One Simple Trick for Destroying US Leadership in Biomedical Sciences
A short post about a scheduling 'trick' that is weaponizing the requirement to announce review panels as a means to grind US science to a halt.
Want to know one simple trick for destroying American leadership in science? Read this from The Transmitter.
In brief, the WH and DOGE have not re-opened the science supply pipeline. Instead, they have halted the announcement of NIH scientific review panels in the Federal Register. These panels are responsible for evaluating proposals to advance health and biomedical research nationwide. Simple trick? Yes. Consequences? Enormous.
Without immediate action to restore scientific review, the current administration will set biomedical/health research groups in universities & institutes across the US on a pathway for implosion in ~6 months, undermining careers, projects, economies, and opportunities for discovery.
You may be interested in science or not. You may think that the federal government should be funding more or less science and perhaps even have thoughts about what kinds of science should be prioritized. But, the one thing we should be able to agree on is that research groups across the United States who have submitted grants to work on problems spanning drug-resistant microbes to cancer to heart disease to Alzheimer's and more (including basic research that makes it possible to step closer to ground-breaking discoveries) should be able to have a fair shot at competing in a *global* marketplace with the support of the NIH and other federal agencies.
The article from The Transmitter may seem complicated. It's quite simple. Without a notice of a meeting in the Federal Register, the panel cannot meet.
No panel, no review.
No review, no recommendations.
No recommendations, no awards.
No awards, no funds.
No funds, no support for the people and materials it takes to do science.
And science is hard, despite what some people might tell you. And we have been - in the US - extraordinarily good (even if imperfect) at doing science precisely because of the (relative) consistent, bipartisan support for science for 80+ years.
It may seem like a ‘missed meeting’, but without further delays, these missed meetings will mean labs nationwide will run out of money, which will mean layoffs, shuttered labs, and worse. If this continues, we won't have an extraordinarily good (even if imperfect) landscape for US science & the innovation economy that emerges from it. Instead, US science will be left behind, likely replaced by pseudoscience, as we watch as advances are made in other countries.
Update, 2/20: Nature now has a story out on this issue:
'Revealed: NIH research grants still frozen despite lawsuits challenging Trump order'
Joshua, this is an excellent essay, clear, concise and informative, and so are others on your substack. I shared it with my friends and included in emails to congress representatives.
Thank you
I'm waiting to see if my study section next week will meet or not, but I assume we won't know until shortly before. I already have put in ~40-60 hours of work reviewing the proposals (multiply that by 20-25 people on the study section). If it has to be rescheduled, there's a chance some people won't be able to participate (especially if this drags out into May or later), meaning their reviews will be thrown out. Who's going to volunteer to serve given these uncertainties?