The War Keeps Raging Against Science

Strange things have been happening to science in the US. An executive order is freezing research, a website with once scientific information now looks kinda like it's advertising a reality show … even milkshakes have been caught in the fray. Milkshakes! On top of this, research projects studying everything from vaccine hesitancy to Covid-19 to climate change have been cut. The Trump administration says that a big reason for the cuts is to stop government waste and boost the economy. Today on the show: What is going on with science in the US right now, and will these cuts ultimately help the economy? To find out, we talk to Nature reporter Max Kozlov, virologist Dr. Seema Lakdawala and economist Professor Andrew Fieldhouse. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsWarKeepsRaging In this episode, we cover: (00:00) A Science Milkshake Up (08:04) Research on the Chopping Block (12:15) How the NIH Justifies Cuts (15:11) 25 million lives on the line (16:48) When Nerds Fight Back (24:46) ‘Dangerous’ Gain-of-Function Research Frozen (27:27 ) Does Science Boost the Economy? (36:05) Losing a Science Superpower? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact Checking by Sam Lemonick. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Emma Munger, Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, So Wiley and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Maya Golden-Krasner, Deputy Director at the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity – who you heard at the beginning of the show, saying this is just a daily stream of nightmare news, and also thank you Dr Shaye Wolf. Special thanks to Lindsey Cherner and Whitney Potter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman and you're listening to Science Versus.

• 0:05Wendy Zukerman?

  Today on the show, the unprecedented and sometimes rather strange things that have been happening to science in the US recently.

• 0:21Wendy Zukerman?

  Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard, so they say, but recently they've also been courting some controversy. Rose Rimler, senior producer at Science Versus, tell us about the milkshakes.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so this all started a couple of months ago. Researchers at the NIH, that's the National Institutes of Health, they published a study where they gave people ultra-processed milkshakes. So these are vanilla shakes, they were loaded with fat and sugar, like all milkshakes, but also emulsifiers and artificial flavorings, that kind of stuff. And then they put these people into PET scanners.

• 0:55Wendy Zukerman?

  PET scanners? They're scanning their brains? What did they want to know?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  They were testing out this idea that certain foods might be as addictive as drugs. So you know, you often hear people say that about sugar.

• 1:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  And it's also an idea that's out there about ultra-processed foods, that they might be addictive. So what the scientists at the NIH wanted to see was whether drinking a milkshake could cause someone's brain to send out a big whoosh of dopamine in the same way that you might see with addictive drugs, right? Like that happens with cocaine, for example.

• 1:25Wendy Zukerman?

  So was the milkshake...

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Bringing all the dopamine to the yard?

• 1:30Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, bringing all the dopamine to the yard.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  No. So as a rule, drinking a milkshake did not lead to a big rush of dopamine.

• 1:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  And that doesn't mean that ultra-processed food or sugar is considered healthy now, but it throws a little cold water on the idea that these foods are addictive in the same way that drugs are addictive.

• 1:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, right.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  But here's where the story takes a weird turn. And this is why I wanted to talk to you about it, Wendy, for this episode that we're doing now, which is not about milkshakes or ultra-processed food or sugar.

• 2:02Wendy Zukerman?

  No.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  So around the same time that this study came out, a reporter from the New York Times reached out to the researchers asking for an interview. So the lead scientist on this is a nutrition researcher named Kevin Hall. He's very famous in the world of nutrition. He's interviewed all the time. We've interviewed him here on Science Versus. And I reached out to him again recently about all this. We talked over email. So the protocol that he follows before these interviews is he reaches out to his overlords at the NIH to let them know about the request and that he wants to do the interview. But this time, for the first time, according to Kevin, the NIH said no.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  They denied his request. He also says that they quashed a press release that was going to come out about the study. So it seemed to him that the NIH didn't want to publicize the study at all. You know, eventually, they agreed to let him answer some written questions from the Times reporter. But then they reviewed his answers and they changed them. Kevin says that their changes kind of downplayed the results. So he interpreted this to mean that the powers that be at the NIH didn't like this finding that milkshakes are not necessarily addictive, kind of wanted to bury it a little bit.

• 3:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Why would they care this much about a milkshake study?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I know. It's like-

• 3:24Wendy Zukerman?

  They got a lot on their plate right now. Why does it matter that much?

