Scientific institutions are in full scramble. No amount of diplomacy or charity can interpret the modern moment as anything other than an attempt at destroying the foundations of the modern scientific machine. In particular, layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (some of which were reversed, perhaps temporarily, this week) are the ones likely to have the largest immediate impact. We may no longer be able to rely on science-based interventions for infectious disease threats. And should the broader proposed changes from presidential executive orders hold up in court, we scientists should say goodbye and make our peace with the old models. Funding will no longer exist in the amounts that it did. The scientific job force will shrink. We should no longer operate with the assumption that everyone believes us. We need to adapt or die.
What do we do? There is nothing new to say that hasn’t been said during other political calamities: despair only serves our masters, humans have been through worse, the mention of the arc of the moral universe, and other aestheticizing (and often wrong) cliches. And the naive optimism of many scientists — that it just can’t get much worse, because yesterday it was fine — is equally impotent. No one is coming out of the sky to give you your grant money. Your citation portfolio won’t survive this market crash. Your credentials mean nothing. Everything is going to change.
In response, we need to swiftly adopt a harm reduction model, where we use our ingenuity — driven by the same mental muscle that we use in our science — to build a different profession that is still capable of defending and practicing science.
Firstly, the thinning of resources would increase the workload on the scientific workforce that survives. There would be far less administrative support, and because money would be harder to come by, everyone will have to put in more effort to carry out daily tasks. There would be fewer junior scientists to train (or for some, to exploit), especially foreign ones, who are a large and underappreciated portion of that workforce. For example, as a former experimental virologist turned computational biologist, I might have to actually run an experiment with my own hands, rather than relying on one of my often younger and more careful trainees. The direct consequences of this are clear: We will produce less data and make fewer discoveries.
We need to swiftly adopt a harm reduction model, where we use our ingenuity — driven by the same mental muscle that we use in our science — to build a different profession.
But as bad as this outcome is, the indirect effects could be worse. As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor. One that has been in my and many others’ crosshairs is the relationship between professional science and a peer-review process that is the jury and judge for valuable products. Ask any editor at a journal: Finding reviewers to evaluate manuscripts is akin to pulling teeth. This problem will become a thousand times worse. No one will have time to read your work, rerun your computer scripts, or pore over your methods. There were never great incentives to do so in the first place (service to the great scientific community has always been a minor part of our promotion dossiers), and now it isn’t worth our effort at all, as we all scramble to chase the same shrunken pool of available funding, in the name of reaching professional benchmarks set in a world that no longer exists.
To combat this, the leadership of every scientific institution must immediately do what it should have done decades ago: incentivize service to the science enterprise to a degree commensurate with classical measures of productivity such as publications and grants. What does this mean, and how would it work?
Our newest science celebrities should be those who facilitate the sharing of open data, work for the democratization of information, provide feedback to colleagues, and develop new publication models. As datasets vanish, public repositories such as GenBank can no longer be taken for granted. And if there is less funding for publications, we’ll need innovative measures to ensure that scientific resources are available.
Currently, scientists who do these things live in a world where their efforts come from goodwill, often defying what a scientist is encouraged to do: accumulate attention from powerful peers, find warm bodies to carry out the work, and bring in money. Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects against the participation of those who spend their effort supporting the work of others and innovating on how science is done. If this Titanic sinks, they will be our lifeboat.
Relatedly, scientific results will be under more scrutiny than ever before. And so the longstanding reproducibility crisis will come to the fore, and concerns over it will likely be weaponized as justification for the further subversion of science. In light of this, we should enter a full data-evaluation era in basic science, where we use our statistical talents to fortify results that are already in circulation, so that we can more confidently defend our conclusions. Thankfully, there are models in place to take on this challenge. The systematic review and meta-analysis, popular in the health sciences, must be elevated in stature and become one of the standard products across all of the sciences.
In this era, we’ll need to vigorously defend even the most basic assumptions in our field: the effect sizes of clinical interventions, diagnostic criteria for certain diseases, and predictions for the effect of climate change. If you thought that debating creationists and flat-earthers was bad, I wouldn’t be surprised if even gravity comes up for debate. And while data alone won’t stop this smear campaign, we should be prepared with our most rigorous defenses of everything.
In this new normal, funding is another area that will require reimagination. In the old system, professional advancement was often tied to raising money. Ask a junior biomedical scientist, and they will tell you advice that they’ve been given in search of promotion: have an active federal grant at the time of evaluation. This might have been presumptuous in a system with copious funding, where effort alone was supposed to be enough to secure grants. (In my view, this has never been true.) But in the new world, that advice becomes plainly stupid: There will not be enough to go around. And so the empire model of science — in which a researcher’s eminence is tied to the accumulation of talent who produce on our behalf — will become less lucrative.
The reason we’ve incentivized extractive practice is because it was financially lucrative to the places where we work. (The debate about whether this is right or wrong is for a different forum.) Universities make money on our National Institutes of Health grants, not because we explain how vaccines work to members of a Baptist church or other populations of non-scientists. But these people who pay for our research understandably shrug their shoulders when the government moves to fire a large fraction of the scientific workforce. Scientists must rethink the targets of our scientific expertise and take on the intimidating challenge of bridging the gap between science and society. Changes here need to be made immediately.
Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects against the participation of those who spend their effort supporting the work of others and innovating on how science is done.
Why has the public gutting of science not caused an immediate political backlash? The authors of the culling have correctly recognized that the public has no idea how science works and has no connection to scientists who aren’t on television. Note that the blame game is irrelevant here: I’m not saying that it’s scientists’ fault. We are doing the job we were trained to do, chasing the prizes that our mentors taught us to chase. In our new world, the expert who carefully engages science journalists and translates findings to our lesser-educated relatives will be just as valuable as the one who generates boatloads of data on the backs of a dozen overworked graduate students. This communicative aspect, now embodied in the science communication movement, must become a formal technical frontier of the scientific enterprise, and not patronizingly summarized as “outreach” or “activism.”
We aren’t lying if we complain that some of these activities aren’t what we were trained for. We spent our lives mastering the methods that allow us to uncover the mysteries of the natural world. My only retort is that such pearl-clutching may reveal that some of us weren’t cut out to be scientists in the first place. Because the truest test of scientific wits is agility; the ability to pivot on a dime. With impressive efficiency, we’ve built atomic bombs, cyclotrons, and mRNA vaccines. We’ve sequenced the genomes of thousands of species.
The good news is that what is required to reduce harm does not rely on developing the supply chain for a rare enzyme or securing taxpayer dollars for a new space station. The bad news is that it involves doing something that is just as ambitious: rethinking the very basics of what the job of a scientist is, why we do our jobs, and what it means to do them well.