I only briefly touched on what’s going on at the NIH but it may a preview of what could happen at NSF, NASA and other federal agencies. Under RFK, Jr’s … leadership … NIH has cancelled hundreds of research grants, including those researching cancer and Lou Gehrig’s disease. The head of NIH, COVID denialists and Great Barrington Declaration author Jay Bhattacharya, appears to be massively out of his depth and has crated morale.
Despite promising Bill Cassidy that he wouldn’t do it, Kennedy fired everyone on the vaccine advisory panel and is replacing with cranks, liars and COVID denialists. He issued a “Make American Healthy Again” report that had made up citations and is rife with bogus assumptions, out-of-date-information and exaggerations. Oh, and the “bleach community” — people who think bleach can cure everything including cancer — are hopeful that he will make their dreams come true.
In short, RFK is cutting funding to actual scientific breakthroughs and starting to redirect it toward nonsense. He has put in place a panel to attack one of the most important breakthroughs in human history — vaccines. He is set up to give an official seal of approval to a bunch of lies and conspiracy theories.
I wish I didn’t have to keep beating the drum on this. I wish I could just talk about amazing scientific discoveries and breakthroughs, which I will do below. But the simple reality is that science in the United States is under an all-out assault from the current Administration. And we are all going to suffer for it.
[ThTh2] Medical miracles haven’t quite stopped yet. A new twice-a-year shot could prevent HIV infection. Assuming the price is reasonable, this could be a massive game-changer in halting the spread of HIV.
[ThTh3] This is how I expect an actual marshmallow experiment would go.
[ThTh4] Speaking of junk science, “In COVID’s Wake” has been getting a lot attention. The book is garbage.
[ThTh5] We are literally turning lead into gold
[ThTh6] The Vera Rubin observatory is preparing to share its first images. This is going to be amazing.
[ThTh7] A new state between life and death has been discovered by scientists. This used to be known as “grad school”.
[ThTH8] The revelation that Joe Biden has prostate cancer has spawned a few conspiracy theories. How could he not have been monitoring his PSA? Well, the reason is that the majority of men beyond a certain age have prostate cancer of some sort. For most, it is slow-developing and they will die of something else before the prostate cancer gets them. Biden is one of the unlucky ones where the cancer has proven to be fairly aggressive. The utility of PSA tests for seniors is somethings that is still being debated, however. Given growing life expectancies and improving health in seniors, we may revisit it at some point.
[ThTh9] So what has JWST been up to? Oh, not much. Just watching black holes devour stars.
The politicization of science has resulted in science becoming political.
Unfortunately, this replicates over and over and over and over and over and over and over
Nope. Science is not becoming political. “Interpreting science.” “Utilizing self-serving versions of science.” “Nit-picking segments of science.” “Bowdlerizing science.” “Ignoring science.” “Refusing to fund science.” “Denying established science.” Yup, all that is political. But science is not becoming political. We can (and lots of us seemingly want to) make science disappear under a sea of muck, but it’s still there. And (if we ever find the will again) we will be able to re-access it. Fingers crossed. (Well, luck exists as well).
Agree 100%. Take climate crisis deniers. They aren’t actually denying the science – mostly. They just don’t like the policy choices that derive from it. Which is funny to me because there could be billions to be made in mitigation, adaptation , and even prevention.
What’s even worse is they want to deny the choices to everyone else, even when the choices are being made for adaptation purposes. In the American West, where water supplies will be more erratic, replacing water-cooled thermal power plants with solar and wind is good planning. There are limits to how clean you can make a gasoline ICE. In urban areas, even before the power grid is cleaned up, electric cars make it possible to shift emissions in both space and time.
I was thinking more about stuff like “Scientific American setting itself on fire” or the whole Covid thing where we moved from “Safe At Home” to “Protesting Injustice Is Public Health”.
Stuff like that.
If I remember correctly, a risky assumption at my age, there was an episode of The Adventures of Superman in which the bad guys got their hands on a scientist who had discovered a way to turn lead into gold. Sadly, the process required a large quantity of platinum, which, apparently, cost more than the resulting gold.
The process at CERN produces radioactive gold-203. Half life is 60 seconds, and it decays to mercury-203. That mercury isotope is also radioactive, has a half life of 46 days and decays to thallium-203, which is stable. Unstated in the medieval lead-to-gold conversion problem is that you need gold-197, the only stable isotope.
ThTh6: Exciting and depressing times for ground-based observations. In addition to the Rubin instrument, the Extremely Large Telescope is making steady progress. I recently saw simulated images of what they expect from the adaptive optics in the ELT, and they were stunning. OTOH, StarLink has thousands of satellites up, Project Kuiper has (finally) started launching what will be more thousands, as has China. If I were starting out in the field, I think I’d focus on software to stitch together the parts of the images w/o satellite streaks.
ThTh1: never mind eliminating basic research at NOAA.
Well … at least if we can’t predict hurricanes, Trump can draw on as many maps with sharpies as he wants.
…at least if we can’t predict hurricanes…
As JB so often says, there ought to be a way for the ECMWF people to monetize their work. From memory, back when Sandy was moving north, for a few days they were the only ones forecasting the sharp left turn into the Long Island Sound.