Speaker 1: Call Zon Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Dick It app Here, a podcast where the
Speaker 2: singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening
Speaker 2: all of the time. I'm your host, Miya Wong, And
Speaker 2: one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has
Speaker 2: been going on over the last two weeks since Trump's
Speaker 2: power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the
Speaker 2: US federal government grant system. And I think to a
Speaker 2: lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal,
Speaker 2: but that is unbelievably catastrophic for like I would go
Speaker 2: so far to say, is like the survival of the
Speaker 2: human species for reasons they will get to in a second,
Speaker 2: but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone
Speaker 2: on Earth. And to get to kind of a sense
Speaker 2: of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these
Speaker 2: funding freezes do, and what the sort of threat, particularly
Speaker 2: to the future of American science is, I have brought
Speaker 2: in two people who are intimately familiar with this Arguvon Salis,
Speaker 2: who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of
Speaker 2: the show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, come on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. I I don't know why I had such
Speaker 2: a hesitant friend of the show, because it wasn't in
Speaker 2: my notes that was that was ad living it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: friend of the show, Kami Hoda, who is a Gas
Speaker 2: show entrologist and the host of the podcast House of Pods,
Speaker 2: and both of you two, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3: I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 2: We may have done episodes of like that were like
Speaker 2: about a row.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a Persians a bit too Persian doctors
Speaker 1: talking about Trump is about as Persian as a good
Speaker 1: and you're not You're not overselling it. This is a
Speaker 1: large scale attack on the healthcare infrastructure of the United
Speaker 1: States on a massive level, So you're not lying. It
Speaker 1: is a serious, serious issue, not just for us but
Speaker 1: for the whole world.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And one of the I mean the places I want
Speaker 2: to start, I think is with because it was happening
Speaker 2: I think in n s FNIH a bit before this happened.
Speaker 2: But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out
Speaker 2: this memo last week that was a it was nominally
Speaker 2: a response to this very weird Trump executive order. That's
Speaker 2: him being like every single program that has to do
Speaker 2: with civil rights, which is like, so, my my description
Speaker 2: was anything it has to do with civil rights at all,
Speaker 2: like gone. His description of it is like dei and woke,
Speaker 2: so like anything it has to do with queer people,
Speaker 2: anything that has to do with like racial inequality. And
Speaker 2: they were supposed to like go through and review every
Speaker 2: single government grant program for anything.
Speaker 4: But don't forget he also included the gender ideology, which
Speaker 4: is a meaningless praise and the Green New Deal is
Speaker 4: all part of.
Speaker 2: It, yep, yep, yep, you know, and this is part
Speaker 2: of the raft of executive voters, particularly the anti trans
Speaker 2: executive voters. But OPM's response to this an awful Personnel
Speaker 2: Management's response was to just freeze literally every single grant
Speaker 2: program in the country. And this was everything from pell
Speaker 2: grants and like work study for college students, to like
Speaker 2: food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite and
Speaker 2: I don't know why this never made it into the press,
Speaker 2: because I'm apparently the only one who went through and
Speaker 2: read the list, but one of the things that he
Speaker 2: froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.
Speaker 2: So like we almost like, why, yeah, why is that included?
Speaker 2: It was because literally what happened was they found a
Speaker 2: list of every single grant that like anyone does like
Speaker 2: and any like program that gives out grants, and they
Speaker 2: froze all of them, and so like another one of
Speaker 2: them that when I said this is like, this is
Speaker 2: a threat to all life on Earth, I was not
Speaker 2: I was not joking here. One of the other ones
Speaker 2: was defunding one of the very important like international nuclear
Speaker 2: non proliferation organizations, like specifically the one that's there to
Speaker 2: make sure that like random people don't get like enriched
Speaker 2: uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons. So like we we
Speaker 2: dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet. When when like
Speaker 2: most of these programs got their money back after a
Speaker 2: judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this. This
Speaker 2: is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding, Like the Constitution
Speaker 2: like very blatantly says that the power of the purse
Speaker 2: is Congress, not the president.
