Science requires ethical oversight – without federal dollars, society’s health and safety are at risk

  As the Trump administration continues to make significant cuts to NIH budgets and personnel and to freeze billions of dollars of funding to major research universities – citing ideological concerns – there’s more being threatened than just progress in science and medicine. Something valuable but often overlooked is also being hit hard: preventing research abuse.

  The National Institutes of Health has been the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. Its support helps translate basic science into biomedical therapies and technologies, providing funding for nearly all treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019. This enables the U.S. to lead global research while maintaining transparency and preventing research misconduct.

Multiple goals, multiple solutions, plenty of second-guessing and revising − here’s how science really works

  A man in a lab coat bends under a dim light, his strained eyes riveted onto a microscope. He’s powered only by caffeine and anticipation.

  This solitary scientist will stay on task until he unveils the truth about the cause of the dangerous disease quickly spreading through his vulnerable city. Time is short, the stakes are high, and only he can save everyone. …

  That kind of romanticized picture of science was standard for a long time. But it’s as far from actual scientific practice as a movie’s choreographed martial arts battle is from a real fistfight.

Science activism is surging – which marks a culture shift among scientists

  Hundreds of scientists protested government efforts to restrict educational access to Western science theories, including Darwin’s theory of evolution, in June 2023 in India. Similarly, scientists in Mexico participated in a research strike in May 2023 to protest a national law they claimed would threaten the conditions for basic research. And during the same month in Norway, three scientists were arrested for protesting the nation’s slow-moving climate policy.

  As these among many other actions show, scientists today are speaking out on a variety of political and social issues related to their own research fields and in solidarity with other social movements.

Why can’t Americans agree on, well, nearly anything? Philosophy has some answers

  Does wearing a mask stop the spread of COVID-19? Is climate change driven primarily by human-made emissions? With these kinds of issues dividing the public, it sometimes feels as if Americans are losing our ability to agree about basic facts of the world. There have been widespread disagreements about matters of seemingly objective fact in the past, yet the number of recent examples can make it feel as though our shared sense of reality is shrinking.

Understanding why people reject science could lead to solutions for rebuilding trust

  Rejection of science is a huge problem, with many people refusing to get vaccines and denying the existence of climate change.

  Why are so many people anti-science? As experts on attitudes, persuasion, and how humans are impacted by scientific innovations, our recent research showed that there are four key reasons people reject scientific information.

3 medical innovations fueled by COVID-19 that will outlast the pandemic

  A number of technologies and tools got a chance to prove themselves for the first time in the context of COVID-19. Three researchers working in gene-based vaccines, wearable diagnostics, and drug discovery explain how their work rose to the challenge of the pandemic, and their hopes that each technology is now poised to continue making big changes in medicine.

Sally Steenland: Are we finally nearing the tipping point on climate change?

  If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will shriek and frantically try to escape. Drop that same frog into a pot of warm water, however, and gradually turn up the heat, and it will drift off to sleep and die.

  Some version of that second scenario is happening to us right now. I’m not saying we’re on the brink of perishing, but on a range of issues—from climate change to gun violence to women’s reproductive health—incremental changes have lulled us into complacency, relaxing our sense of danger and weakening our response reflexes.