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Science FTW

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By KIM BELLARD

Science won. At least, that’s one of the takeaways from last week’s midterm elections. If you were one of the 124 million Americans who voted, you probably already know that there was a Blue Wave, with resounding Democrat victories across the country, even in historically red areas.

Georgia not only reelected its Democrat Senator – no surprise — but also elected a Democrat Governor, who will be the first black woman governor in the country, no less. Iowa elected a Democrat Senator and Governor. South Carolina is sending a Democrat to the Senate, and Mississippi – Mississippi!!! – may as well. Even Kansas elected a Democrat Senator, the first such in almost 100 years. Ohio and Texas not only flipped their Senators and Governors but Democrats won all the statewide elections.

Truly strange times.

I’m allowing myself to hope that we’ll finally have a Congress that will fulfill its constitutional duties of acting as a counterbalance to the power of the Presidency, but one thing I’m particularly excited about is the prospect these results will be less about being a Blue wave than what The Washington Post called a “STEM wave.” Among the newcomers to Congress are a record number of physicians and scientists. They’re going to have their hands full.

Much has been written (including by me) about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science. Just last week The New York Times reported on How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine. Amid cuts in research grants, resignations and firings of top scientists, departures of leading scientists to other countries, and reductions in Ph.D. students, the Defense Department warned that its “innovation engine is at risk of stalling.” Even people who aren’t defense hawks should realize that spells big trouble for American science in general, and for all of us.

A year ago I wrote about how organizations like 314 Action and Stand Up for Science were leading the resistance to the attacks on science. 314 Action, for example, spent some $23 million on pro-science candidates, doubling its 2024 donations. Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, told Alexander Nazaryan of The New York Times that the election results, especially the incoming scientist lawmakers, represent “a real repudiation of what has been two terrible years for science and public health.”

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Putting the “AI” in “Legal” (and “Health Care”)

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By KIM BELLARD

I once again have to thank The New York Times for introducing me to a new concept. Sarah Kessler wrote about the rise of “legal engineering” – for which, it turns out, one doesn’t have to be either a lawyer or an engineer.

Their role is to help integrate A.I. into the practice of law, whether at law firms or companies. That sure sounds like a prudent, if possibly belated, idea – and one suspects we’re going to see such “engineers” in other fields. I certainly hope that healthcare is one of them, sooner rather than later.

Irene Liu, the executive director of the A.I. initiative at Stanford Law School, explained the job to Ms. Kessler thusly: “If you were to just put it into an equation, it’s law plus technology plus business process.” That Venn diagram gets pretty small very quickly.

Mary O’Carroll, the C.E.O. of LegalEng Consulting Group, also explained the role to Ms. Kessler: “You don’t necessarily need a giant pyramid of lawyers anymore. People who have this kind of skill set don’t have to have a J.D., and they don’t have to be software engineers, but there’s business process re-engineering, or this M.B.A. type skill, that I think is really necessary.”

Ms. Kessler notes that they are sometimes referred to as “knowledge and innovation counsels,” “innovation attorneys,” or “legal applications engineers,” which may illustrate that the role is both new and evolving.

If you’re considering why this role is important, note that the 2026 Legal Industry Report from 8am™ found that 69% of legal professionals report personally using Generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude for work-related purposes, up from 31% a year earlier.

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I’d Like Some Choices, Please

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By KIM BELLARD

Let’s say your favorite social media platform is bought by a right wing trillionaire, who espouses free speech, but only when it echoes his. You can switch to, say, Threads, but – whoops – that’s owned by Mark Zuckerberg, another of the super-rich who have turned to the right. There’s always Facebook but – damn! – Zucked again! So you migrate to Bluesky, where the discourse is more civil but the audiences admittedly smaller. At least you have some choices.

