n
During the annual rally in Boston last week of one of the oldest American scientific companies, discussions addressed threats to humanity: artificial intelligence on the run, “chemicals per forever”, the possible end of the universe.
But the most urgent threats to many scientists were those who targeted them because the Trump administration reduces federal scientific workforce and reduced billions of dollars in universities.
“Anxiety and anxiety and, to a certain extent, sorrow”, is the way in which Sudip Parikh, which directs the American Association for the Advance of Science, the organization organizing the conference, summed up mood SATURDAY. News on dismissals in government agencies have struck the phones of conference fires.
“It is as if we were touched on all sides,” said Roger Wakimoto, vice-research at the University of California in Los Angeles.
A few weeks after President Trump’s second term, his administration and his Republicans to the Congress sent universities in shock to the repression of diversity initiatives, threats to allocations and potential deportations of undocumented students.
Scientists fear that the most in-depth changes are yet to come, affecting the cornerstone of public research financing in the United States: the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Together, the two agencies finance thousands of projects each year, supporting hundreds of thousands of researchers and other workers in institutions of each state. Agencies provide the financial backbone to American efforts to treat cancer, approach the increase in sea level, advance quantum and much more.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to maintain a plan to reduce $ 4 billion in NIH funding. But if the proposal goes from the front or if the administration brings changes similar to other agencies, university officials claim that the effects on their institutions and their communities are devastating.
The stake is the basic model that supported modern scientific leadership in America, said Holden Thorp, editor -in -chief of the journal Science. After the Second World War, officials understood the need to support basic research, the type that does not immediately lead to marketable innovations. But such work is expensive. Thus, universities and the federal government have agreed to divide costs.
“Now you see the federal government potentially trying to get away from this,” said Dr. Thorp. “And what worries me is that in the long term, universities will decide to do less research.”
The Trump administration said its plan for NIH would slow down waste, not research. During the AAAS conference, Kelvin Droegemeier, an atmosphere scientist who advised President Trump during his first mandate, urged researchers to adopt what he described as a desire for efficiency. Scientists spend a lot of time meeting regulatory requirements instead of doing real science, said Dr. Droegemeier.
“There are challenges right now, but there are also very important opportunities to get greater efficiency,” he said.
But pruning on research regulations would not be easy, said Dr. Thorp. And hold the financing of day overnight “will destabilize the system,” he said.
Among the 3,500 people who gathered in a Boston congress center for the Science Conference, a large part of the conference derived towards a simple question: what can I do about all of this? Some of the answers first implied sorting what the administration is and does not do before trying to counter it.
“The current administration, in my opinion, is not anti-science,” said Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a non-profit group that promotes medical research. Scientists can advance their objectives with the administration by emphasizing, for example, that strong science strengthens the competitiveness of the United States in the world, she said.
In Kei Koizumi, which served in the White House science and technological office during the Biden administration, scientific research has so far been “collateral damage” in the crusade of the new administration against universities. These actions, he said, have not been motivated by the animus towards science, but by the desire to develop what Trump officials make fun of “awakened” policies and cultures.
A discipline that has been more specifically targeted is climate science. President Trump has long minimized the threats of global warming. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staff members have been ordered to paint their research prices for terms such as “climate science”, “climate crisis”, “clean energy” and ” pollution”.
Aurora Roth finishes his doctoral studies at the Institution of Oceanography scripps at the University of California in San Diego and is preparing to apply for jobs. Instead, she said: “I wonder what institutions will even exist in a year.”
She and other scientists could understand how to reformulate their financing applications to avoid mentioning climate change, said Roth. But “Do you feel attacked just on the basis of science in the world?” This is a difficult thing to sit down, ”she said.
A participant in the Boston meeting, Kelly Cronin, deputy professor of geology at the Perimeter College of Georgia State University, saw reasons of optimism. For example, his former employer, Georgia Southern University, recently created an earth, environment and sustainability school.
“Georgia Southern is in Statesboro, Georgia, solidly red,” said Dr. Cronin. “They shoot most of their students from southern Georgia,” she said. “And yet it was the decision they made.”
n
n