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not like there's none of like deep milkshake throat, like being met in a parking garage, you know? Sanding over government secrets. Yeah, it seems very weird. Like, because usually when the government has some issue with some research, it's like there's corruption with industry pressure. There's like a government screw-up that's trying to get covered over.

• 3:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  This one doesn't appear to make any sense until you start to pay attention to what the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been saying recently about ultra-processed food and sugar.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  And sugar is poison. And Americans need to know that.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Uh-huh. This is a big talking point for Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" platform. Here he is talking about sugar at a press briefing recently.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Oh, it's as addictive as crack. And our children are addicted to it from when they're little kids.

• 4:26Wendy Zukerman?

  So Kevin's findings are rather inconvenient to this story that they're pushing.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's what Kevin suspects. And he ultimately quit over that. And he said on Twitter that he felt his work was being censored to fit, quote, "preconceived narratives of my agency's leadership about ultra-processed food addiction."

• 4:47Speaker 01

  And we asked, you know, HHS about this. They pushed back. Their head of communications told us in an email that, quote, "It's disappointing that this individual is fabricating false claims. NIH scientists have and will continue to conduct interviews regarding their research through written responses or other means, just like Kevin Hall was allowed to do." And they said another, quote, "Any attempt to paint this as censorship is a deliberate distortion of the facts." I asked them to be more specific about what was false here, and I didn't hear back on that.

• 5:19Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  You know, to me, I would be surprised if Kevin was making this up because, you know, he didn't want to quit. He was very reluctant. He told me that before all this, he and his wife would joke about how he was probably never going to retire. But he went into early retirement because he felt he had no choice. It was either that or, you know, compromise his research. And also, you know, Kevin is not the only US scientist who feels like they're being muzzled right now, or that their work is being suppressed in some way, just because the federal government doesn't like it, which is why I wanted to tell you about it, Wendy.

• 5:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, because that is what this episode is about. What is happening in science in the US right now? Because a few months ago, we reported on what some were calling a war on science. But there was a lot of confusion about what would be targeted? How bad is this going to be? And now it's becoming very clear what is going on. And I tell you, it's been a real milkshake up.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  All right.

• 6:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Milkshake up.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  That's my cutie leaf. I can't condone that pun.

• 6:33Wendy Zukerman?

  Get out of here, right?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I used to say goodbye.

• 6:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Goodbye.

• 6:39Wendy Zukerman?

  All right, as the Trump government says that it is trying to reduce government spending and cut waste, billions of dollars of funding into science research has been cut in many areas. We're going to tell you all about it because today we are talking about exactly what is going on with science because it's not only about the muzzling and the cuts. There's also been some curious executive orders affecting research and we're hearing from a lot of folks who are really worried in this moment.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  It's just a daily stream of nightmare news. The gutting is the word. Just every day feels like I'm being punched in the stomach.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  What it is, is that it is confusing. I mean, the thing is, I don't think anybody is safe. Every scientist, not just virologists. I mean, bacteriologists should be concerned, cancer biologists should be concerned.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  There are human lives on the line here.

• 7:34Wendy Zukerman?

  We're also going to tell you how some scientists have been fighting back. Plus, a big reason that the Trump government is making these cuts, as we mentioned, is to help the economy. So will it work? After the break.

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• 10:35Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, what's happening with science in the US? And to kick us off, let's first get a lowdown on what has been happening since we first covered this. So we've called back someone on the show who has been following this really, really closely. And it's someone that you guys absolutely loved from last time. Or at least one person on Instagram did. What did they call you?

• 10:59Speaker 05

  wannabe, was it like wannabe Ryan Reynolds? I think it's very strange, that whole situation.

• 11:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Well, it's great to have you back on the show. Max Kozlov, reporter for Nature. What would have been like the nicest, the nicest comparison that someone could have given you?

• 11:17Speaker 05

  I mean, I feel like Ryan Reynolds isn't that far off from one of the nicest comparisons. I mean, I, I don't know, you know, man is pretty universally, if you're left wing, right wing, regardless of what state you're in, regardless of your sexual orientation, I feel like we can all agree that Ryan Reynolds is a pretty attractive man.

• 11:34Wendy Zukerman?