Speaker 4: Eight like stop, yeah, but I would just want to
Speaker 4: clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just
Speaker 4: grant specifically, it was like all federal assistance. So one
Speaker 4: of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was
Speaker 4: this question of does this mean Snap is gone? Does
Speaker 4: this mean Wick is gone? What about headst what about
Speaker 4: meals on wheels? I mean, there are tons of federal
Speaker 4: assistance programs out there, and they had only made an
Speaker 4: exception for Social Security and medic care in the memo,
Speaker 4: but not Medicaid. And what happened the next day, but
Speaker 4: the Medicaid portal went down?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, And it's chaotic too because like all of
Speaker 2: the programs you just named were on the list of
Speaker 2: like programs that they were putting a freeze on, but
Speaker 2: then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them, end.
Speaker 3: Right, And it's still not right, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just have a judge.
Speaker 4: We have We found one judge with a backbone in
Speaker 4: the entire country so far, and he said, no, you cannot.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out
Speaker 1: on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like attacking
Speaker 1: that judge, you know.
Speaker 3: But it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's so confusing to me is, you know,
Speaker 1: I get it, at least in some part of their
Speaker 1: weird internal terrible logic, transphobic logic. I get why they're
Speaker 1: doing some of the things they're doing. But then some
Speaker 1: of them don't even make sense within their own whack
Speaker 1: internal logic, like when they scrub, for example, the CDC
Speaker 1: for all the terms that they didn't like, gender terms,
Speaker 1: transgender terms, things like that. They also scrub things like
Speaker 1: following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't, at
Speaker 1: least on the surface, even fit with their attacks on
Speaker 1: woke ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess
Speaker 1: to me what's happening. And it's what's terrifying about it
Speaker 1: is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are doing it, they are pushing it,
Speaker 1: even though they clearly don't even seem to really know
Speaker 1: what they're doing or even have a great sense internally
Speaker 1: of what they're doing.
Speaker 2: I think that's the danger of this right now, is
Speaker 2: that this is revenge. Right They're lashing out in sort
Speaker 2: of in pure anger and pure hatred, and they have
Speaker 2: been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand
Speaker 2: at all, Right Like that, that's how you get defunding
Speaker 2: a nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding like
Speaker 2: the very Goldwater Memorial grant thing that gives money to
Speaker 2: kids who're writing essays about Bury Goldwater. They don't understand
Speaker 2: what the state is and what it does, and they're
Speaker 2: just trying to take the whole thing apart, and they're
Speaker 2: just trying to sort of rampage their way through it.
Speaker 2: And it means that we're in this situation now where
Speaker 2: like for a long time, the line on like trans
Speaker 2: Rice was like, well, you should defend trans Rice because
Speaker 2: they're going to come for you next, And that's no
Speaker 2: longer true. This is actually happening here is in order
Speaker 2: to kill us. They are willing to kill every sit
Speaker 2: They're willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire.
Speaker 2: It's like specifically in order to hurt us. Right, that's
Speaker 2: the sort of line we're at where you know, all
Speaker 2: of these all of these sort of complicated systems and
Speaker 2: all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just
Speaker 2: getting lit on fire by people who don't understand what
Speaker 2: they're doing and don't care.
Speaker 3: Right, just out of spider or something, for sure, out.
Speaker 4: Of fight and hate. But I want to just take
Speaker 4: a step back and think about the fact that all
Speaker 4: of this is happening because of two versus three executive orders,
Speaker 4: depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders.
