Please remember that science is under attack in the United States - new proposals would gut the nih even beyond the horror that is ongoing. As a scientist I am horrified and I truly hope that we don’t abandon the usas historically strong investment in the future.
1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.
I know just as much as you do about this, if not more - so it's terribly frustrating to me. I have been a scientist in a time where lots of political nonsense from the left didn't interfere with good science. Scientists are mostly NOT villains, though some use their positions to espouse various progressive nonsense that have nothing to do with good science.
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.
The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.
If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.
Yes, I know. That is one of several reasons why what Communists did in the Soviet Union in the 1950s isn't particularly relevant to what Democrats have (or haven't) been doing in the past decade or two.
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)
Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.
>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
This should go without saying, but the person you're replying to obviously wants you to prove instances of scientists receiving grant money because they know someone or are part of a group. They are not asking you to prove the support of the people.
It's called the 2024 election. People have listened to so much propaganda aimed at destroying the anyone with credibility that can challenge whichever "truth" the propagandist chooses to push.
Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's "propaganda". The fact you say things like this show people that they should constantly be questioning the science.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
Could you explain how much the US spends on its science budget compared to peers? It would help us really understand how much he's cutting it and harming our science base if we knew the numbers. For example if we're spending 50% less than EU or Canada.
> Kindly share more details (about your claim that science is under attack in the United States)
Is of public knowledge that the National Science Foundation and funds for thousands of scientific projects were gutted by DOGE in 2025.
Each one of the research lines cut needed typically 10 years to grow, so Trump and GOP had destroyed an incredible amount of years of research just on 2025, with consequences probably extending into 2035 or so. Without any visible benefit for Americans, that had still seen their debt sky-rocketing while their taxes are spent in pools and sinks.
Trump has also assured to engrave into the brains of the whole scientific community that US is now an hostile place for students and researchers. The whole planet had seen the main universities attacked by Trump (with Harvard resisting, and Columbia losing their pride), the foreign students targeted by ICE and the department of Education eviscerated
Also the thousands of workers in USAID and Health and Human Services fired for fun. Without mentioning the DOGE mess done at the national nuclear safety administration with 400 essential workers fired and then asked to return to the job ASAP, please, please.
It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
The funding environment in Canada is quite simply abysmal. You don’t need a politician to kill your grant, the money doesn’t exist in the first place. Canada could do so incredibly well if it only would invest in science.
Heritability is the proportion of variance in a trait that can be ascribed to genetics. So if you increase or decrease the total variance in the population u change heritability by definition. Eg. Split the pop in half and give one half less food - that half will be smaller (eg shorter in humans) and variance will increase thus the heritability will necessarily decrease.
"Heritability does not indicate what proportion of a trait is determined by genes and what proportion is determined by environment. So, a heritability of 0.7 does not mean that a trait is 70% caused by genetic factors; it means that 70% of the variability in the trait in a population is due to genetic differences among people."
Yeah, it's not immediately obvious, but if we created perfect utopia where conditions are ideal, perfectly matched for given individual, heritability would be 0%.
Sure, when the cameras start turning into a source of revenue then the city has an incentive to adjust the timing of the lights to maximize revenue and not minimize harm. This has happened (notably, the city of Chicago reduced the time of yellows and it led to more tickets and more accidents).
The other thing to remember is that governments don't operate red light cameras. They hire contracting businesses to install and operate them, and normally instead of paying a fixed rental/maintenance rate for the cameras those companies typically get paid a fraction of the fines. That means the designer/operator of the camera doesn't have much incentive to make the camera accurate or maximize safety, but to maximize how many cars it can issue tickets to (whether or not they're actually breaking the law or not).
When you take that to the extreme, the red light camera companies will even lobby local politicians to install more of them, and advertise them not as a tool for safety but for revenue. In some cases they've straight up bribed mayors and city officials with kickbacks from the ticket revenue.
All told, red light cameras are pretty shitty at making roads safer. What we really need are narrower roads with fewer lanes and smaller cars, but that's systemic. If we want to make specific intersections safer you can park a traffic enforcement officer at the intersection which will do more than any camera will.