  That's right, it's true, it's true. Things have been busy for you.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, things have been so busy, it's crazy. The last time we talked, there was like, the funding was paused, and then restarted, and then paused, and to a certain extent, that dance is continuing. But, you know, I feel like three quarters of the, the destruction and dismantling of science hadn't even happened yet, so I have orders of magnitude of destruction and dismantling to tell you about.

• 12:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, gosh. Give us the lowdown, what do we know now? What has been happening in just the last few months?

• 12:11Speaker 05

  One, one of the biggest stories that I've covered in the last few months was the fact that grants at the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, hundreds, 1,500 projects have now been terminated, which amounts to more than $7 billion of research money. And that is absolutely unprecedented.

• 12:36Wendy Zukerman?

  And so what has been on the chopping block? I mean, what projects have been canceled?

• 12:40Speaker 05

  So, there's kind of this laundry list of research topics that this administration doesn't want to fund. I mean, so it started with DEI, it started with so-called gender ideology, but it's grown to include some COVID-19 research, it's grown to include vaccine hesitancy research, recent update, they're also terminating grants that quote-unquote "influence public opinion", which researchers are really confused about because they're like, isn't that all research? Isn't like, the whole point of science is that we, you know, ask a question, we gather the data, and then we make decisions based on what that data says?

• 13:22Wendy Zukerman?

  Exactly, it would be great if science influenced more public opinion, in fact, if evidence influenced opinion.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:29Wendy Zukerman?

  And then let's look at climate change for a second because that has also, that's another area that's been on the chopping block. NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been hit. There's been projects on weather forecasting, tracking the cost of climate disasters that have been retired. What have you heard about climate change research at the NIH?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  They're basically reframing the whole situation as extreme weather. They're not saying that the extreme weather is caused by climate, but just, you know, we'll still fund research about, you know, what wildfire smoke means for human health or flooding, just don't say it was from climate change. And on top of that, we're also not going to be funding any research that investigates why the climate is changing, that provides any kind of climate change education or enhances climate change literacy. So it, all of this just kind of puts a political framing and lens on the kind of work that researchers can get funding for.

• 14:34Speaker 05

  And, you know, now you might look at a study and you might think twice. I mean, you might say, oh, did they have to delete the word climate change from this study because otherwise they wouldn't allow it to be published?

• 14:46Wendy Zukerman?

  You and your team have done a lot of work just trying to understand why the, these cuts are happening. And when it comes to vaccine hesitancy, the NIH told your team, you know, it's basically not a priority anymore to improve vaccine interest, curious in the middle of a measles outbreak.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 15:04Wendy Zukerman?

  And then research on LGBTQ folks and particularly transgender folks has been hit really hard. Grants around how taking hormones might affect your health, disease prevention, like HIV prevention, these are all examples of projects that have been cut, which the government had justified because they said, research programs based on gender identity are unscientific, have little return on investment and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.

• 15:36Wendy Zukerman?

  But what's curious is that there is one study that the White House was very keen to fund when it came to trans folks. Tell us about that.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this was a real head scratcher when I found out about this. I mean, just astonishing after terminating nearly 100 grants that involve transgender people, all of a sudden they're saying, oh, we do want to fund one. And it's about, drumroll, it's about regret after transitioning, which the researchers who I spoke with to this story who study trans health, they're like, okay, I mean, that's not a terrible thing to study. Patient satisfaction is an important thing to understand. But the big problematic thing is when you've terminated virtually everything else in the field, and this is the only thing we're

• 16:26Speaker 05

  studying about trans health, that's what rubbed researchers really the wrong way. And I talked with people who were at the agency for decades, and they say, look, every administration comes in and they're like, okay, for example, President Biden, he wanted more research on cancer, especially with the experience of his late son. Or he wanted more research on women's health. It's another thing to go in and say, we want research only about this one specific question.

• 16:54Wendy Zukerman?

  It is astonishing, because if you're genuinely in a place where you don't want to be funding trans research because it's the minority of the population, many Americans are not trans. But then, when we look at the research we do have, maybe out of those who regret surgery, for example, who have done surgery, it's maybe 1% of trans folks will regret it. And that's important to know. But it's a minority of a minority.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:25Wendy Zukerman?

  By the way, we also reached out to the NIH about these cuts, and they told us that the, quote, NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.

• 17:41Wendy Zukerman?

  And then just something else that I'm starting to see is scientists beginning to calculate or at least get their head around some of the consequences of the cuts that the US made to international aid.

