Lakdawalla, who's a virologist at Emory.

And nerds are fighting back with lawsuits too. So just this week, a bunch of researchers and physicians sued the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services over the cuts to grants for LGBTQ research. After the break, a controversial executive order. Some say it could stop critical research in its tracks. But others reckon that it just might save us from a new pandemic.

Plus, will all these cuts boost the economy? Coming up. Welcome back. Now, we're going to talk about a new executive order from the Trump administration that's got some scientists pretty nervous. And before we get into the details of the executive order, I just want to talk about a big part of the reason that it came down, which is because of this big and very interesting question of...

What started the COVID pandemic? So let's start here. Now, the truth is that we don't know exactly where the virus came from before it showed up in humans. But the best scientific thinking and what most virologists and epidemiologists think happened is that the virus came to us naturally through animals. And we're getting more and more evidence on this.

Despite that, President Trump and others have long theorised that COVID-19 started from a lab leak in China. Here's Nature reporter Max Kozlov again.

Wouldn't it be convenient that if... Have you gone to COVID.gov recently?

Yeah, and I do want to emphasize that a lot of the information on here right now is just truly misinformation.

And that's because this idea that the COVID virus leaked out of a lab is part of the explanation for this new executive order that came out just a couple of weeks ago. And what it does is it's putting a pause on what the administration is calling dangerous gain-of-function research. So think if you take a virus or a bacteria and you tweak it in a way that might make it more deadly or contagious.

And it's this kind of research that the Trump administration claims was happening in China and caused the pandemic. Now, the order says that federally funded research doing dangerous gain-of-function research has to stop for 120 days while the administration creates a new policy on this.

And if a scientist disobeys this order, it means they could be banned from receiving federal funding for up to five years.

So halting dangerous gain-of-function research, that might seem like a good idea, but Seema, the virologist from Emory University, along with other virologists, are saying that the wording of this order is so vague that they're worried a bunch of really important research is going to be affected here.

Yeah, so scientists tweak viruses and bacteria for all kinds of reasons. to help us understand the risks of bird flu, for example, or to study superbugs. There's even cancer research that alters viruses so that they attack tumors, which is very cool. But Seema's wondering, is all of that work going to be affected here? Does all of that work now have to be on pause? We just don't know.

And for Seema, what's a little frustrating here is that there's already a bunch of rules around how scientists do this kind of work. Even before Trump got in, the Biden administration introduced a new policy that added more scrutiny to this kind of research. Here's Seymour again, talking with our editor, Blythe Terrell.

That's right. Hopefully, we'll know more about what research is going to be affected when the new government policy comes out. And we did ask the Trump administration about some of the concerns here and didn't hear back. Here's Max again.

So finally, I want to go back to the cuts to grants and jobs in science to talk about the government's reasoning here, why they're doing this. I mean, the US has got a national debt of around $36 trillion. And the Trump administration says a big reason for these cuts is that they want to stop government waste and help the economy.

Thanks, Professor Andrew Fieldhouse, who's an economist at Texas A&M. And Andrew told me that for decades, since World War II really, there's been this idea that when the government invests in basic science, like how the body works or how atoms work, That gives us knowledge, which can potentially be used to help the economy.

So investing in rockets and space science decades ago ended up launching the current space economy, which the US government recently said adds more than $130 billion to the economy. Another example, the US government invests in understanding the basic biology of viruses, like coronaviruses. And it literally spends millions of dollars into mRNA vaccine technology that might have never worked.

But then 2019 rolls around.

So there are some obvious examples where investing in science has clear benefits for the economy. The internet is another classic example, which also started out through U.S. government money. But at the same time, it's pretty easy to find some projects that the U.S. government has funded recently and think, huh, that's no Apollo space mission.

Like take this one, Smart is the New Sexy, a study about the mating behaviour of chickadees. Or another paper that's about cannibalistic tadpoles. Every now and then a politician will find studies just like these and say, come on, science is having a laugh. This is a waste of taxpayer money.

