Latest news with #StandUpForScience
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Newsom pushes back against potential federal cuts to California public universities
The Brief Sources told CNN that the Trump administration is targeting California universities over alleged antisemitism on campus. Newsom is threatening to withhold federal tax dollars if the cuts go through. PALO ALTO, Calif. - California Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing back amid reports that the Trump administration is considering cutting federal funding for the University of California and California State University systems. A White House spokesperson told CNN no final decision has been made. Still, Newsom is threatening to withhold federal tax dollars if the cuts go through. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the governor, responded to the CNN report on Friday. "Let's have a serious discussion about how much California contributes to the national economy," said Palmer. Newsom also took to X, posting, "Californians pay the bills for the federal government. We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back. Maybe it's time to cut that off." In Palo Alto, community members responded to the potential federal cuts to universities during a rally in defense of science research and academic funding. "We want to preserve our democracy, our science, and our medicine," said Carol Peyser, an organizer of the "Stand Up for Science and Sanity" demonstration. Big picture view Next year's federal budget proposal includes cuts of 40% to the National Institutes of Health and 55% to the National Science Foundation. Peyser and others expressed concern that additional cuts could reverse decades of progress in scientific research and public health. "The attacks on the universities are really severe and not what we voted for. People did not vote for this," Peyser said. "It's absurd, and it's not just going to hurt California. We develop technology that goes all over the country and supports our economy." The Source Original KTVU reporting
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
UNM post-docs forewarn threats to research at Stand Up for Science event
Graduate student Alex Connolly signs a letter to U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) as part of the New Mexico Stand Up for Science outreach on the last day of spring semester classes. (Danielle Prokop / Source NM) On the last day of classes for the spring semester, organizers for the New Mexico Stand Up for Science tabled at the University of New Mexico, asking more students to join efforts to protest White House efforts to dismantle funding mechanisms for science research. 'The intent really is to make sure that people don't lose steam throughout the summer,' said Nina Christie, a post-doctoral researcher studying substance use. The group is part of a national movement seeking an expansion of research science funding and reinstating research cuts under anti-diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. UNM could face $20 million in lost funding under NIH rule The cuts, led by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, have impacted billions of dollars in research — including a UNM neuroscience researcher studying impacts of repeated traumatic brain injuries, who spoke at an earlier protest at the New Mexico Legislature. About two dozen students stopped by over the course of 45 minutes. Some UNM employees also visited, including undergraduate advisors Madison Castiellano-Donovan and Dylan Velez. Velez told Source NM some of the psychology students whom they advise are expressing uncertainty in finding future jobs, wanting to graduate early or 'considering switching majors altogether' due to the cuts to higher education. Matison McCool, a post-doctoral researcher in substance abuse research, said lost funding will close doors for upcoming students. 'Without general training grants in place, without that infrastructure, there simply won't be pathways to get into science anymore, for people who want to do that,' he said. McCool said he also hoped the effort to organize will push the university to further protect funding. 'I want to hear concrete steps the administration is going to take and plan on taking to help continue funding researchers who lost their grants, and finding the resources for funding science,' he said. McCool said the recent 2026 Budget Request from the White House proposes Congress halve the National Science Foundation by more than $4.7 billion, and cut the National Institutes of Health budget by more than $17 billion dollars. 'That will devastate cancer trial research, substance trial use research — that is a fact,' he said. 'We cannot fund these studies that are solving these problems, people will die if these studies don't exist.' His own five-year research grant hasn't been impacted yet, but he's concerned that research will only get more limited, and he worries the grant could be rescinded at any time. 'The hardest part is looking at these White House proposed budgets and thinking 'I don't have a job in five years,'' he said. 'This may be the only science I ever get to do.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bill Nye
Credit - Jamie McCarthy—Getty Images Bill Nye did not have much to do with politics during the 1990s, when he was making his celebrated Bill Nye the Science Guy TV series on PBS. But Nye has grown increasingly vocal in his objections to changes, budget cuts, and firings at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and elsewhere under the Trump Administration. Now he's using his millennial celebrity to speak out. 'If the U.S. is to lead the world, science cannot be suppressed,' he said at the Stand Up For Science rally in Washington, D.C., in March, where he urged people to make their feelings known to lawmakers. In addition to inspiring action, Nye has attracted the ire of the Administration's supporters, including Elon Musk, who criticized him on X. But Nye is not inclined to go quietly. 'Scientists are citizens, and science has always been political,' he tells TIME. 'Where do you apply your intellect and treasure? How do you make decisions on how to spend government resources? What do you require of private industry, of vaccine labs? You need informed policy makers, and they're going to get that information from scientists and engineers.' Write to Jeffrey Kluger at