Not so much if, say, you are the President of Ukraine. Ukraine has unexpectedly held off the much bigger Russia for over four years now, in the process reinventing modern warfare by turning it from the traditional men, tanks, and artillery to a technology-powered war, especially with drones. To do so, it relied heavily on Starlink and its Pentagon-version Starshield. Unfortunately, Ukraine was blindsided a couple weeks ago when Starlink speeds were drastically lowered. Drones were literally falling out of the sky.

President Zelensky raised the alarm. Secretary of State Rubio said he thought software “glitches” were to blame, but most people suspected either Starlink’s owner Elon Musk and/or President Trump. Mr. Musk pointed fingers at the Pentagon, President Trump blamed Mr. Musk, and for several days Ukraine was hampered. Finally Mr. Musk admitted he’d ordered the slowdown, saying Ukraine had violated the “terms of service” of the service, using it “for offensive drone strikes to kill people.”

Note that Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on military technology, wrote on social media “we are PHYSICALLY UNABLE TO USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes or medium-range strikes.”

The “loophole was closed last week,” according to both Mr. Musk and President Zelensky, with normal speeds resumed, but if you were President Zelensky you’d sure have to be looking for alternatives, as you’d never know when the equally mercurial Mr. Musk or President Trump might pull another Lucy on you (Gen Z: check your “Peanuts” references).

Unfortunately, there really aren’t any, and that’s a problem.

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Enough of Asshole Capitalism

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By KIM BELLARD

I recently read both Plastic, Inc. (Beth Gardiner) and These Are the Plunderers (Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner), and, boy, am I mad. Nothing in either book really came as a surprise, but the degree to which some people are willing to be greedy at the expense of others is still daunting. The latter introduced me to the phrase “Asshole Capitalism,” a phrase that comes from the work of Aaron James, a philosophy professor at University of California, Irvine. It can be summed up as a system where “citizens feel entitled to unlimited personal enrichment even at social cost.”

In other words, capitalism. No wonder a recent survey found that 43% of U.S, adults view socialism favorably (although Vice President J.D. Vance finds it a hard term to define and seems to think it has to do with foreign workers and transgender athletes).

Plastic, Inc. tells the story of how, over the course of several decades, the petrochemical industry has worked to have us consume ever more plastic while not only absolving themselves of the responsibility for what happens to all that plastic but also boldly attempting to make consumers feel guilty about not doing a better job of recycling it. Those of us of a certain age might remember the “Crying Indian” littering ad. Well, that ad was sponsored and paid for by the industries that were producing the litter.

These Are the Plunderers shows how private equity firms blithely take companies and strip them of valuable assets, enriching themselves while often essentially destroying the companies. The authors focus much attention on healthcare, such as nursing homes or emergency room staffing, in which private equity ownership leads to demonstrably higher costs, job cuts, and worse care, while making boatloads of money for the private equity owners. Manufacturing, retailing, and other industries have also had victims.

Capitalism is replete with disregard for the common good. E.G., the fossil fuel industry giving us cheap gas without being responsibly for the ensuing climate change, mining companies that strip the earth while wrecking ecological damage on the environment, or manufacturers that pollute their local communities then close the factories when asked to clean up their waste. Capitalism has a very bad habit of not recognizing either costs imposed on others or costs to clean up their actions. It’s someone else’s problem, and that someone else usually ends up being those of us who pay taxes, or whose health is deemed unimportant.

Cancer alley is no secret, nor are the health risks of the fracking craze that has supercharged the profits of oil & gas companies. We’re becoming more aware of how pervasive microplastics are, and just starting to realize how bad that is for us.

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It’s Only a Subsidy If You’re Poor

By KIM BELLARD

Even though most ACA enrollees/would-be enrollees have made their 2026 enrollment decisions assuming the expanded premium subsidies are not going to be renewed, the renewal of those subsidies is not entirely dead. Last week the House narrowly passed an extension, relying on a discharge petition and 17 Republican Congressmen willing to go against their leadership. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), of all people, is leading an effort to come up with a bill to expand them as well.