So we wanted to know, when you don't cherry pick the obvious examples where science has made bank, or the curious examples where it's not so obvious where the benefit might be, does investing in science really boost the economy? Luckily, Andrew and a colleague at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finished a study that helps us answer this very question.

They looked through more than 70 years of data and used regression models to see when the US government put money into non-defence research and development in the past. So think the NIH, the NSF, NASA. What happened? That is... The government puts in a dollar of R&D funding, what comes out...

Yeah. The team found that for every dollar that the government spends on science, years down the line, the economy gets around $1.70.

And it's not just Andrew's work that finds this. In fact, one non-partisan think tank concluded that, quote, virtually every scholarly study examining the issue finds the same thing. Although the bang for your buck that you get from investing in science changes depending on the studies. Now, this isn't to say that every single research project is going to launch a new company for Elon Musk.

But it does tell us that however we've been funding science, it is to some extent boosting the economy. It's also been estimated that for every dollar spent on the National Weather Service, which has also recently had budget cuts, we get back about $74.

NOAA's budget is just under $7 billion, or at least it was, and the improvements it's made in predicting hurricanes has been estimated to save us about $5 billion every time there's a large hurricane.

Andrew says that the numbers you see for investing in science are better than anything else the government could be doing, better than investing in infrastructure even, which is why it's hard to understand the White House's proposed budget for next year. It would slash the National Science Foundation by more than 50% and the NIH's budget by 40%.

Now, some folks say that without this government funding, things are actually going to get better because the private sector and the free market can now do more efficient research. Andrew says that he hears this kind of thing all the time.

Why would they... care this much about a milkshake study.

Yeah. Andrew's research and others have found that public funding actually incentivises private firms to invest a bit more in R&D, which is partly because all this basic science has found cool shit that then companies invest in. But the thing is, when the public funding goes away, the private sector doesn't come to the rescue.

Companies are generally focused on investments that develop new products rather than exploratory basic science. And on top of that, you can't patent a lot of basic research because you're just working out how the body works or how the universe works. And you can't patent Uranus. Andrew told me that this idea that the private sector is going to foot the bill here, it's a fairy tale.

We talked about it. Why would big pharma with shareholders to look out for invest in research, basic research that may or may not go anywhere? And if it does, you can't patent it.

Another fairy tale down the drain.

Last month, economists in D.C. used Andrew's research to estimate that if there really were long-term 50% reductions in federal science funding, and this may not happen, but just as an example, it would make the average American approximately $10,000 poorer. Wow. So really, these cuts that are being proposed, you genuinely think it's going to mean less wages over time for the average American?

So bottom line, investing in science, even if it's not clear exactly what those nerds are up to with their cannibalizing frogs or whatnot, overall, it does pay off. And by cutting science, we might just be cannibalizing our economy. To cap this off, I went back to Max, reporter at Nature. Max, as we're winding down, what have researchers told you about how they're feeling right now?

And this idea that we may be heralding the end of America's fairytale science run, it's been on Seema's mind too.

And maybe whether the U.S. is a science superpower anymore isn't your priority in this moment. But what I keep coming back to is that unless other countries are going to start really investing in science, we all stand to lose out here, potentially having fewer new medicines, fewer breakthroughs. We'll definitely have less cool science. And to say the least, that's going to be a bummer.

That's Science Faces. This episode has 91 citations in it. So if you want to read more about how science can help to boost the economy or anything that we've talked about on the show, you can go to the show notes and there's a link to the transcript. Also, if you want to follow Max's reporting, just go to nature.com slash news. And I'd love to hear how you're feeling about science right now.

You can tell us on Instagram, we're science underscore VS. And also on TikTok, I'm at Wendy Zuckerman. Thank you. Thanks to Maya Golden-Krasner, Deputy Director at the Climate Law Institute at the Centre for Biological Diversity, who you heard at the start of the show saying that this has just been a daily stream of nightmare news. Also, thank you to Dr. Shea Wolf.