Vox
09-04-2025
- Science
- Vox
The self-inflicted death of American science has already begun
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Demonstrators take part in a 'Stand Up For Science' rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2025. Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images In Ezra Klein and Derk Thompson's new book Abundance — which maybe you've heard of — they tell the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian American scientist whose work ultimately led to the mRNA Covid vaccines. Related A longtime target of the right is finally buckling under Trump pressure When the research center she was working for in Hungary lost its state funding in the early 1980s, Karikó left her homeland, selling her car for 900 British pounds and sewing the cash into her daughter's teddy bear so her family had something to live on. Like countless other researchers around the world, she found her way to the country where a scientist had the best chance of finding the funding and support to further their work: America. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thompson and Klein, one of Vox's founders, mostly use Karikó's story to illustrate the way risk aversion holds back science. Karikó was convinced that mRNA could be harnessed for new kinds of treatments and vaccines, but she experienced rejection after rejection from short-sighted grantmakers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was only when the Covid pandemic struck that the enormous value of Karikó's mRNA work was finally recognized. The mRNA vaccines ultimately saved as many as 20 million lives in just one year, and Karikó won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2023. But wind the tape back. Even before her years of rejection in American academia, had Karikó never been able to immigrate, she might never have been in a position to further her research in the first place. Perhaps we never would have had the mRNA vaccines — or even if we had, they would have been the product of another nation, one that would have reaped the benefits that ultimately went to the US. Instead, Karikó is one of a long line of foreign scientists, with the support of America's unparalleled university system and government support, achieved greatness that benefited her and her adopted country. The US has won more Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other country by far, and immigrant scientists won more than a third of those Prizes, a proportion that has only increased in recent years. America has become a scientific colossus not just because it has spent more than any other nation on research and development, but because it made itself a magnet for global scientific talent, from superstar researchers to lowly junior scientists like Karikó. That, in turn, has translated to enormous economic benefit. According to one study, government-funded research and development has been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth since the end of World War II. Now the Trump administration is working to destroy all of that through catastrophic funding cuts and blatantly nativist immigration policies. And the result will be nothing less than an act of national suicide. That's what the money's for This is very bad. Sheer dollar power has always been a key ingredient in American scientific dominance, going back to the country's enormous advances during World War II. (As important as geniuses like J. Robert Oppenheimer were to the development of the atomic bomb, the US ultimately got there first because it had the resources, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, to turn the entire country into a factory for nuclear material.) Universities have already resorted to hiring freezes to cope with the cuts, and some are even rescinding admissions offers to PhD students. Some young scientists may simply leave the field altogether, potentially robbing us of future Karikós. But there has already been some success in pushing back against these cuts. On Friday, a federal judge permanently barred the Trump administration from limiting funding from the NIH to support academic research, though the ruling is almost certain to be appealed. And even if funding is cut, future administrations could restore it, while alternative sources of money can be found in the interim. What the Trump administration is doing with funding is a body blow to American science, but doesn't have to be a fatal one. What is happening with immigration policy, however, is another matter altogether. Killing the golden goose The Trump administration has made no secret of the fact it is deliberately targeting foreign students in the US that have been involved — sometimes only peripherally — in pro-Palestinian protests. Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder from Algeria who was a grad student at Columbia University, is currently sitting in custody in Louisiana after his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Another international student, Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts University, was arrested and scheduled for deportation, apparently for the crime of co-writing a newspaper op-ed criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza. But those are just the most high-profile cases. The New York Times reported this week that nearly 300 international students at universities around the US have had their visas suddenly revoked and could face deportation. (That figure could be higher when you read this — every time I clicked on the headline yesterday, the number of visas revoked went up.) There have also been reports of harassment and detainment of foreigners legally crossing the US border, which adds to a state of fear for any noncitizens. A few hundred students may