• 17:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:57Wendy Zukerman?

  So recently, there was some researchers that tried to put figures around how many people might die because of those cuts to programs like USAID. So what these researchers estimated is if they just looked at the expected increased cases of HIV, tuberculosis, and deaths from unplanned pregnancies, so from unsafe births, unsafe abortions. They predict that around 25 million people could die in the next 15 years if the US pulled back all of its global health funding.

• 18:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Right now, I think researchers are just scrambling to find any other funding because they're desperate.

• 18:42Wendy Zukerman?

  I mean. Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  There are human lives on the line here, and I think that's a tragedy.

• 18:49Wendy Zukerman?

  And on that point, I mean, I should say that this has been on the US for a long time now, and the whole world has been used to that. There's other countries that could be replacing the US and could be putting money into international aid. This just comes at a time when the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland have also said they might cut contributions, which tells us this is part of a just a bigger story here.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 19:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so time for some good news. But to get to the good news, we will need some more bad news. So grants looking into COVID research have been cut. And when your team at Nature asked Health and Human Services, why? They told you the HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago? Which is quite startling because according to the CDC, more than 6,000 people died from COVID in the US in the past three months. And then there's folks with long COVID.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  So to see that kind of language coming from HHS, I mean, that's just a slap in the face.

• 20:06Wendy Zukerman?

  But then to get to the good news, with long COVID, some really important research, the funding had been cut for it, but then it was restored. So what happened?

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Basically, it's something of a bipartisan issue. In fact, at RFK Jr.'s confirmation hearing, it was a Republican senator that asked him if he planned to support long COVID research, and he answered affirmatively.

• 20:34Speaker 07

  Will you commit to prioritizing long COVID research and integrate this work in a broader healthcare policies? Yes or no, please?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Fast forward a couple of months, and NIH terminated some of the big initiatives to study long COVID. And the long COVID community is like, wait, what the heck? We thought that you supported us. I can't even describe to you the fury and ire that people in this community felt, especially after feeling that the Biden administration also left them out to dry. So the community, patient community, really rose up and called their congresspeople to try to slap some sense into RFK Jr. Next thing you know, about a week later, some of them were restored. You know, unfortunately, this is still a minority of all the research that's been terminated.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  But, you know, it is a nice story to hear that they restored the funding.

• 21:29Wendy Zukerman?

  There was another big reversal, which is that big chunks of this study called the Women's Health Initiative had also been on the chopping block. We've talked about this study on this show before. It's, you know, basically tens of thousands of women being tracked for more than three decades. Super, super important study. Certain parts of that study had been terminated, but then there was this huge outcry from scientists, some senators, even some celebrities, and the department decided to refund it.

• 21:59Wendy Zukerman?

  This is a time, though, when a lot of researchers have been scared into silence. And, you know, I think as reporters, both of us have experienced this, where we'll reach out to someone who just says, not right now, I can't talk to the press. But do you think this actually tells us that your best chance of getting research is to speak up in this moment, as hard as that might be?

• 22:21Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, there are so many cases where they quietly pull funding, and I think they are hoping that it stays that way. They want to capitalize on this culture of fear they've created. They know that people are scared right now, and they don't want to speak out because maybe the government will pull other funding, or they'll come after your institution. And so the more that this can stay in the public's eye, that's what really the administration is very sensitive to. And after they saw the outcry of the Women's Health Initiative funding being pulled, that's when they decided to reinstate it.

• 23:00Wendy Zukerman?

  And I think for some scientists, they might be feeling like, hey, I didn't sign up for this, you know, to be running these campaigns to try and get my funding back. In fact, we talked about this a little bit with Seema Lakdawala, who's a virologist at Emory.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  I don't, if it's a war, maybe scientists don't know we're supposed to be fighting. You know, like, I don't, scientists like to ask questions and tinker in the lab and, like, do science. That's why we pick up a pipe.

• 23:29Wendy Zukerman?

  Which is, I guess, why it's such an easy target. Like, you pick the nerds, you know?

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I will say, yeah, the nerds can pack a punch, too.

• 23:43Wendy Zukerman?

  And nerds are fighting back with lawsuits, too. So just this week, a bunch of researchers and physicians sued the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services over the cuts to grants for LGBTQ research.

• 24:00Wendy Zukerman?

