Peter Hotez

And we do get the institution in trouble, but we need to know, you know, not on purpose, but it happens sometimes and you need to know that you have their backing.

And so I think the consequence of not doing this is the situation that we're in right now that allows bad actors or things like a Maha movement to tell the public that,

Scientists are bad guys and and biomedical scientists are bad guys.

Doctors are bad guys.

I mean, why did we become physician scientists, Eric?

I did it because, you know, back in the 1980s, I did my MD PhD in New York and I did it because I thought that was something noble, something heroic to make low cost vaccines for the world.

I still do.

Yeah.

And if young people feel that's not the case, then there's other things they can do.

Science is hard.

It's a hard path.

And they need to know we have their back.

Yeah, well, there's a couple of points there.

First of all, the stakes are high.

if we allow anti-science to go untethered and without accountability like it is right now, it dismantles our science infrastructure in the United States.

And eventually that globalizes as well.

I like to point out that

you know, our nation is built in part on the strengths of our research universities and institutions, right?

That's what gave us the Manhattan Project and victory in the Cold War, defeating AIDS, defeating cancer.

That's