Special thanks to Lindsay Cherner and Whitney Potter. Also to the Zuckerman family and Joseph LaBelle Wilson. Mum, I cut the second Uranus joke. You were probably right. It was too many Uranus jokes. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

And wherever you do listen to us, please give us a five-star review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people find the show. And if you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.

So Kevin's findings are rather inconvenient to this story that they're pushing.

Yeah, because that is what... This episode is about what is happening in science in the U.S. right now. Because a few months ago, we reported on what some were calling a war on science. But there was a lot of confusion about what would be targeted. How bad is this going to be? And now it's becoming very clear what is going on. And I tell you, it's been a real... Milk shaker.

As the Trump government says that it is trying to reduce government spending and cut waste billions of dollars of funding into science research has been cut in many areas. We're going to tell you all about it. Because today we are talking about exactly what is going on with science, because it's not only about the muzzling and the cuts.

There's also been some curious executive orders affecting research. And we're hearing from a lot of folks who are really worried in this moment.

We're also going to tell you how some scientists have been fighting back. Plus, a big reason that the Trump government is making these cuts, as we mentioned, is to help the economy. So will it work? After the break. Welcome back. Today on the show, what's happening with science in the US. And to kick us off, let's first get a lowdown on what has been happening since we first covered this.

So we've called back someone on the show who has been following this really, really closely. And it's someone that you guys absolutely loved from last time, or at least one person on Instagram did.

What would have been like the nicest, the nicest comparison that someone could have given you?

PET scanners?

What did they want to know?

Give us the lowdown. What do we know now? What has been happening in just the last few months?

It would be great if science influenced more public opinion, in fact, if evidence influenced opinion.

And then let's look at climate change for a second, because that has also, that's another area that's been on the chopping block. NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been hit. There's been projects on weather forecasting, tracking the cost of climate disasters that have been retired. What have you heard about climate change research at the NIH?

You and your team have done a lot of work just trying to understand why these cuts are happening. And when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, the NIH told your team, you know, it's basically not a priority anymore to improve vaccine interest. Curious, in the middle of a measles outbreak.

And then research on LGBTQ folks, and particularly transgender folks, has been hit really hard. Grants around how taking hormones might affect your health, disease prevention, like HIV prevention. These are all examples of projects that have been cut, which the government had justified because they said research programs based on gender identity are unscientific.

But what's curious is that there is one study that the White House was very keen to fund when it came to trans folks. Tell us about that.

It is astonishing because if you're genuinely in a place where you don't want to be funding trans research because it's the minority of the population, many Americans are not trans, But then when we look at the research we do have, maybe out of those who regret surgery, for example, who have done surgery, it's maybe 1% of trans folks will regret it. And that's important to know.

But it's a minority of a minority.

By the way, we also reached out to the NIH about these cuts and they told us that the, quote, NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities. And then just something else that I'm starting to see is scientists beginning to calculate or at least get their head around some of the consequences of the cuts that the US made to international aid.

So... Recently, there was some researchers that tried to put figures around how many people might die because of those cuts to programs like USAID. So what these researchers estimated is if they just looked at the expected increased cases of HIV, tuberculosis, and deaths from unplanned pregnancies, so from unsafe births, unsafe abortions...

They predict that around 25 million people could die in the next 15 years if the U.S. pulled back all of its global health funding.

And on that point, I mean, I should say that this has been on the US for a long time now and the whole world has been used to that. There's other countries that could be replacing the US and could be putting money into international aid.

This just comes at a time when the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland have also said they might cut contributions, which tells us this is part of a... Just a bigger story here.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

All day long?

49.

One in six people are narcissistic.