  After the break, a controversial executive order. Some say it could stop critical research in its tracks, but others reckon that it just might save us from a new pandemic. Plus, will all these cuts boost the economy? Coming up.

• 24:25Wendy Zukerman?

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• 27:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Now, we're going to talk about a new executive order from the Trump administration that's got some scientists pretty nervous. And before we get into the details of the executive order, I just want to talk about a big part of the reason that it came down, which is because of this big and very interesting question of what started the COVID pandemic. So let's start here. Now, the truth is that we don't know exactly where the virus came from before it showed up in humans. But the best scientific thinking and what most virologists and epidemiologists think happened is that the virus came to us naturally through animals.

• 27:52Wendy Zukerman?

  And we're getting more and more evidence on this. Despite that, President Trump and others have long theorized that COVID-19 started from a lab leak in China. Here's nature reporter Max Kozlov again.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  And there's not a whole lot of scientific evidence behind those claims. They're very tempting to believe because they're so weighty and so hefty. But there is not actually a lot of evidence beyond, wouldn't it be convenient that if...

• 28:25Wendy Zukerman?

  Have you gone to covid.gov recently?

• 28:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, I have. It's quite an experience.

• 28:31Wendy Zukerman?

  Covid.gov used to be a sort of great place to get factual, very 101 information on COVID, what it is, how it spreads, how you... Can protect yourself. And now, if you go there, what will you see, Max? You want to describe this?

• 28:47Speaker 05

  I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at Donald Trump's, like, he has like a body shot. It's like, I don't even, it's like a reality TV show. But basically, it just says, you know, that definitively, the origin of COVID was in a lab.

• 29:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, and I do want to emphasize that a lot of the information on here right now is, it's just truly misinformation.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  But it is already impacting how research, and specifically, research on microbes and viruses happen.

• 29:20Wendy Zukerman?

  And that's because this idea that the COVID virus leaked out of a lab is part of the explanation for this new executive order that came out just a couple of weeks ago. And what it does is it's putting a pause on what the administration is calling dangerous gain-of-function research. So think if you take a virus or a bacteria and you tweak it in a way that might make it more deadly or contagious. And it's this kind of research that the Trump administration claims was happening in China and caused the pandemic. Now, the order says that federally funded research, doing dangerous gain-of-function research,

• 30:01Wendy Zukerman?

  has to stop for 120 days while the administration creates a new policy on this. And if a scientist disobeys this order, it means they could be banned from receiving federal funding for up to five years. So, halting dangerous gain-of-function research, that might seem like a good idea. But Seema, the virologist from Emory University, along with other virologists, are saying that the wording of this order is so vague that they're worried a bunch of really important research is going to be affected here.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  I think it's all about, like, what are we defining as dangerous gain-of-function research? This is where I think everyone's like, wait, what does that mean? Does that mean studying antibiotic resistance? When, you know, for treatment of even things like cancer, right? Viruses that are used to treat head and neck cancers that could be caught up in this?

• 30:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, so scientists tweak viruses and bacteria for all kinds of reasons. To help us understand the risks of bird flu, for example, or to study superbugs. There's even cancer research that alters viruses so that they attack tumors, which is very cool. But Seema's wondering, is all of that work going to be affected here? Does all of that work now have to be on pause? We just don't know. And for Seema, what's a little frustrating here is that there's already a bunch of rules around how scientists do this kind of work. Even before Trump got in, the Biden administration introduced a new policy

• 31:38Wendy Zukerman?

  that added more scrutiny to this kind of research. Here's Seema again, talking with our editor, Blythe Terrell.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  What it is, is that it is confusing because we have regulations in place. We routinely get inspected every year. Yeah, so it's not as though this order is coming down into something that is the equivalent of the Wild West. It's like, finally, regulations. No, no, exactly, absolutely. This is why it's confusing. We're like, well, what does this mean on top of everything else that already exists? So it's maybe it's fixing something that's not necessarily broken. That's right.

• 32:11Wendy Zukerman?

  Hopefully, we'll know more about what research is going to be affected when the new government policy comes out. And we did ask the Trump administration about some of the concerns here and didn't hear back. Here's Max again.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  So I think the devil will be in the details. If it's interpreted really broadly, that's definitely going to add even more uncertainty to a very, already a very uncertain time.

• 32:35Wendy Zukerman?