Whether it will eventually get passed is uncertain, as is how/when it might be reconciled with the House bill, and the President might just veto whatever extension might manage to emerge. The expanded subsidies aren’t dead yet, they’re just “mostly dead,” as Miracle Max would say.

The seeming indifference to the concerns of over twenty million ACA enrollees is appalling, but in character. This is an Administration and a Republican Congress that doesn’t like SNAP, Medicaid, school lunches, or aid to starving people in Third World countries, among other things. If you’re poor, they think, too bad; get a job, or a better job, and pull yourself up yourself. No handouts.

If they were against federal subsidies generally, out of fiscal prudence or other guiding principles, I could respect it. I wouldn’t agree with it, but it’d at least be intellectually honest. The trouble is, they’re not against subsidies per se; they just don’t like them going to poor people. I.e., the ones who need them most.

What set me off on this was a ProPublica/High Country News investigation into grazing on public lands. If you live in the East you probably don’t think much about either grazing or public lands, but if you live in the West you are probably very familiar with both. Almost 50% of land in Western states is federally owned. It ranges from 85% in Nevada to 4% in North Dakota. Almost half of California is federal land. You might be forgiven if you assume federal lands must be national parks, but they are small relative to land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

According to ProPublica: “The federal government allows livestock grazing across an area of publicly owned land more than twice the size of California, making ranching the largest land use in the West.” Well, you might think, that’s not inherently bad; we might as well use the land for something, maybe even make a little money from it. That’s the problem; the federal government is practically giving it away. Its analysis found that the grazing fees charged amount to a 93% discount relative to the market rate. You read that right: ninety three percent. That’s not a discount, that’s a giveaway.

OK, that’s eye-opening, but if it helps a bunch of ranchers who are struggling to survive, maybe that’s not so bad; ranching goes back to frontier days and has a certain cowboy appeal. Unfortunately, that stereotype isn’t quite true.

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We Should Write a Really Stern Letter

By KIM BELLARD

On the heels of the disastrous floods in Texas, days away from the Hurricane Katrina twenty year anniversary, and with Hurricane Erin almost becoming another Hurricane Sandy, the dedicated employees at FEMA are worried. Very worried. They’ve got a President who repeatedly has called to dismantle the agency, a DHS Secretary who is more interested in photo ops and slow walking expenditure requests, and an acting administrator who has no experience in emergency management. Oh, and they’ve suffered losses of about a third of their workforce.  

So some of the more outspoken employees have written a letter.  That should do the trick.

The letter, which they call the FEMA Katrina Declaration, was signed by almost two hundred current and past employees (although only three dozen allowed their names to be public). They charge:

Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator. Decisions made by FEMA’s Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Administrator (SOPDA) David Richardson, Former SOPDA Cameron Hamilton, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem erode the capacity of FEMA and our State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) partners, hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management.

The letter goes on to list “Six Statements of Opposition,” calling to reverse various actions the Administration has taken that they believe impairs FEMA’s ability to fulfill its mission. Each seems perfectly reasonable, and none seems likely to result in action, at least unless/until disasters strike enough red states to force action.

FEMA spokesperson Daniel Llargues was not impressed, responding: “It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo. But our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems.”

I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to the letter, except it comes two months after some 90 NIH scientists issued their “Bethesda Declaration” to protest what has been happening to the NIH so far in the Trump Administration. Addressed to Director Jay Bhattacharya, it declared:

For staff across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe. Keeping NIH at the forefront of biomedical research requires our stalwart commitment to continuous improvement. But the life-and-death nature of our work demands that changes be thoughtful and vetted. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources.  

The Declaration lists five categories of cuts the Administration has taken, about which they warn: “Combined, these actions have resulted in an unprecedented reduction in NIH spending that does not reflect efficiency but rather a dramatic reduction in life-saving research.”

Amen to that.

Director Bhattacharya was somewhat more respectful than Mr. Llargues in his response, claiming: “The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.”