Yes. Scientists are getting excited here. Whoa. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, this idea isn't totally wild. Remember how creatine works to help you build muscle because you're better at recycling that fuel, ATP? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the brain also uses ATP. So Ali Gorjanejan, a physicist from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Germany, figured... We thought, okay, when that is working for the muscles, why not for the brain? So Ali wanted to know if creatine could really boost your brain power. And for this study, he wanted to get the brain when it's at its worst and really needs that fuel.

And the totally exhausted, totally stressed state that he studied was the sleep deprived brain.

Uh-huh. And so one evening, Ali brought 15 people into the lab and ran a bunch of tests on them. In one of these tests, he's looking at reaction times. So a green dot lights up on a screen, and you have to press a clicker as soon as you see it. But you get tired and more tired and you get really crappy at this.

So there's also memory tests he did, stuff like that. And then Ali had to make sure that these folks didn't sleep. And for those who were struggling to stay awake, he had a cheeky trick.

You debated about politics.

On top of the annoying chats throughout the night, Ollie's taking MRI scans and repeating those cognitive tests once at midnight, at 2 a.m. and at 4 a.m. And, you know, these people are really dedicated to They all came into the lab to do this on a second night again. So each person got one night on creatine, another on placebo. They didn't know which they were getting each time.

Well, very on theme, it was late at night when Ali tallied up the results and he got so excited. Creatine was actually doing something.

Those taking creatine on average did significantly better at both the memory test and the clicker test.

Through those MRI scans, Ali was also able to see that brain creatine levels increased and went up over time. and that the brain was using them up throughout the night. That's so cool that they could see it in the brain scanners. Yeah, so he had total proof that this is what was happening. But you have to know that Ali gave the people in the study a huge dose.

Most people suggest that you need to take around like five grams a day. He gave them around five times that.

Yeah. But hey, it worked. And Ali's study has created this huge buzz online. You've got folks like Joe Rogan talking about it, but it is a small study. And so before I started smashing half a glass of white powder, I went hunting for other studies looking into creatine in the brain and came across this very interesting one by Julia Fabian-Sandkuhler.

At the University of Bonn, also in Germany. So Fabienne and her team recruited 123 healthy people and had them take creatine for six weeks. She also had those same people take placebo for six weeks to compare. And Fabienne thinks this is the largest study on creatine supplementation and the brain that we have so far. She did a bunch of cognitive tests on them.

Stuff like you heard before, things that look at memory, but also intelligence and reasoning. For example, they did this one test called the backward digit span test.

Okay, I want to give you digits. You have to repeat it back to me, but backwards. Okay. And I'm going to add a digit until you mess up.

Two.

It was 2-3, wasn't it? So you did almost average. On average, people can do about five digits pretty well. Uh-huh.

So Fabian looked at the results before and after creatine, and on average, no, it didn't help. Some people got a little boost compared to when they were on the placebo, but overall, it wasn't statistically significant. Aww. Yeah. So people online say it's amazing, brings you this giant boost in mental clarity and energy. Uh-huh.

Fabienne says you should know it's not anywhere near that big of a jump. Like suddenly they can do like quantum physics.

Right. And I've been taking it. Blythe has been taking it. We've been exercising and we haven't really noticed much of anything. Here's Blythe. How do you feel mentally?

So Ali's study was really when the brain was at its worst, right?

And maybe that's where creatine does its best work for the brain. Because there's been other studies showing that creatine can help with the brain in other stressed-out states, like helping with recovery after a stroke or concussion, and maybe even depression. Yeah.

A study published just this year on 100 folks with pretty nasty depression found that taking creatine along with cognitive behavioral therapy helped folks more than just CBT and a placebo. Huh, interesting. And even just for older folks. A recent review suggested that maybe it's more effective in boosting the memory of older adults compared to younger adults.

But as for those online influencers who are like, everybody take this, everybody boost your brain, do a better job at work, that's... Probably overstated.

So we know from the hundreds of studies on creatine that it's safe on the recommended dose, three to five grams a day. One thing on the internet I hear a lot that people are worried about is putting on weight and bloating regularly. We think this sometimes happens because, as you heard before, creatine does this thing where it brings water into muscle cells.

