People immersed in chaos try to solve for what it all adds up to. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: A scientist who is used to organizing data starts tracking scientific meetings that seem to exist only on paper—meetings that might decide the fate of years of research. The NIH website shows one reality; the empty conference rooms tell another story. She graphs the chaos. (9 minutes)Act One: American doctors returning from Gaza compare notes and start to see a pattern. (28 minutes)Act Two: A woman watches her partner get taken in handcuffs with no explanation. Days later, she spots him in the most unexpected place. The coordinates of her life suddenly don't make sense as she navigates the bewildering map of the US immigration system. (23 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.
Chapter 1: Who is Annika Barber and what chaos is she tracking in science funding?
It's This American Life. I'm Hannah Jaffe-Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. I've been talking to someone here and there over the last couple of months about a situation she's in. And I think she typifies the thing we're going to try to do in this episode. So I'd like you to meet her. Her name is Annika Barber. She's a scientist, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, a runner.
She's got purple hair. And a particular way of organizing the world around her. Her books, organized topically and then by height. Her lab, color-coded labels.
I also track how many days of the year my husband eats pizza and I make a chart of it. He's really into pizza. So sometimes I just like to have data.
Wait, wait, wait.
Why? Why do you do that? So my husband really can't go 24 hours without talking about pizza. So last year I accused him of talking about pizza every day and he swore he didn't. And I was like, I really think you do. And so starting in January of this year, I said that for 2025, I was going to log every day that I heard him say the word pizza as well as every time he ate pizza for the year.
He actually eats less pizza than I would expect for the amount he talks about pizza. Like the consumption to discussion ratio is not what I expected it would be. He's only had pizza 14 times this year.
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Chapter 2: What happened to NIH scientific meetings during the Trump administration freeze?
Lately, Annika has been trying to get her mind around a new situation that is deeply confusing for her and lots of people. She's tracking scientific meetings that are not happening. When President Trump was inaugurated, he put a freeze on research grants.
This meant the meetings where scientists like Annika get together at the National Institutes of Health to assess new research, they're called NIH study sections, those meetings were off. But then a judge said the administration couldn't pause all research grants, so the meetings were theoretically back on.
They were listed on an NIH website as scheduled, but Annika says they did not seem to be happening. The website showed they were, but scientists were saying they weren't. Scientists who had submitted grants literally had no idea if their grant had been reviewed and moved on to the next step of the funding process.
But Annika learned there was a place you could get a way better picture of whether a meeting was going to happen or had already happened.
I had never even heard of the Federal Register in my American taxpaying voting life. What is the Federal Register? The Federal Register is where all notices of open public meetings that may be happening in the federal government are required to be posted. And for some reason, NIH study sections do have to be posted to the Federal Register at least 15 days before they meet.
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Chapter 3: How did Annika Barber graph the chaotic state of NIH meetings and grants?
And if they're not posted to the Federal Register, they cannot meet. It's a strange feeling knowing you're in the middle of an upending. knowing that something fundamental to the way that you live is changing. But you can't understand or see the scale of change as it's happening. You just can't. You have to wait. What I like about Annika is she rejects this. She is not waiting.
Annika immediately began scraping data from federal websites, finding all the meetings that were supposed to happen, cross-referencing them with the Federal Register, reaching out to scientists to see if the supposedly scheduled meetings did in fact occur, compiled all that into a Google spreadsheet, and posted it online.
Anxious and confused scientists all over America began consulting Annika's spreadsheet and passing it around to see, is my study section actually happening? Has my grant been reviewed? Is there any point in submitting my next grant? Will I be able to keep my lab open?
There are tens of thousands of scientists whose grants depend on this happening who are all wondering what's going on.
How much science has not happened?
So let's see. Right now we are at 182 meetings that have not happened.
182 meetings. How many grants is that?
You know, if we assume roughly 100 grants would have gotten reviewed at each meeting, you know, we're talking about at least 18,000 grants that didn't get reviewed. Wow. Wow. And that's 18,000 grants across all kinds of things. I mean, you know, very basic science. You know, just scrolling through here, I've got things like adaptive immunity and bacterial virulence.
But then we also have things like addiction risk and learning and memory and decision making and therapeutic immune regulation. We have training neuroscientists and physician scientists. And we have studies looking at dentistry and eye diseases. Those aren't meeting.
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Chapter 4: What are American medical workers witnessing in Gaza during the war?
So will that stuff that you reviewed get funded? I don't know. Was there a part of you that felt like, are we chumps? Yes, absolutely.
You know, it feels like we're fiddling while Rome burns, talking about some cool genes and worms and mice and all the interesting genome-wide association studies that we could do if money keeps existing. And yeah, are we chumps? Are we participating in furthering something or nothing? Are we just wasting our time?
The thing that is killing her is not knowing the shape of the new normal. How many grants will now be funded compared to before? Half? A quarter? Which scientists will get funding? What kind of research? There's no data she can turn to that will tell her that.
