Tag: NSF

Welcome to the (U.S. Science) Apocalypse

May 6, 2025

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.

Goodbye, American Science

Feb 26, 2025

By KIM BELLARD

Many people don’t realize it, but a hundred years ago America was something of a scientific backwater. Oh, sure, we had the occasional Nobel laureate, but the center of science was in Europe, particularly Germany. Then in the early 1930’s the Nazis decided that “purity” – of political ideas, of blood – was more important than truth, making life uncomfortable at best and deadly at worst for their scientists. So hundreds of them fled, many of them ending up in the U.S. And – voila! – American science came of age and hasn’t looked back.

Until now. Now, I fear we’re going to suffer what Germany did, a brain drain that will bode well for some other country’s scientific fortunes.

Once of the first chilling announcements from the Trump Administration was that it was freezing NIH grants in order to ensure they were in compliance with Trump’s executive order banning DEI-related efforts. That froze some $1.5b in grant funding.

Piling on, the Administration announced that NIH grants would limit indirect costs to 15%. Sounds reasonable, you might say, but the vast machinery of U.S. biomedical research uses these “indirect” costs to fund the infrastructure that makes the research possible. Numerous state Attorney Generals immediately filed a lawsuit to block the cuts, claiming:

This research funding covers expenses that facilitate critical components of biomedical research, such as lab, faculty, infrastructure and utility costs. Without it, lifesaving and life-extending research, including clinical trials, would be significantly compromised. These cuts would have a devastating impact on universities around the country, many of which are at the forefront of groundbreaking research efforts – while also training future generations of researchers and innovators.

Oh, and on top of all this, as many as 1,500 NIH employees are in line to be laid-off.

Katie Witkiewitz, a professor at the University of New Mexico, lamented to The New York Times: “The N.I.H. just seems to be frozen. The people on the ground doing the work of the science are going to be the first to go, and that devastation may happen with just a delay of funding.”

Universities are similarly frozen, not sure when or how much money they can expect. The University of Pittsburgh has paused all Ph.D. admission, until it can better understand its funding future. One has to suspect it won’t be the only such program to do so, and we may never know how many would-be Ph.D. students will simply decide a future in U.S. science is too bleak to risk.

Crowd-Funding for Research Dollars: A Cure for Science’s Ills?

Nov 1, 2018

By Jai Ranganathan

Science in crisis

Scientists – and science generally – are in a moment of crisis on multiple fronts. The gap between science and society has grown to a chasm, with disastrous consequences for issue after issue. For example, just last month, Tennessee passed legislation permitting creation “science” into classrooms. On another front, the concern of Americans about global warming has dramatically declined over the past decade, despite the scientific consensus on the clear and present danger caused by climate change.

But science illiteracy in the general public isn’t the only crisis in science. Funding for research is becoming increasingly unattainable, with funding rates at their lowest levels in a decade at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the two most important American science agencies (see here and here for details). The situation in many other nations is no better. In Spain, for example, science spending by the central government has fallen by 20% since 2009. Even worse, research funding from traditional sources will likely be even harder to come by in the years to come due to ongoing economic instability around the world.

Open Access: The Next Steps

May 7, 2013• 2

By Andy Oram

A useful and well-written summary of open access to publications in the medical field triggered some thoughts I’d like to share. The thrust of the article was that doctors need more access to a wide range of journal publications in order to make better decisions. The article also praises NIH’s open access policy, which has inspired the NSF and many journals.

My additional points are:

Open publication adds to the flood of information already available to most doctors, placing a burden on them to search and filter it. IBM’s Watson is one famous attempt to approach the ideal where the doctor would be presented right at the point of care with exactly the information he or she needs to make a better decision. Elsewhere, I have reported on a proposal to help experts doctors filter and select the important information and provide it to their peers upon demand–a social networking approach to evidence-based medicine.

Not only published papers, but the data that led to those research results should be published online, to help researchers reproduce the results and build on them to make new discoveries. I report in an earlier article on this site about the work of Sage Bionetworks to get researchers to open their data. Of course, putting up raw data leaves many challenges: one has to be careful to deidentify it according to accepted standards. One has to explain the provenance of the data carefully: how it was collected and massaged (because data sets always require some culling and error-correction) so it can be understood and properly reused. Finally, combining different data sets is always difficult because they are collected under different conditions and with different assumptions.

Could Opening Up the Doors to the World’s Medical Research Save Healthcare?

May 3, 2013• 5

By John Willinsky

What if you had access to all of the medical research in the world? Or better yet, what if the physician treating your particularly complex or rare condition had access to the latest research? Or what if a public health organization in your community could access that research to inform policymakers of measures to advance public health?

“Wait,” you may think, “can’t they already access that research? Doesn’t the Internet make that possible?” While unfortunately the answer to the first question is “No,” fortunately the Internet can make such access possible. As it is today, most physicians and public health professionals have very limited access to health research, almost all of which is published online. Only about a quarter of the research published today ends up being available to those working outside of universities, where libraries subscribe to a good proportion of the research journals.

So, what are these health professionals missing? What difference to their work would access to research make? Cheryl Holzmeyer, Lauren Maggio, Laura Moorhead and I seek to answer these questions with a new National Science Foundation study for which we are currently recruiting physicians and staff of public health NGOs.

We seek to demonstrate the difference it makes to the daily work of these health professionals to have easy electronic access to all the biomedical and public health research – or at least that large proportion held by Stanford University Library – for a period of eleven months (with one month of limited access as a control). To assess the impact of this access, we provide participants with a special portal to the research literature and track when and what research is viewed, while following up with interviews on the use and value of this access.