So muscles around your body are holding on to a bit more water than it normally would. This can lead to that bloaty feeling. And that water retention might lead to a bit of weight gain on the scales.

But if this happens to you, you should feel back to normal pretty quickly. Okay. There's also this big idea that you'll get dehydrated from creatine. So people online say, like, drink tons of water to make up for this. But Darren, our bodybuilder, says you don't have to worry about this.

Just quickly, some people don't seem to digest creatine very well. You can get a bit of diarrhea or feel uncomfortable in your gut. Darren is actually one of these people. He said he gets gassy on creatine and he's tried all kinds of different forms of creatine to help, but nothing did. And

Also, if you're someone who has any kind of kidney conditions, you maybe shouldn't take creatine because it's going to give your kidneys a lot of extra work. But if your kidneys are healthy, that three to five gram dose should be perfectly fine for you. That's great. And if you do want to try this for your muscles, there's no need to be taking more than the recommended dose.

Yeah, people claim you should take this loading phase of 20 to 25 grams of creatine a day for a week so that you saturate your muscles faster. And then you drop down to that lower dose. But Darren's actually said you don't need to do this. It's not necessary. He did a study on this looking at how much creatine came out of people's pee when they started their creatine regimens with a loading phase.

Yeah. But bottom line, capping off this episode here, having done the research, for me, creatine isn't mind-blowing, but it's safe and it might boost some muscle. So I think it might be a helpful tool in the gym. I plan to keep trying it out and see if it works for me.

Wendy, there are 65 citations. 65 citations. Yes. And if people want to see them in all of their glory, where should they go? Please check out our transcript in the show notes. Michelle.

Science Versus. Science Versus is 10 years old. Crazy. This show's been going for 10 years. It's bonkers. Well, you've been here for all those 10 years. How are you feeling?

Yeah, that is very nice symmetry to me. Oh, and there's something that you wanted to ask the audience about, right?

Yeah. So people should send us a voicemail or even a video. to our email at sciencevstteam at gmail.com. Or if you're in the US, you can call us and leave a voicemail at 774-481-1238. Those two things will be in our show notes. So head over there and send us a message.

Bye.

Well, I want to build muscle. Yeah. And I just kept hearing that creatine is like the supplement to take. And I figured like research is research. So let's find out if the hype is real.

Some people think it's a steroid, but it's not. It's actually something our body naturally makes from food. When you eat things like meat or fish, your body pulls together amino acids from it to actually create creatine. But people take supplements like that white powder you buy in the store because they want more of this stuff.

Is Creatine doing the heavy lifting here? Yeah. Speaking of huge muscles, we got to go talk to Darren Willoughby, who's a professor of anatomy at Baylor College Medicine in Texas. Not just any exercise nerd, Darren's also a former bodybuilder, which means lots of skimpy outfits.

Let me show you what he looked like last time he won a competition. This was back in 2018. Wow. I mean, he's huge.

Yeah, so Darren's been studying creatine for a while. It was back in the 90s. He started hearing whispers about creatine's powers.

So Darren wanted to know, does creatine actually work? Does it build muscle? So to find out, he got 22 men, split them into two groups. One got creatine and one got placebo. And for three months, every few days, they did this lower body workout, lots of leg presses, but they took it a step further.

and looked inside the mussels themselves by grabbing a giant needle and ramming it into their upper thigh. He showed me what one of these looked like.

Yes, he did see a difference. So he took out a bit of muscle from them, did this chemical analysis, and found more of these muscle proteins, one called myosin heavy chain and another one called myofibrillar protein. And there was more of this stuff in the people that took creatine. meaning that their muscles had grown, indeed grown more. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, like the density of the muscles growing. You have more units of this microscopic muscle that's actually being grown and built. And the people in the study were feeling a bit stronger too.