  So finally, I want to go back to the cuts to grants and jobs in science to talk about the government's reasoning here, why they're doing this. I mean, the US has got a national debt of around $36 trillion. And the Trump administration says a big reason for these cuts is that they want to stop government waste and help the economy. So will it work?

• 33:00Speaker 04

  That's a great question.

• 33:01Wendy Zukerman?

  Thanks, Professor Andrew Fieldhouse, who's an economist at Texas A&M. And Andrew told me that for decades, since World War II really, there's been this idea that when the government invests in basic science, like how the body works or how atoms work, that gives us knowledge, which can potentially be used to help the economy.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Knowledge that is gained from one thing, like developing an atomic weapon, then has other uses, like civilian nuclear power, or the Apollo space program is what Elon Musk's SpaceX and Blue Origins are riding on.

• 33:40Wendy Zukerman?

  So investing in rockets and space science decades ago ended up launching the current space economy, which the US government recently said adds more than $130 billion to the economy. Another example, the US government invests in understanding the basic biology of viruses, like coronaviruses, and it literally spends millions of dollars into mRNA vaccine technology that might have never worked. But then, 2019 rolls around.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  Our experience with the COVID pandemic would have been so much worse without decades of investment in basic and applied science. I mean, millions and millions of people didn't die because we were able to develop mRNA vaccines in nine months.

• 34:31Wendy Zukerman?

  If you think of the economic costs of shutting down the US economy early on during the COVID pandemic, if you can invest in public health and epidemiology to prevent that, the economic rate of return on that is astronomical. So there are some obvious examples where investing in science has clear benefits for the economy. The internet is another classic example, which also started out through US government money. But at the same time, it's pretty easy to find some projects that the US government has funded recently and think, huh, that's no Apollo space mission. Like, take this one. Smart is the New Sexy,

• 35:15Wendy Zukerman?

  a study about the mating behavior of chickadees. Or another paper that's about cannibalistic tadpoles. Every now and then, a politician will find studies just like these and say, come on, science is having a laugh. This is a waste of taxpayer money. So we wanted to know, when you don't cherry pick the obvious examples where science has made bank, or the curious examples where it's not so obvious where the benefit might be, does investing in science really boost the economy? Luckily, Andrew and a colleague at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas finished a study that helps us answer this very question. They looked through more than 70 years of data

• 36:00Wendy Zukerman?

  and used regression models to see when the US government put money into non-defense research and development in the past. So think the NIH, the NSF, NASA. What happens? That is... The government puts in a dollar of R and D funding. What comes out? More GDP. Yeah. The team found that for every dollar that the government spends on science, years down the line, the economy gets around a dollar seventy. Oh, that's incredibly high.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  This is huge. It's crazy that we're not investing more. You're getting a really high rate of return on government R and D spending. It seems wild that Congress hasn't invested more in these areas.

• 36:49Wendy Zukerman?

  And it's not just Andrew's work that finds this. In fact, one nonpartisan think tank concluded that, quote, "virtually every scholarly study examining the issue finds the same thing." Although, the bang for your buck that you get from investing in science changes depending on the studies. Now, this isn't to say that every single research project is going to launch a new company for Elon Musk. But it does tell us that however we've been funding science, it is, to some extent, boosting the economy. It's also been estimated that for every dollar spent on the National Weather Service, which has also recently had budget cuts,

• 37:32Wendy Zukerman?

  we get back about $74. Noah's budget is just under $7 billion, or at least it was. And the improvements it's made in predicting hurricanes has been estimated to save us about $5 billion every time there's a large hurricane.

• 37:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Andrew says that the numbers you see for investing in science are better than anything else the government could be doing, better than investing in infrastructure even. Which is why it's hard to understand the White House's proposed budget for next year. It would slash the National Science Foundation by more than 50% and the NIH's budget by 40%. Now, some folks say that without this government funding, things are actually going to get better because the private sector and the free market can now do more efficient research. Andrew says that he hears this kind of thing all the time.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  And this would be the argument that you could cut the NIH budget by 40% and then the pharmaceutical industry is going to pick up all of that. Our research finds the opposite.

• 38:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah. Andrew's research and others have found that public funding actually incentivizes private firms to invest a bit more in R and D, which is partly because all this basic science has found cool that then companies invest in. But the thing is, when the public funding goes away, the private sector doesn't come to the rescue. Companies are generally focused on investments that develop new products rather than exploratory, basic science. And on top of that, you can't patent a lot of basic research because you're just working out how the body works or how the universe works. And you can't patent Uranus.