not seem like that much, given that the US granted more than 400,000 visas in 2024 alone. But the message from the administration, which is also apparently scouring student visa applicants' social media for evidence of 'hostile attitudes' toward America or Israel, is clear: We don't want you here. And students and scientists are listening. In a recent poll by the journal Nature of more than 1,200 scientists in the US, three-quarters said they were considering leaving the country. This was especially true of the young scientists who are set to form the next vanguard of American research. Foreign scientists who might otherwise come to the US for conferences or short-term positions are rethinking those plans, afraid — with reason — they might end up inside an ICE detainment facility. Other countries like China and Canada are already making overtures to scientists in the US, because they're smart enough to grab an opportunity when they see one. As one recent Times opinion piece put it, the Trump administration's actions 'could mean America's demise as the most powerful force for innovation in science, health and technology in the 21st century.' Could they be replaced by American students? Don't bet on it. To push out foreign scientists who are here and shut the door to those who would come would cause incalculable damage to the US. Jeremy Neufeld of the Institute for Progress has called the recruitment of brilliant immigrant scientists to the US the 'secret ingredient' in American dynamism. A 2022 study found that immigrants have accounted for 36 percent of total innovation in the US since 1990, as measured through patents, while more than half of the billion-dollar US startups over the last 20 years have an immigrant co-founder. And now, apparently, we don't want them anymore. Destroying our future A boutique industry has emerged recently trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless actions of Trump and Musk. One theory is that Musk is doing what he often did at his companies: cutting things to the bone, and then adjusting as he sees what breaks. This can work — Musk didn't build multibillion-dollar companies like Tesla and SpaceX by accident — but it depends on being able to see the effects of what is cut immediately, through a fast information feedback loop. If Musk makes a change to a SpaceX rocket and it blows up, well, there's his answer. But as Klein said on a recent podcast, 'the government doesn't have very fast feedback loops.' And that's especially true for something as long-term as science funding and talent. Katalin Karikó came to the US in 1985, but it wasn't until 35 years later that her true value as a scientist was borne out. We may not immediately feel the impact of fewer foreign scientists coming to the US and staying here, but the impact is real. We'll feel it when we see scientists in other countries take home Nobel Prizes, when China laps us in vital fields like biotechnology and AI, when we struggle to find the people and the ideas that can create the next world-beating companies. We'll feel it when America becomes just another country. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
09-04-2025
- Science
- Vox
The slow death of American science has already begun
is an editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate, tech, and world teams, and is the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Demonstrators take part in a 'Stand Up For Science' rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2025. Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images In Ezra Klein and Derk Thompson's new book Abundance — which maybe you've heard of — they tell the story of Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian American scientist whose work ultimately led to the mRNA Covid vaccines. Related A longtime target of the right is finally buckling under Trump pressure When the research center she was working for in Hungary lost its state funding in the early 1980s, Karikó left her homeland, selling her car for 900 British pounds and sewing the cash into her daughter's teddy bear so her family had something to live on. Like countless other researchers around the world, she found her way to the country where a scientist had the best chance of finding the funding and support to further their work: America. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thompson and Klein, one of Vox's founders, mostly use Karikó's story to illustrate the way risk aversion holds back science. Karikó was convinced that mRNA could be harnessed for new kinds of treatments and vaccines, but she experienced rejection after rejection from short-sighted grantmakers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was only when the Covid pandemic struck that the enormous value of Karikó's mRNA work was finally recognized. The mRNA vaccines ultimately saved as many as 20 million lives in just one year, and Karikó won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2023. But wind the tape back. Even before her years of rejection in American academia, had Karikó never been able to immigrate, she might never have been in a position to further her research in the first place. Perhaps we never would have had the mRNA vaccines — or even if we had, they would have been the product of another nation, one that would have reaped the benefits that ultimately went to the US. Instead, Karikó is one of a long line of foreign scientists, with the support of America's unparalleled university system and government support, achieved greatness that benefited her and her adopted country. The US has won more Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other country by far, and immigrant scientists won more than a third of those Prizes, a proportion that has only increased in recent years. America has become a scientific colossus not just because it has spent more than any other nation on research and development, but because it made itself a magnet for global scientific talent, from superstar researchers to lowly junior scientists like Karikó. That, in turn, has translated to enormous