I don’t believe him. This Administration does not recognize any dissent as “respectful.”

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Après AI, le Déluge

By KIM BELLARD

I have to admit, I’ve steered away from writing about AI lately. There’s just so much going on, so fast, that I can’t keep up. Don’t ask me how GPT-5 differs from GPT-4, or what Gemini does versus Genie 3. I know Microsoft really, really wants me to use Copilot, but so far I’m not biting. DeepMind versus DeepSeek?  Is Anthropic the French AI, or is that Mistral?  I’m just glad there are younger, smarter people paying closer attention to all this.

Still, I’m very much concerned about where the AI revolution is taking us, and whether we’re driving it or just along for the ride. In Fast Company, Sebastion Buck, co-founder of the “future design company” Enso, posits a great attitude about the AI revolution:

The scary news is: We have to redesign everything.

The exciting news is: We get to redesign everything.

He goes on to explain:

Technical revolutions create windows of time when new social norms are created, and where institutions and infrastructure is rethought. This window of time will influence daily life in myriad ways, from how people find dates, to whether kids write essays, to which jobs require applications, to how people move through cities and get health diagnoses.

Each of these are design decisions, not natural outcomes. Who gets to make these decisions? Every company, organization, and community that is considering if—and how—to adopt AI. Which almost certainly includes you. Congratulations, you’re now part of designing a revolution.

I want to pick out one area in particular where I hope we redesign everything intentionally, rather than in our normal short-sighted, laissez-faire manner: jobs and wealth.

It has become widely accepted that offshoring led to the demise of U.S. manufacturing and its solidly middle class blue collar jobs over the last 30 years. There’s some truth to that, but automation was arguably more of a factor – and that was before AI and today’s more versatile robots. More to the point, today’s AI and robots aren’t coming just to manufacturing but pretty much to every sector.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned:

The economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive, the most quickly. We’re talking about whole categories of jobs, where — not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four — half of the entry-level jobs might not be there. It will be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade in automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the nineties — but ten times, maybe a hundred times more disruptive.

Mr. Buttigieg is no AI expert, but Erik Brynjolfsson, senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is. When asked about those comments, he told Morning Edition: “Yeah, he’s spot on. We are seeing enormous advances in core technology and very little attention is being paid to how we can adapt our economy and be ready for those changes.”

You could look, for example, at the big layoffs in the tech sector lately. Natasha Singer, writing in The New York Times, reports on how computer science graduates have gone from expecting mid-six figure starting salaries to working at Chipotle (and wait till Chipotle automates all those jobs). The Federal Reserve Bank of New York says unemployment for computer science & computer engineering majors is better than anthropology majors, but, astonishingly, worse than pretty much all other majors.

And don’t just feel sorry for tech workers. Neil Irwin of Axios warns: “In the next job market downturn — whether it’s already starting or years away — there just might be a bloodbath for millions of workers whose jobs can be supplanted by artificial intelligence.” He quotes Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook: “AI is poised to reshape our labor market, which in turn could affect our notion of maximum employment or our estimate of the natural rate of unemployment.”

In other words, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

While manufacturing was taking a beating in the U.S. over the last thirty years, tech boomed. Most of the world’s largest and most profitable companies are tech companies, and most of the world’s richest people got their wealth from tech. Those are, by and large, the ones investing most heavily in AI — most likely to benefit from it.

Professor Brynjolfsson worries about how we’ll handle the transition to an AI economy:

The ideal thing is that you find ways of compensating people and managing a transition. Sad to say, with trade, we didn’t do a very good job of that. A lot of people got left behind. It would be a catastrophe if we made the similar mistake with technology, [which] that also is going to create enormous amounts of wealth, but it’s not going to affect everyone evenly. And we have to make sure that people manage that transition. 

“Catastrophe” indeed. And I fear it is coming.

