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GELFAND’S WORLD - I have to confess that I'm having trouble writing this piece because it involves justifying research and development in science and engineering. Is this even a question? And yet the current administration is engaging in its war on science through its attacks on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and some of our senior universities.
The consequences are ugly. Remember the war on cancer? The truth of the matter is that there has been huge progress in understanding how cancer arises and sometimes gets out of control. But we are not yet at the point that simple, nearly painless treatments are available for all the different forms of cancer, not to mention the as-yet unfulfilled desire to create broad preventions. We do have pretty good treatments for the most common forms of skin cancers and we also have a pretty good system of screening for colon and cervical cancers, but there is lots left to do.
And of course people would surely welcome the invention of less invasive diagnostic procedures. There has been lots of work to develop simple screening tools based on a blood sample. How many of these studies will be cancelled due to the current cuts?
There was a time when childhood leukemia was nearly always fatal. That is no longer the case. What would have happened had the research that went into the modern treatment protocols been stopped back in the 1950s and '60s? Would the majority of children with this disease still be suffering an early death?
This question sounds a little "out there," but putting politically defined limits on research is the current policy of the Trump administration and of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Yes, there has been remarkable progress in understanding the genetics and progression of cancer, but what is left to do will require hundreds of thousands of hours of work, not to mention supplies and equipment and probably whole new technologies. We tend to talk about the pursuit of knowledge as "science," in the sense that "science continues to progress," but that word Science is just the summation of all those hours of labor in the laboratories of the world.
And also remember that cancer is not the only thing that can kill or cripple you. There are lots and lots of other human frailties that cause hurt. We all know somebody who has one of those conditions.
And then there is that other elephant in the room, global warming. We can and should be doing massive amounts of research in the hope that we will figure out some way to prevent the worst levels of warming. We should be preparing for future heat emergencies, and we should be thinking about how to deal with increasingly violent hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and tropical diseases. The current administration intends to suppress all such studies and all discussion. The commissars will tell us what we can do and say.
It's ostrich science that they are now prescribing.
So why are the people in power engaging in this insane vendetta? You'll have to ask them. But in the meanwhile, the rest of America can only sit by and speculate, as in this New Republic article which you can read here. Is the war on science really the result of the influence of religious extremists who resent the idea that global warming exists? Is it the desire for vengeance on the part of Donald J Trump? Probably both of these and more.
For a comment on the budget cuts from a not particularly lefty organization, take a look at what the head of a national engineering society said here.
A More Opportunistic Take on the Matter
At one time, I studied cellular components called microRNAs, a kind of RNA which is involved in regulating the amounts and activities of other RNAs. We began to notice that there were an increasing number of contributions to the miR literature coming from mainland China. There was (and continues to be) a lot of high quality work that obviously came from labs that are well staffed and well funded. Suddenly, American science finds itself handicapped by substantial funding cuts. Soon it will be entirely uncompetitive with the rest of the world.
This is just one tiny example among many such, but it is illustrative. The United States was once a world leader in all manner of research activities. Now that leadership is threatened by this administration -- either due to the strange ideologies among Trump supporters or maybe just to save a few more dollars in the federal budget.
This is the ultimate example of a false economy. It's eating your seed corn and killing off the breeder cattle all at once.
What is the long term effect of a nation's failure to compete in science and technology?
I don't think that we can predict accurately what the specific losses will be at any particular time in the future, because the nature of scientific progress is that there are surprises. Still, there are predictable avenues of research that the rest of the world engages in, but go contrary to the Trumpian ideology. There is plenty of interest in developing cleaner, sustainable, non-CO2 emitting power for motor vehicles and for every other element of industrial civilization. But the current administration is off in another universe altogether.
I'm old enough to remember when there was no such thing as a cellular telephone, when there were no desktop computers, much less laptop computers, and when the whole system of software and wiring (and things called routers) that now make up what we call the internet had not been invented. The creation of all these devices and systems depended on private business, but they also depended on fundamental discoveries and inventions that came from academic institutions and research facilities. Historians like to point out that critical elements of all these inventions began as a result of the space race -- that is to say, from government funded research.
It's curious that the Trump administration, in spite of its outspoken fear of China, is willing to cede scientific superiority to the Asian continent, but this is a predictable result of the current administration's policies.
The Trump Administration Has Gone Total-Soviet-Union on its own agencies
Remember when you read books like Red October and every Russian submarine crew included a political officer? We now have the same situation in federal agencies such as the VA. Read it and weep. The idea of having political guidance for American science is a new one. The end game for the Trump administration appears to be to outlaw communications about global warming and vaccine safety along with whatever other scientific findings are inconvenient or irritating to the president or his associates. You can read an editorial piece on the dangers here.
I wonder what line of research or solid scientific finding is going to be opposed by the new commissars next?
Addendum
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, in order to justify budget cuts to Medicaid, is arguing that recipients will decide for themselves whether they lose coverage or not. This is presumably about work requirements. The idea that people accepting government aid should be making some attempt to better themselves has a certain philosophic defensibility, but I don't think that this is the policy area in which to make that claim. There is a much better argument for universal health care. Like, if Switzerland can go there politically, why can't we?
Perhaps I should call this last point the Second Addendum, but here goes. Donald Trump reposted to Truth Social a claim that Joe Biden was executed back in 2020 and replaced with clones or a robot or something. Remember when Ronald Reagan began to confuse real history with stuff from the movies?
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