economic benefit. According to one study, government-funded research and development has been responsible for 25 percent of productivity growth since the end of World War II. Now the Trump administration is working to destroy all of that through catastrophic funding cuts and blatantly nativist immigration policies. And the result will be nothing less than an act of national suicide. That's what the money's for This is very bad. Sheer dollar power has always been a key ingredient in American scientific dominance, going back to the country's enormous advances during World War II. (As important as geniuses like J. Robert Oppenheimer were to the development of the atomic bomb, the US ultimately got there first because it had the resources, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, to turn the entire country into a factory for nuclear material.) Universities have already resorted to hiring freezes to cope with the cuts, and some are even rescinding admissions offers to PhD students. Some young scientists may simply leave the field altogether, potentially robbing us of future Karikós. But there has already been some success in pushing back against these cuts. On Friday, a federal judge permanently barred the Trump administration from limiting funding from the NIH to support academic research, though the ruling is almost certain to be appealed. And even if funding is cut, future administrations could restore it, while alternative sources of money can be found in the interim. What the Trump administration is doing with funding is a body blow to American science, but doesn't have to be a fatal one. What is happening with immigration policy, however, is another matter altogether. Killing the golden goose The Trump administration has made no secret of the fact it is deliberately targeting foreign students in the US that have been involved — sometimes only peripherally — in pro-Palestinian protests. Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder from Algeria who was a grad student at Columbia University, is currently sitting in custody in Louisiana after his arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Another international student, Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts University, was arrested and scheduled for deportation, apparently for the crime of co-writing a newspaper op-ed criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza. But those are just the most high-profile cases. The New York Times reported this week that nearly 300 international students at universities around the US have had their visas suddenly revoked and could face deportation. (That figure could be higher when you read this — every time I clicked on the headline yesterday, the number of visas revoked went up.) There have also been reports of harassment and detainment of foreigners legally crossing the US border, which adds to a state of fear for any noncitizens. A few hundred students may not seem like that much, given that the US granted more than 400,000 visas in 2024 alone. But the message from the administration, which is also apparently scouring student visa applicants' social media for evidence of 'hostile attitudes' toward America or Israel, is clear: We don't want you here. And students and scientists are listening. In a recent poll by the journal Nature of more than 1,200 scientists in the US, three-quarters said they were considering leaving the country. This was especially true of the young scientists who are set to form the next vanguard of American research. Foreign scientists who might otherwise come to the US for conferences or short-term positions are rethinking those plans, afraid — with reason — they might end up inside an ICE detainment facility. Other countries like China and Canada are already making overtures to scientists in the US, because they're smart enough to grab an opportunity when they see one. As one recent Times opinion piece put it, the Trump administration's actions 'could mean America's demise as the most powerful force for innovation in science, health and technology in the 21st century.' Could they be replaced by American students? Don't bet on it. To push out foreign scientists who are here and shut the door to those who would come would cause incalculable damage to the US. Jeremy Neufeld of the Institute for Progress has called the recruitment of brilliant immigrant scientists to the US the 'secret ingredient' in American dynamism. A 2022 study found that immigrants have accounted for 36 percent of total innovation in the US since 1990, as measured through patents, while more than half of the billion-dollar US startups over the last 20 years have an immigrant co-founder. And now, apparently, we don't want them anymore. Destroying our future A boutique industry has emerged recently trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless actions of Trump and Musk. One theory is that Musk is doing what he often did at his companies: cutting things to the bone, and then adjusting as he sees what breaks. This can work — Musk didn't build multibillion-dollar companies like Tesla and SpaceX by accident — but it depends on being able to see the effects of what is cut immediately, through a fast information feedback loop. If Musk makes a change to a SpaceX rocket and it blows up, well, there's his answer. But as Klein said on a recent podcast, 'the government doesn't have very fast feedback loops.' And that's especially true for something as long-term as science funding and talent. Katalin Karikó came to the US in 1985, but it wasn't until 35 years later that her true value as a scientist was borne out. We may not immediately feel the impact of fewer foreign scientists coming to the US and staying here, but the impact is real. We'll feel it when we see scientists in other countries take home Nobel Prizes, when China laps us in vital fields like biotechnology and AI, when we struggle to find the people and the ideas that can create the next world-beating companies. We'll feel it when America becomes just another country. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