The goal of a red light camera is ostensibly to make an intersection safer, but the fact that the city gets money when people get tickets incentivizes them to actually keep the intersection difficult to navigate correctly. They lose money if they adjust timings to be more appropriate for the situation or if they make the lights more visible or if they replace the light with a roundabout.
It also penalizes driving behaviors that are objectively not very dangerous far more harshly than a human police officer would—a lot of the profit from a red light camera comes from rolling right turns on red, which is very often a perfectly safe behavior that actually helps traffic move more smoothly (for example, when you technically have a red but there's a left turn crossing in the opposite direction providing complete cover for your move).
From what I recall, the real reason was that Lockheed owned and operated the cameras, took a cut of revenue, and was found to be changing the settings to issue more tickets.
I have perhaps unpopular additional suggestion. If you break any traffic laws your tesla should automatically report u to the police. Shouldn’t a car w AI capabilities be committed to responsible, ethical, safe, law abiding behavior ? I’m tired of bay area Teslas not signaling, cutting me off, and near killing me while I’m walking or on my bike.
Folks agreeing with this take should take a hard look at their attention spans and ability to focus and comprehend - it’s honestly really shocking to see how many people can’t handle sitting still and reading for 10 minutes (or fewer!) straight!
I should say I’ve struggled with this too, I have to be super mindful otherwise I’ll flip and skim and find myself distracted. But it is interesting there’s an embracing of this by many - “I always ask ChatGPT to summarize xyz.”
This is a long winded “permission slip” to avoid any personal responsibility for our actions. The fact is whether it’s eating beef or writing code for Raytheon you actually do have free will. The HN and tech crowd is also far more educated and empowered (individually and collectively) than the author would have us believe.
It’s to say we stress so much about avoiding actions to try to push for a society what we actually want, we don’t actually end up making any nudges towards that society.
HN is much more happy with the status quo because they on measure earn enough money to be comfortable at a much higher rate than the rest of society.
"Why it is okay to enjoy every single benefit capitalism brings, although I am opposing capitalism", is one of the oldest tropes of anti-capitalist literature.
It would be so easy to admit that you are doing it because your own personal satisfaction outweighs some ultimately vague political position, but of course admitting that to yourself can be hard.
Why don’t we preemptively put anyone who works in finance in the hall of shame. Unpopular w the hn crew I’m sure, but the field does disproportionately more harm than good.
I have loved watching space x launches for years. And here I am, scrolling around on my phone and I can’t for the life of me find a stream that opens- this is just so sad
“CRISPR-based genome editing tools developed by MIT professor and McGovern investigator Feng Zhang, Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and others have changed the way scientists modify DNA, accelerating research and enabling the development of many experimental gene therapies.”
“Others” being Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpatier - MIT and the Broad have long sought to minimize the work of these two women in the media for their own gain. Here again, a small but glaring example of their pettiness.
Biochemist Dr. Jennifer Doudna, from the University of California, Berkeley, submitted her patent application for the core CRISPR technology back in May 2012 after creating the tech along with Emmanuelle Charpentier.
But then biologist Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT submitted a similar patent application in 2013--but he requested a fast-track process and received the official patent in April 2014. Zhang has since been awarded additional patents on the technology.
CRISPR’s Nobel Prize winners defeated in key patent claim for genome editor
According to a ruling by an appeal board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a different group, led by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, made the “actual reduction to practice” of CRISPR’s ability to edit eukaryotic cells, including humans. This means companies developing CRISPR-based medicines must now negotiate with Broad and its partners, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for the use of the editor.
I think it goes something like this:
Doudna, et. al. were the first to discover and describe CRISPR in nature.
Zhang, et. al. were the first to successfully develop ways to edit genomes with it.
Mojica is generally considered the "discoverer of CRISPR". Douda and Charpentier took that knowledge and made a specific genome editing system based on bacterial enzymes (Cas9) and demonstrated it working in bacteria. Zhang is generally considered the person who made it work in eukaryotes.