Speaker 4: They are not laws in the books. In Congress did
Speaker 4: not pass anything. It's like this elderly man woke up
Speaker 4: and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and d
Speaker 4: I A for example, those are the terms they use
Speaker 4: exactly without saying what DEI is or what DEI A is,
Speaker 4: And just I feel that we need to pause for
Speaker 4: a moment on the A de I A and they
Speaker 4: spell out, you know, as we're accessible. Wiping out everything
Speaker 4: related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA
Speaker 4: and makes no sense and is cool and all of that,
Speaker 4: but also just like legally, it makes no kind of
Speaker 4: sense unless they are going to go after the ADA,
Speaker 4: which I'm guessing is part of their plan to the
Speaker 4: extent that there is a plan. But the two key
Speaker 4: executive orders here are the sex and gender. One that's
Speaker 4: defending quote unquote defending women, that basically dictates that sex
Speaker 4: must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely,
Speaker 4: and that there's really either essentially saying there's no such
Speaker 4: thing as gender and that the only genders that they
Speaker 4: see are willing to recognize are male and female, there
Speaker 4: by erasing trans folks, intersect people, non binary folks, cutter
Speaker 4: a gender, queer, gender whood, all of those people. So
Speaker 4: for them to go into like the CDC data sets,
Speaker 4: take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is
Speaker 4: there eliminate I'm assuming I don't I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: know that this is not I'm assuming that that's what
Speaker 4: they're doing, taking any sex that thought male or female
Speaker 4: out of there, and then removing gender as a varia
Speaker 4: will because they've said that no grant funding should go
Speaker 4: to any assessment of gender period. So that's when you're
Speaker 4: talking to me about like how they're willing to throw
Speaker 4: everyone under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda.
Speaker 4: That's what you're talking about. They're willing to take huge
Speaker 4: lots of information off of the Internet so people can
Speaker 4: no longer research or position. Anyone else can no longer
Speaker 4: access this information, just to make sure that there is
Speaker 4: no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That
Speaker 4: seems to be like the key thing that they're trying
Speaker 4: to do with all of this. So they have thrown
Speaker 4: the entire government and take chaos and the lives of
Speaker 4: millions of people into chaos all to remove the t
Speaker 4: in LGBP.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction
Speaker 2: of this research data, the way that it's been just
Speaker 2: like taken down and destroyed. Little parts of it have
Speaker 2: come back up after the sort of backlash, but you
Speaker 2: know what they're what they're doing is staging a digital
Speaker 2: version of the nazis burning all of the books at
Speaker 2: the Institute Sexual Research. Like that's that's exposedly what they're doing.
Speaker 2: It's it's literally the same stuff, like it is research
Speaker 2: on queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 2: And you know you know who else lights research on
Speaker 2: queer and trans people on fire. It's it's the sponsors
Speaker 2: of this show. It's the products of services.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the way you get those big bucks. That's
Speaker 3: how you do it. That's professional broadcasting.
Speaker 2: And we are back. So I want to move from
Speaker 2: that to kind of the next phase after we got
Speaker 2: out of the sort of oh PM like suspending everything phase,
Speaker 2: which has been this kind of this uncertainty around a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science, National
Speaker 2: Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. Can you talk a
Speaker 2: bit about what's been going on with grants there before
Speaker 2: we move into like how this whole process works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the first sign that something was materially going
Speaker 4: to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm
Speaker 4: living this along with everyone else, and what is time.
Speaker 4: But the first thing that I recall is the study
Speaker 4: section being canceled. The study sections are meeting where scientists
Speaker 4: come together. They each will have read various grant proposals
Speaker 4: and scored them on a number of different dimensions, and
Speaker 4: then they come together and discussed. They don't discuss all
Speaker 4: of them, by the way, They only dissuess the ones
Speaker 4: that have that seem to have the most merit, and
Speaker 4: then out of those they make recommendations for which ones
Speaker 4: they believe should get funded. So these are a critical
Speaker 4: part of the process by which the government gives out
Speaker 4: funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people
Speaker 4: grants are not getting evaluated us and recommended for funding.