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A New Future for DNA

By KIM BELLARD

As a DNA-based creature myself, I’m always fascinated by DNA’s remarkable capabilities. Not just all the ways that life has found to use it, but our ability to find new ways to take advantage of them. I’ve written about DNA as a storage medium, as a neural network, as a computer, in a robot, even mirror DNA. So when I read about the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project, last month, I was thrilled.   

The project was announced, and is being funded, by the Wellcome Trust, to the tune of £10 million pounds over five years. Its goal is “to develop the foundational tools, technology and methods to enable researchers to one day synthesise genomes.”

The project’s website elaborates:

Through programmable synthesis of genetic material we will unlock a deeper understanding of life, leading to profound impacts on biotechnology, potentially accelerating the development of safe, targeted, cell-based therapies, and opening entire new fields of research in human health. Achieving reliable genome design and synthesis – i.e. engineering cells to have specific functions – will be a major milestone in modern biology.

The goal of the current project isn’t to build a full synthetic genome, which they believe may take decades, but “to provide proof of concept for large genome synthesis by creating a fully synthetic human chromosome.”

That’s a bigger deal than you might realize.

“Our DNA determines who we are and how our bodies work,” says Michael Dunn, Director of Discovery Research at Wellcome. “With recent technological advances, the SynHG project is at the forefront of one of the most exciting areas of scientific research.” 

The project is led by Professor Jason Chin from the Generative Biology Institute at Ellison Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, who says: “The ability to synthesize large genomes, including genomes for human cells, may transform our understanding of genome biology and profoundly alter the horizons of biotechnology and medicine.”

He further told The Guardian: “The information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease.”

Professor Patrick Yizhi Cai, Chair of Synthetic Genomics at the University of Manchester boasted: “We are leveraging cutting-edge generative AI and advanced robotic assembly technologies to revolutionize synthetic mammalian chromosome engineering. Our innovative approach aims to develop transformative solutions for the pressing societal challenges of our time, creating a more sustainable and healthier future for all.”

Project member Dr Julian Sale, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, told BBC News the research was the next giant leap in biology: “The sky is the limit. We are looking at therapies that will improve people’s lives as they age, that will lead to healthier aging with less disease as they get older. We are looking to use this approach to generate disease-resistant cells we can use to repopulate damaged organs, for example in the liver and the heart, even the immune system.”

Consider me impressed.

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I’m Sensing Some Future

By KIM BELLARD

One of my frequent laments is that here we are, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, yet too much of our health care system still looks like the 20th century, and not enough like the 22nd century. It’s too slow, too reactive, too imprecise, and uses too much brute force. I want a health care system that seems more futuristic, that does things more elegantly.

So here are three examples of the kinds of things that give me hope, in rough order of when they might be ready for prime time:

Floss sensor: You know you’re supposed to floss every day, right? And you know that your oral health is connected to your overall health, in a number of ways, right? So some smart people at Tufts University thought, hmm, perhaps we can help connect those dots.

 “It started in a collaboration with several departments across Tufts, examining how stress and other cognitive states affect problem solving and learning,” said Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “We didn’t want measurement to create an additional source of stress, so we thought, can we make a sensing device that becomes part of your day-to-day routine? Cortisol is a stress marker found in saliva, so flossing seemed like a natural fit to take a daily sample.”

The result: “a saliva-sensing dental floss looks just like a common floss pick, with the string stretched across two prongs extending from a flat plastic handle, all about the size of your index finger.”

It uses a technology called electropolymerized molecularly imprinted polymers (eMIPs) to detect the cortisol. “The eMIP approach is a game changer,” said Professor Sonkusale. “Biosensors have typically been developed using antibodies or other receptors that pick up the molecule of interest. Once a marker is found, a lot of work has to go into bioengineering the receiving molecule attached to the sensor. eMIP does not rely on a lot of investment in making antibodies or receptors. If you discover a new marker for stress or any other disease or condition, you can just create a polymer cast in a very short period of time.”

