Thomas Lu
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Thomas Lu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's been three weeks since President Trump was inaugurated. And in that time, America's health and science institutions have been thrown into chaos. There's been funding freezes, communications gag orders, censorship of research. Things are moving really fast, and we still don't have a complete picture of exactly what's going on here.
But a lot of scientists are concerned about their research and their careers. Normally on Unexplainable, when we talk about why questions are still unanswered, it's because they're particularly hard to solve, even when scientists have all the time and the freedom in the world to work on them.
But we're dealing with a situation here where questions might start going unanswered because of attacks on science itself. It's feeling pretty unprecedented. So this week on the show, I'm going to do my best to tell you what's been happening and what it might mean for the future of scientific research. If you haven't been able to keep up, here's a quick recap.
On Inauguration Day, Trump issued 26 executive orders. But the ones on gender and DEI really set off alarms at science agencies.
In response to those orders, the National Science Foundation started circulating a list of keywords that could cause grants to be pulled. And the Centers for Disease Control told their scientists to retract and revise research that included terms like gender, pregnant person, LGBT, biologically female, all kinds of things.
The day after that executive order, a memo went out to all the health agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, the NSF, the CDC, and it banned all external communication unless it had been approved by the Trump administration. Next, the government issued a blanket ban on all federal grants.
Two judges blocked that grant freeze, but on Monday the 10th, one of them ruled that some of that money still hadn't been released. The order had been ignored. And researchers, like one clinical psychologist we spoke to, they're worried about the future of their funding.
Even after the judge's order, agencies like the NSF specifically said grants would be awarded, quote, in the context of recent executive orders, which has a lot of people thinking about that list of forbidden terms, especially when it comes to research on things like MPOCs or reproductive health. Like one researcher said in an interview with Katie Couric.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been telling researchers at the CDC what to study and what not to study. They've withheld research on bird flu and told scientists to do more research on the health effects of wildfires, at the same time that the president has been criticizing California's response to those wildfires.
And then finally, at the end of last week, the NIH announced its own major funding cut.
Like lots of things these days, that decision was temporarily blocked by a judge. But scientists, doctors, university administrators, they're confused. They don't know what kind of research is permitted. They're not sure how they're allowed to communicate. They have no idea if they're going to get paid.
That's Derek Lowe. He's been working in pharmaceutical research for over 30 years, and he writes In the Pipeline, which is one of the most influential and longest-running science blogs out there. Derek's got kind of an insider-outsider perspective on all of this.
He's super well-connected to researchers on the inside of the national science agencies, but because his research isn't funded by the NIH or the NSF, He's not financially tied to what happens. He doesn't have government grants that are going to get canceled here. And as someone who works on the applied side of science, he knows what can happen when basic research gets disrupted.
So he's been following the disruptions over the last couple weeks extremely closely.
So have you talked to people on the inside? Have you talked to people at the NIH or the NSF and what it's like over there?
Do you think this might lead scientists and researchers to try to go do their work in other countries?
Why do you think it matters whether the research is coming out of the US or somewhere else?
I'm curious if you think there are any inefficiencies in these agencies.
So there's a lot we don't know here, a lot of confusion. We don't know how much of this is going to get walked back. Some of it already has been walked back. Right. I'm wondering what kind of damage has been done already, like even if more things get walked back.
Thank you to the researchers who spoke with us about everything that's going on right now. Coming up in a minute, the ripple effects of a potential war on science.
Showing 1–20 of 28 · page 1 of 2
Next →