Speaker 4: That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're
Speaker 4: not hiring people, or they're having to fire people they
Speaker 4: already had in their layoff, people they already had in
Speaker 4: their lab. They're not able to continue the important work
Speaker 4: that they are doing they may lose their job, like
Speaker 4: really truly people can lose their job because they were
Speaker 4: not able to secure enough funding to support themselves and
Speaker 4: their labs. So these are really really important meetings, and
Speaker 4: those have been canceled for both the NSF and the
Speaker 4: nih for at least the last couple of weeks. And
Speaker 4: as of yesterday, I saw doctor Megan Ray said that
Speaker 4: her or not maybe not her, but that study sections
Speaker 4: were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today. So
Speaker 4: there had been some communication around perhaps the free of
Speaker 4: those activities ending on February first today that we're recording
Speaker 4: as February third, and those study sections for today were canceled.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, NSS, which is obviously a separate organization,
Speaker 4: has informally I've heard this that they were going to
Speaker 4: resume some body sections, although they haven't rexamped yet.
Speaker 1: And if I did add, just to be totally clear
Speaker 1: with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery
Speaker 1: of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. For
Speaker 1: the NAIH, for example, the nih IS is a big
Speaker 1: part of the reason we have mRNA vaccines now. They
Speaker 1: were the ones helping to promote that research for decades
Speaker 1: before we were able to turn them into vaccines, and
Speaker 1: because a lot of what they did that we're able
Speaker 1: to do that when we're looking for new breakthroughs and
Speaker 1: we're looking for something where patient comes to us and
Speaker 1: they're like, isn't there anything we've tried everything, isn't there
Speaker 1: anything that we could at least try or some trial
Speaker 1: that we could be involved in. That's where we find
Speaker 1: these things. These are the things that we're talking about,
Speaker 1: these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know between NAH and National Science Foundation
Speaker 2: and you know, Department of Energies having a similar thing
Speaker 2: to this, because Department of Energy funds all like high
Speaker 2: energy physics research, so all of your sort of like
Speaker 2: particle accelerator or stuff like that. It's not just sort
Speaker 2: of like the National Labs for example, that they get
Speaker 2: funding from these places, although you know National Labs are like,
Speaker 2: you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else.
Speaker 2: But you know, I mean, this is this is all
Speaker 2: the way down to the level of like undergrads and
Speaker 2: college chemistry labs like they're they are getting paid out
Speaker 2: of these grants from National Science Foundation from the National
Speaker 2: Institute's for Health, Like all of these all of these
Speaker 2: institutions pay out everything, and it's like this is the
Speaker 2: basis of how all science almost all science. Like there's
Speaker 2: some private sector stuff, but the thing is like the
Speaker 2: giant private like Bell Labs, right, like you're your old
Speaker 2: school giant private sector. Here's our giant R and D thing.
Speaker 2: Like that's all kind of gone, so you know, like
Speaker 2: the only people who are getting funded by this are
Speaker 2: like weird startup guys. And it's like, Okay, look look
Speaker 2: look what they've invented in the last like fifty years.
Speaker 2: It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again.
Speaker 3: Theranos don't forget.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they dose the metaverse juicer row like they're they're
Speaker 2: doing great. It's really great. And people will be like, oh,
Speaker 2: the Veta eye. It's like no National Labs were using
Speaker 2: those AA algorithms like a decade and a half ago.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, the generative blah blah. Okay, we're not
Speaker 2: we're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI.
Speaker 2: Go go go go listen to Edgittern's entire like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean I think the bottom line of what you're
Speaker 4: trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific
Speaker 4: and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers
Speaker 4: who have been funded by the NFF and the NIH
Speaker 4: And I will just say as an academic, these are
Speaker 4: certainly the kind of premiere funding opportunities that we have.
Speaker 4: Like it also was really critical in the careers of
Speaker 4: researchers to be able to show that their work is
Speaker 4: worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of
Speaker 4: why I would think people's jobs, the people we pay
Speaker 4: off of our grants, but also people like me, our
Speaker 4: jobs can be really dependent on whether we get this
Speaker 4: funding or not.
