4 ms·

The scientific research community is torn asunder right now. I have never seen moods this bad. It is weird to see one of the US's greatest strengths thrown away

The scientific research community is torn asunder right now. I have never seen moods this bad. It is weird to see one of the US's greatest strengths thrown away for little gain. Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending. Cutting off the future of science feels a lot like "saving money" by eliminating retirement savings. Sure, the money isn't going into the retirement account and now you can buy more beer, but it's just sacrificing far more future gains for a short term gain. Foolish at best, and traitorous at worst.

monero-xmr 2y ago
[flagged]
- esalman 2y ago
  Your example is anecdotal and does not present the whole picture.
  - lmeyerov 2y ago
    Same but different. I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this. It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired. The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff. The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people. People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them. Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    No, your description of doomer destruction is non-factual. She works in the blue state, Ivy-league affiliated research hospital that is supposedly on the chopping block. We are not observing child cancer funding being eliminated even in the lion's den of leftism
    - epistasis 2y ago
      > even in the lion's den of leftism Interesting choice of words but it throws all the rest of your assessment into doubt. Especially your idea that your wife's research is worthy and then all the rest is less worthy.
      - monero-xmr 2y ago
        I think the academy is long overdue for a reckoning. The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense. The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system
        mu53 2y ago
        no biases detected
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        > The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense. None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research. Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue. And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.
- epistasis 2y ago
  It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit. Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants. A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks. Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts. Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement. Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-proposal-could-shatter-the-national-science-foundation/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours. She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations. Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.
    - 2y ago
- senkora 2y ago
  Ah yes, the questionable value of checks notes reducing child and maternal mortality and providing HIV/AIDs treatment. (That seems to be the primary mission of Jhpiego, where 90% of the layoffs occurred)
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    They've removed this [1] page from their site, but it's quite relevant. The main reason funding is being cut is for things related to DEI, gender, and so forth. And it seems this organization was heavily involved in such, which means they may have seen a significant reduction to their funding, even if nothing but funding related to these issues was scrapped. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpiego.org/our-expertise/gender-equity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
- justanotheratom 2y ago
  This comment is an example why a reply should be required before allowing a downvote. HN members with the privilege to downvote seem to be simply burying anything that disagrees with their opinion bubble.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    There were already several replies to this comment 20 minutes before you made your comment. There were no downvotes when I made my reply, and note that I can not downvote it because it was a reply to one of mine.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- pkphilip 2y ago
  Why is this person's comment being downvotted?
  - mindslight 2y ago
    Because most people have gotten sick of steelmanning the deliberate destruction of our country. My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.
  - justanotheratom 2y ago
    there is a mob mentality on HN where a certain group of people go burying dissenting opinion, because they can just downvote without posting a thoughtful response.
    - epistasis 2y ago
      The insult about "worthwhile" research is a bit more negative than is usually tolerated on HN plus it is completely inaccurate as there has been zero assessment of worthwhile or not in these cuts.
    - pkphilip 2y ago
      True. As you can see I have been downvotted just for asking that question
  - lmeyerov 2y ago
    Because it's almost guaranteed to be a lie and they refuse to provide basic information that would clear it up.
- ManuelKiessling 2y ago
  Practically everything we take for granted today to be core, important science was considered science of questionable value if go back in time long enough.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- derbOac 2y ago
  So everything not pediatric cancer research is of questionable value? Of value to who exactly? Trump and Musk? RFK Jr? mRNA vaccines seem pretty valuable to me, for example. They did to the Nobel committee.
- yummypaint 2y ago
  Having read this guy's other comments, he's definitely a liar engaging in bad faith. Don't waste your time on him
chneu 2y ago
My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty. This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  > many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty. It might be time to exit the US. "Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States." https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/ https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-co...
- whatshisface 2y ago
  This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.
arcmechanica 2y ago
There is no gain, only loss
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jfengel 2y ago
  There's plenty of gain: $4.5 trillion in reduced taxes. Not for you, of course. But for other people. You should be happy for them. Maybe they'll trickle some down on you.
- Cassyrobert 2y ago
  [dead]
DeathArrow 2y ago
>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending. But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed. It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from). [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpiego.org/our-expertise/gender-equity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
    - ceph_ 2y ago
      This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda. Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.
- kergonath 2y ago
  You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them. Also, there are things like this: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-entering-biomed-graduate-class-over-trump-funding-chaos https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en... This is a lost class. Do it for 4 years and you have a lost generation.
- rex_lupi 2y ago
  Plenty of PhD offers have been rescinded, and stipend cut.
  - giardini 2y ago
    We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.
    - bitxbitxbitcoin 2y ago
      That is an incredibly short sighted view of the world.
  - Cassyrobert 2y ago
    [dead]
gunian 2y ago
[flagged]

