Trump's War on Science, con't

It’s hard to keep track of the outrages coming out of the Trump administration, but for anyone who cares about learning and science, here are a couple of things that are worth focusing on. They are particularly worth focusing on if you have been thinking, like several old friends of mine, that Columbia University “had it coming,” and that the concessions that it made last week were things that the Columbia administration should have been doing anyway.

The first thing is a letter posted on social media by Sarah Ehlke, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Old Dominion University, from the National Institutes of Health, terminating a grant on which she is a co-investigator. “This award,” the letter states, “no longer effectuates agency priorities. Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”

The second thing is a list of 344 NIH grants terminated between March 12 and March 20, including no fewer than 108 issued to Columbia University. The Columbia grants total $400 million—and, in case you missed the story amid the torrent of news this week, that happens to be precisely the amount Donald Trump hoped to gain from a real estate deal with Columbia twenty-five years ago, but that Columbia ultimately decided not to pursue. In the past, it has been almost unheard of for NIH to terminate grants before they concluded, and the institutes followed a scrupulous set of procedures before doing so. No procedures whatsoever were followed here.

But given the letter posted by Dr. Ehlke, the reasons for terminations are not hard to determine. Eighteen of the grants had the word “transgender” in the title. Another forty-three had “gender.” “Race” and “racial” were popular, while over fifty grant titles use the words “sex,” “sexual,” or “bisexual.” Over fifty mention HIV. COVID (also known as SARS COV-2) came up several times. And twenty grants mention vaccines. Finally, more than twenty grants reference aspects of female and maternal health—for instance, cervical cancer. (Prostate cancer research, on the other hand, seems to have been spared). In fact, nearly all the non-Columbia grants seem to have some connection to race, gender, sexuality, class, COVID, or vaccines. Of all the universities affected, only Columbia has a plethora of grants on other subjects, including $4.5 million for a project on maternal and child metabolic health, $6 million for one on radiation biodosimetry, $4.2 million for mitochondrial disease, and $2.8 million for exploring the benefits of xenotransplantation. Also canceled were most of Columbia’s grants for training graduate students.

Now, I am guessing that if Americans were polled on the subject, most of them would object to the federal government spending $573,588 to develop “a couples-based approach to HIV prevention for transgender women and their male partners,” to cite the title of one of the terminated grants. It is easy enough to imagine the reaction of most Fox News viewers. But while the American people should certainly have the right to decide if they want to spend tax dollars on health research, do we really want to put the actual allocation of funds, the actual choice of projects, in the hands of non-experts? And consider this: how much money might a project on HIV prevention for transgender women and their male partners end up saving the government in Medicaid, Medicare and disability payments for HIV treatment, not to mention the tax dollars lost from workers disabled because of this punishing disease? Not to mention the moral case for saving the health and lives of American citizens.

But as the list, and the letter posted by Dr. Ehlke, make abundantly clear, these grant terminations have nothing to do with science, or with any sort of serious economic calculation. I sincerely doubt they were made by anyone with serious scientific expertise. They reflect the average Fox News viewer’s understanding (or, rather, lack thereof) of how scientific research works. The letter’s claim that research projects on gender identity “have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of Americans,” is, to use a scientific term, pure bullshit. Quite possibly, some of the terminated projects do indeed lack scientific viability. But who should be making this determination? I have no idea who composed the letter Dr. Ehlke posted, but I am pretty sure it was not a scientist. Of course, Donald Trump and his acolytes think the entire scientific establishment is corrupt. But even if that were the case (and it’s not), wouldn’t the solution be to find non-corrupt scientists to reform it? As opposed to the sort of person who wrote the letter?

So let’s be clear. The Trump administration is waging a crass, bigoted, and enormously destructive war on American universities and American science, grounded in ignorance and prejudice and a petty desire for revenge. These things, and not a desire to protect Jewish students, are what really motivated the attack on Columbia. And if you think that the administration is now sated, and will stop its attacks, then there is a bridge ten miles south of Columbia Medical Center that I think you might find a very interesting real estate proposition.