The sensor is designed to track rather to diagnose, but the scientists are optimistic that the approach can be used to track other conditions, such as oestrogen for fertility tracking, glucose for diabetes monitoring, or markers for cancer. They also hope to have a sensor that can track multiple conditions, “for more accurate monitoring of stress, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other conditions.” 

They believe that their sensor has comparable accuracy to the best performing sensors currently available, and are working on a start-up to commercialize their approach.

Nano-scale biosensor: Flossing is all well and good, but many of us are not as diligent about it as we should be, so, hey, what about sensors inside us that do the tracking without us having to do anything? That’s what a team at Stanford are suggesting in A biochemical sensor with continuous extended stability in vivo, published in Nature.

The researchers say:

The development of biosensors that can detect specific analytes continuously, in vivo, in real time has proven difficult due to biofouling, probe degradation and signal drift that often occur in vivo. By drawing inspiration from intestinal mucosa that can protect host cell receptors in the presence of the gut microbiome, we develop a synthetic biosensor that can continuously detect specific target molecules in vivo.

“We needed a material system that could sense the target while protecting the molecular switches, and that’s when I thought, wait, how does biology solve this problem?” said Yihang Chen, the first author of the paper. Their modular biosensor, called the Stable Electrochemical Nanostructured Sensor for Blood In situ Tracking (SENSBIT) system, can survive more than a week in live rats and a month in human serum.

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Welcome to the (U.S. Science) Apocalypse

By KIM BELLARD

I’m starting to feel like I’m beating a dead horse, having already written a couple times recently about the Trump Administration’s attacks on science, but the hits just keep on coming. Last Friday, for example, not only did the Administration’s proposed 2026 budget slash National Science Foundation (NSF) funding by over 50%, but Nature reported that the NSF was ceasing not only making new grants but also paying out on existing grants.

Then this week, at an event called “Choose Europe for Science,” European leaders announced a 500 million euro ($566 million) program to attract scientists. It wasn’t specifically targeted at U.S. scientists, but the context was pretty clear.

Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, called the proposed budget cuts “a crisis, just a catastrophe for U.S. science.” Even if Congress doesn’t go along with such draconian cuts and grant approval resumes, Dr. Parikh warns: “That’s created this paralysis that I think is hurting us already.” 

One NSF staffer fears: “This country’s status as the global leader in science and innovation is seemingly hanging by a thread at this point.”

Nature obtained an internal NSF April 30 email that told staff members “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice.” Researchers can continue to spend money they’ve already received but new money for those existing or for new grants are frozen “until further notice.” Staff members had already been told to screen grant proposals for “topics or activities that may not be in alignment with agency priorities.”

NPR reports that some 344 previously approved grants were terminated as a result, as they “were not aligned with agency priorities.” One staffer told Nature that the policy had the potential for “Orwellian overreach,” and another warned: “They are butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Yet another staffer told Samantha Michaels of Mother Jones that the freeze is “a slow-moving apocalypse…In effect, every NSF grant right now is canceled.”

No wonder that NSF’s director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned last week, simply saying: “I believe I have done all I can.” 

If you think, oh, who cares? We still have plenty of innovative private companies investing in research, so who needs the government to fund research, then you might want to consider this: new research from American University estimates that even a 25% drop in federal support for R&D would reduce the U.S. GDP by 3.8% in the long term. And these aren’t one-time hits. “It is going to be a decline forever,” said Ignacio González, one of the study’s authors. “The U.S. economy is going to be smaller.”  

If you don’t believe AU, then maybe you’ll believe the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which estimates that government investments in research and development accounted for at least a fifth of U.S. productivity growth since World War II. “If you look at a long period of time, a lot of our increase in living standards seems to be coming from public investment in scientific research,” Andrew Fieldhouse, a Texas A&M economist and an author of the Dallas Fed study, told The New York Times. “The rates of return are just really high.”

It’s no wonder, then, that European leaders see an opportunity.

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