• 39:27Wendy Zukerman?

  Andrew told me that this idea that the private sector is going to foot the bill here, it's a fairy tale. We talked about it. Why would Big Pharma, with shareholders to look out for, invest in research, basic research that may or may not go anywhere? And if it does, you can't patent it?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Right. It's highly unlikely. I don't know why you would expect the private sector to invest an equivalent amount in basic research.

• 39:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Another fairy tale down the drain.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  You like those with your show, right?

• 40:02Wendy Zukerman?

  Fairy tales.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Fairy tale busting.

• 40:06Wendy Zukerman?

  Exactly. Down the toilet this one goes to. Last month, economists in DC used Andrew's research to estimate that if there really were long-term 50% reductions in federal science funding, and this may not happen, but just as an example, it would make the average American approximately $10,000 poorer. Wow, so really, these cuts that are being proposed, you genuinely think it's going to mean less wages over time for the average American?

• 40:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cutting NSF funding by 50%, cutting National Institutes.

• 40:50Wendy Zukerman?

  Of health funding by forty percent if what's being proposed comes to pass. That's a really big hit. So bottom line, investing in science, even if it's not clear exactly what those nerds are up to with their cannibalizing frogs or whatnot. Overall, it does pay off. And by cutting science, we might just be cannibalizing our economy. To cap this off, I went back to Max, reporter at Nature. Max, as we're winding down, what have researchers told you about how they're feeling right now?

• 41:22Speaker 05

  I would say that people are scrambling, they're afraid. And just to give you a statistic, since we last talked, we did a poll at Nature of how people are feeling and if they are thinking about leaving the country because of these policies. And of the sixteen hundred people that responded, seventy-five percent said they were considering leaving the country. Seventy-five percent. And even if a fraction of that comes to pass, I mean, we're talking effects that will last for generations. Because all the young scientists right now, they're reading the writing on the wall. The funding's not there.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  Things are getting cut willy-nilly. And so there's a brain drain that's only just now beginning, that we won't even see or appreciate the effects of for many years.

• 42:18Wendy Zukerman?

  And this idea that we may be heralding the end of America's fairy tale science run, it's been on Seema's mind, too.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  It's sad because we do this really well. We are really good at doing science in the US. The infrastructure, the amount of resources that have been pumped into scientific research over the last thirty, fifty decades, right? This isn't like recent developments. This is like decades of investment in science in the US, bipartisan. And that's why we're a superpower. That's why we lead in antivirals, stem cell therapies, immunotherapies. It feels like we may lose that.

• 43:07Wendy Zukerman?

  And maybe whether the US is a science superpower anymore isn't your priority in this moment. But what I keep coming back to is that unless other countries are going to start really investing in science, we all stand to lose out here. Potentially having fewer new medicines, fewer breakthroughs. We'll definitely have less cool science. And to say the least, that's going to be a bummer. That's Science vs.

• 43:44Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode has 91 citations in it. So if you want to read more about how science can help to boost the economy or anything that we've talked about on the show, you can go to the show notes and there's a link to the transcript. Also, if you want to follow Max's reporting, just go to nature.com/news. And I'd love to hear how you're feeling about science right now. You can tell us on Instagram, where science underscore VS and also on TikTok, I'm at Wendy Zukerman.

• 44:28Wendy Zukerman?

  This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zukerman, with help from Merrill Horn, Rose Rimmler, Michelle Dang, and Akadi Foster Keys. We're edited by Blact Terrell. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Fact checking by Sam Lemonick. Music written by Emma Munga, Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, So Wiley, and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Maya Golden-Krasner, Deputy Director at the Climate Law Institute at the Centre for Biological Diversity, who you heard at the start of the show saying that this has just been a daily stream of nightmare news. Also, thank you to Dr. Shay Wolf. Special thanks to Lindsey Cherner and Whitney Potter. Also, to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Mum, I cut the second Uranus joke.

• 45:13Wendy Zukerman?

  You were probably right. It was too many Uranus jokes. Science vs. is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And wherever you do listen to us, please give us a five star review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people find the show. And if you are listening on Spotify, follow us and tap the bell icon so you get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back next time.