monero-xmr 2y ago

[flagged]

esalman 2y ago
Your example is anecdotal and does not present the whole picture.
- lmeyerov 2y ago
  Same but different. I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this. It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired. The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff. The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people. People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them. Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  No, your description of doomer destruction is non-factual. She works in the blue state, Ivy-league affiliated research hospital that is supposedly on the chopping block. We are not observing child cancer funding being eliminated even in the lion's den of leftism
  - epistasis 2y ago
    > even in the lion's den of leftism Interesting choice of words but it throws all the rest of your assessment into doubt. Especially your idea that your wife's research is worthy and then all the rest is less worthy.
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      I think the academy is long overdue for a reckoning. The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense. The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system
      - mu53 2y ago
        no biases detected
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        > The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense. None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research. Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue. And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.
epistasis 2y ago
It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit. Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants. A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks. Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts. Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement. Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-proposal-could-shatter-the-national-science-foundation/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours. She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations. Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.
  - 2y ago
senkora 2y ago
Ah yes, the questionable value of checks notes reducing child and maternal mortality and providing HIV/AIDs treatment. (That seems to be the primary mission of Jhpiego, where 90% of the layoffs occurred)
- somenameforme 2y ago
  They've removed this [1] page from their site, but it's quite relevant. The main reason funding is being cut is for things related to DEI, gender, and so forth. And it seems this organization was heavily involved in such, which means they may have seen a significant reduction to their funding, even if nothing but funding related to these issues was scrapped. [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpiego.org/our-expertise/gender-equity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
justanotheratom 2y ago
This comment is an example why a reply should be required before allowing a downvote. HN members with the privilege to downvote seem to be simply burying anything that disagrees with their opinion bubble.
- epistasis 2y ago
  There were already several replies to this comment 20 minutes before you made your comment. There were no downvotes when I made my reply, and note that I can not downvote it because it was a reply to one of mine.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
pkphilip 2y ago
Why is this person's comment being downvotted?
- mindslight 2y ago
  Because most people have gotten sick of steelmanning the deliberate destruction of our country. My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.
- justanotheratom 2y ago
  there is a mob mentality on HN where a certain group of people go burying dissenting opinion, because they can just downvote without posting a thoughtful response.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    The insult about "worthwhile" research is a bit more negative than is usually tolerated on HN plus it is completely inaccurate as there has been zero assessment of worthwhile or not in these cuts.
  - pkphilip 2y ago
    True. As you can see I have been downvotted just for asking that question
- lmeyerov 2y ago
  Because it's almost guaranteed to be a lie and they refuse to provide basic information that would clear it up.
ManuelKiessling 2y ago
Practically everything we take for granted today to be core, important science was considered science of questionable value if go back in time long enough.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
derbOac 2y ago
So everything not pediatric cancer research is of questionable value? Of value to who exactly? Trump and Musk? RFK Jr? mRNA vaccines seem pretty valuable to me, for example. They did to the Nobel committee.
yummypaint 2y ago
Having read this guy's other comments, he's definitely a liar engaging in bad faith. Don't waste your time on him

chneu 2y ago

My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty. This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.

clumsysmurf 2y ago
> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty. It might be time to exit the US. "Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States." https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/ https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-co...
whatshisface 2y ago
This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.

arcmechanica 2y ago

There is no gain, only loss

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jfengel 2y ago
There's plenty of gain: $4.5 trillion in reduced taxes. Not for you, of course. But for other people. You should be happy for them. Maybe they'll trickle some down on you.
Cassyrobert 2y ago
[dead]

DeathArrow 2y ago

>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending. But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.

epistasis 2y ago
Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?
- somenameforme 2y ago
  It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed. It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from). [1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpiego.org/our-expertise/gender-equity/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
  - ceph_ 2y ago
    This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda. Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.

kergonath 2y ago
You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them. Also, there are things like this: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-entering-biomed-graduate-class-over-trump-funding-chaos https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en... This is a lost class. Do it for 4 years and you have a lost generation.
rex_lupi 2y ago
Plenty of PhD offers have been rescinded, and stipend cut.
- giardini 2y ago
  We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.
  - bitxbitxbitcoin 2y ago
    That is an incredibly short sighted view of the world.
- Cassyrobert 2y ago
  [dead]

gunian 2y ago

[flagged]