And so I need the data of how bad is it? You know, I think a lot of us are used to approaching problems as something that we can...
not necessarily solve with data, but that we can find the edges of with data and get our arms around the problem and define the problem by figuring out what the data are and what the... But it might be possible that that's not going to happen in this case, that there might not be... That does say I'm starting to get that vibe.
Yeah, you know, it becomes one of those things where, you know, can you graph chaos? Maybe not. Can you feel better trying to graph chaos? Also, maybe not.
Will she continue to try to graph the chaos? Yes, she will. Today's show is full of people who do not wait for the chaos to settle. People who run toward it, who will take whatever little data they have available to them and try to make it make sense. These are people who get answers. Stay with us.
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Chapter 5: How many children have been injured by gunshots in Gaza according to US doctors?
You know, when people look at me, they assume I'm Palestinian or something, but I'm not. I lived in Haifa. That was from 2004 to 5. And I worked with, like, an Arab-Jewish cooperative that doesn't exist anymore. And during that time, I toured around in the West Bank. I was never able to go to Gaza, but toured around in the West Bank a lot.
So Mark sat next to Feroz. And when they arrived at the European hospital, that's the name of the hospital, in Han Yunis, in Gaza, their team dropped off their thousands of pounds of supplies. European Hospital was built for just over 200 beds, but is taking care of over a thousand people. And families are living in every corner of the hospital. Mark hadn't seen anything like it.
Froze hadn't either, but he told me he didn't linger on that long. A nurse took them on a quick tour, let them know where everything was.
The operating room, the ICU. The nurse that was showing us around didn't really speak English very well. And she just pointed at these two kids and just pointed at her head and said, shot, shot. There were four kids in the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head. I just thought that that was unbelievable. And I just assumed that she was just wrong.
I didn't think she was lying, but she was just incorrect. That probably was a shrapnel injury or something like that. But then I looked at these kids and they didn't have any other evidence of an explosive injury. And then we pulled up their CT scans and sure enough, it did look like they had been shot in the head.
And then we went on and found two more kids also shot in the head in the other ICUs.
This is like minutes into your initial tour of the hospital. You see two kids with gunshots to the head and then two more kids with gunshots to the head.
Yeah. For me, what struck me about it was just the fact that it had happened. I work in a pretty rough part of the country, so I do see children who get shot in the head.
Froese works at a hospital near Stockton, California, which has higher rates of violent crime than most of the country.
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Chapter 6: What do American doctors say about the targeting of children in Gaza?
So the next day, the eight-year-old girl had died and in the same bed is a 14-year-old boy shot in the right chest and the head. The next day, I said, I went through the ICU afterwards. The 14-year-old boy turns out to be 12 when his family arrived. So then, let's see, two days later, he's been replaced by a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. I wrote, he'll also die.
So then on that same day, I wrote, I took care of a two-year-old girl who was brought to the ED after being shot in the head. She arrived with bilateral fixed and dilated pupils, also a non-survivable brain injury. We then had a mass casualty event a few minutes later.
At the same time that Froese was starting to document this, Mark, working with his patients, he was seeing the same thing. He vividly remembered the day he saw two kids brought in who had both been shot in the head and the chest.
One of the kids was there with a family member. I ripped up his shirt and there was a bullet entry wound right over the heart. And then I picked up the dressings on his forehead and a second bullet went in right in front of his left ear hole, in front of his ear and out of his neck.
What was the kid doing when this happened?
Walking with their adult to get water.
Was there a street battle happening?
I didn't ask if there was a street battle going on, but it happened twice in the same day.
Could you say the second time?
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Chapter 7: How did the US government respond to doctors' reports of children shot in Gaza?
That's as far as Mark thought about it at the time. The detail of 13 kids, all with gunshot wounds to the head and chest, it just got added to the long list of things they saw in Gaza and couldn't fully understand. It didn't come back to Feroz until they were back home and got invited to speak at a conference in Dearborn, Michigan.
The panel had another American doctor who also volunteered in Gaza. He worked in two different hospitals a couple months before Feroz and Mark arrived.
He's a Palestinian-American in Chicago named Thayer Ahmed. And we were just sitting next to each other talking before our panel started. And I said, you know, I couldn't believe how many kids I saw shot in the head. I just went through my journal recently, and it was 13. And he said, oh, yeah, I know, me too. You know, almost every day I saw a kid shot in the head. And I was like, oh, okay.
And then Feroz texted me, hey, you know, this guy saw other kids shot. We have to find out who else saw other kids shot.
So I started asking other people who had been over there, physicians, nurses, midwives, nurse practitioners.
I got a call from Feroz Sidwa. I think like sometime in mid-July, he called me.
Dr. Adam Hamowy is a plastic surgeon from New Jersey.
And he said, like, did you take care of anyone with any gunshot wounds to the head or face? And I said, yes. And he said, really? How many?
Because of Adam's specialty, he would have only seen children who survived a gunshot to the head long enough to make it to reconstructive surgery. Not many did. He saw one. It was still shocking to him. Adam had served in Iraq as a surgeon in the U.S. Army. He treated lots of injured people, but what he was seeing in Gaza was different.
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