Well, Darren said it's not physically building muscle for you. Instead, it works by getting you extra energy during your workout. So like as you're working out, you're rapidly using up fuel in your body, which is ATP or adenosine triphosphate. Uh-huh. And your body like eats it up really quickly, runs out of ATP, and then needs to recycle it to use it again.

And what creatine does is help that recycling process happening faster.

Yeah, and another really interesting thing that Darren's study tried to sort out is this question of whether creatine actually helped grow muscles or if maybe it just kind of makes them look bigger. What do you mean? It's because of this other thing creatine can do in our bodies. So when we bring a bunch of creatine into our muscles, it can bring water in with it. Here's Darren.

Which would mean maybe your muscles get plumped up, but you're sort of tricked into thinking it's muscle gain when it's really just this water that's hanging around in there.

Exactly. It looked like at least some of the gain was real muscle. And some studies in older folks have also found that creatine really can help build muscle too.

Well, this new study came out suggesting that the question of how much of the gains you see with creatine are water weight versus actual muscle growth hasn't been fully solved. But, you know, we spoke to the author of the study and he basically told us that when you zoom out and look at the bulk of studies on creatine, it shows creatine can help build muscle. But the question is, how much?

If you're a gym girly with a flat ass, I have a supplement that will help.

So did you notice that Darren said that even in his study when creatine made people stronger, it wasn't a dramatic difference?

That's what a lot of these studies find. Creatine can work, but it's not this huge change. Like it's not a night and day difference from how you were working out before. Darren told me maybe I'll help you do like two to three extra reps, like a few extra push-ups or lifts per set at the gym.

And one review of 10 studies that followed people for different times, about a week all the way up to a year, imaged their muscles and found that creatine compared to placebo increased the thickness of their muscles by about a tenth of a centimeter.

Yeah. Right. So these differences are not huge. And, you know, these extra reps you can do thanks to creatine, it might add up for some people. Darren reckons it's worth trying. Right. But big picture here, let me tell you about the Olympics. They have this huge list of banned substances. You can't use steroids or this and that, but you can use creatine. It is not a banned substance.

Yeah, it's not a banned substance. And some have suggested that this is because it's a naturally occurring substance that the body makes from food. However, we also reached out to the World Anti-Doping Agency and asked them, like, why isn't this stuff banned? And they told us there's this criteria for banning substances. One is, quote, it has the potential to enhance sport performance.

And they told us that creatine does not satisfy that. Criteria. Interesting. We followed up and said, you know, triple checking here. Are you sure? Creatine does not have the potential to enhance sport performance. And they wrote back, it is not considered sufficiently performance enhancing.

Go for it. Exactly. Even the U.S. anti-doping agency, which also doesn't ban creatine, says, quote, end quote. Hmm. And this takes us to another really important point about creatine. The reason those effects are not guaranteed is that we know from the research there are some people who don't respond to creatine. So people who don't even get those small benefits that we talked about earlier.

For example, there was one small study that found about one in four men didn't respond, and we think it might be even worse for women. Oh, how come? Maybe because the hormone fluctuations with the menstrual cycle affect our uptake of creatine, but we're not really sure yet. And while Wendy, I've been taking creatine and Blythe, our editor, has also been taking creatine.

And speaking of all this like booty growing, she's been doing this workout program called the Brazilian Booty Lift.

Yeah. Here's a snippet of how it's going. Do you feel any differently at the gym?

And, you know, I've been taking it too. And me and Blythe, we're just an N of two. But I haven't noticed a difference either while taking creatine. But just because we haven't experienced a difference doesn't mean like you, listener, won't.

get so huge like they'll have this before and after and they say the only thing that's changed is creatine why why are they so swole all of a sudden well one they could be exaggerating like how fast it took them but it's also possible that some people like are responding really well to creatine but kind of in a psychological way too

Darren told me that when you go to work out, you could be physically working harder because you think like, oh my God, this creatine is amazing. Here's Darren.

Exactly. Okay.