Speaker 2: And it's a generational thing too, because the students also
Speaker 2: need this funding. And so people people who are undergrads,
Speaker 2: particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right,
Speaker 2: Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school,
Speaker 2: like getting PhD so they can become scientists. That's all
Speaker 2: also like funded by these grants. And if that stuff
Speaker 2: goes away, like, it's not just that you're obliterating this
Speaker 2: generation of science, like you're decapping the next like three
Speaker 2: generations of scientists, right, because each one of them down
Speaker 2: the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're
Speaker 2: supposed to have.
Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, right.
Speaker 4: And also, who would want to go into science if
Speaker 4: it's going to be right, if there's just going to
Speaker 4: be like some random person who goes into the White
Speaker 4: House and never mind, we're not doing that anymore. Who
Speaker 4: are to be exposed to those kinds of wins.
Speaker 1: A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know
Speaker 1: that tend to be risk averse people. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people the CDC that could try to
Speaker 1: maybe sue for you know, for not being able to
Speaker 1: use the terms that they want to use and study
Speaker 1: the things they want to study, and they might even
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe they could win. You talk to
Speaker 1: Laurier about that. Seems unlikely because they're not private sector.
Speaker 1: But to them, they're not going to because they're living
Speaker 1: paycheck to paycheck too.
Speaker 3: Some of these people that are the lower levels, people that.
Speaker 1: Aren't making a ton of money and they have livelihoods
Speaker 1: that they're trying to maintain, they're not going to try
Speaker 1: and rock the boat when it comes to these things.
Speaker 1: It's putting them in a really tenuous position already, they're
Speaker 1: already worried about their next grant or their next what
Speaker 1: however they're going to fund their labs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I just want to highlight that postdocs I
Speaker 4: think are particularly vulnerable because they are often like this
Speaker 4: NFF where you actually demonstrated this girl, they aren't as
Speaker 4: said like, they're definitely often living paycheck paycheck. And what
Speaker 4: the NFF freeze did was that it made it so
Speaker 4: close could not get their next paycheck. Yeah, because we
Speaker 4: were this was happening at the end of the month, right,
Speaker 4: So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And
Speaker 4: in particular and talking about POSTOC, yes, it can affect
Speaker 4: graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding,
Speaker 4: like one of the grants that I have actually we
Speaker 4: worked directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral
Speaker 4: training programs that fund POSTOC. And to the extent that
Speaker 4: any of those grants are put on hold, that is
Speaker 4: threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer,
Speaker 4: who cannot afford to not get paid.
Speaker 2: And also, you know, and this is another aspect of
Speaker 2: this too, and I really doubt they understand this, but
Speaker 2: you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are
Speaker 2: not from the US right there, who are either international students,
Speaker 2: international students who are just you know, coming in from
Speaker 2: other countries. And those people, if you suddenly don't have
Speaker 2: a grant, you don't have a job, and that is
Speaker 2: really really bad for your immigration status. Like that that
Speaker 2: is enough to get you kicked out of the US.
Speaker 2: And this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in sort
Speaker 2: of labor organizing, right or like one of the threats
Speaker 2: that universities will make.
Speaker 3: Usually they do it implicitly.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally,
Speaker 2: will be like Okay, if if you this postoc or
Speaker 2: like you, this grad student like tries to like join
Speaker 2: this union, like your legal status in the US is
Speaker 2: going to be compromised. But that's another sort of risk
Speaker 2: from this is like those people's ability to stay in
Speaker 2: the US and not get reported basically.
Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And then then we talk about bringing in you know,
Speaker 1: I know there's a lot of internal debate right now
Speaker 1: between the publican party on you know, bringing in people
Speaker 1: to work these jobs and bringing in these minds. But
Speaker 1: this is a clear example of where the United States
Speaker 1: has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring
Speaker 1: in great minds from all over the world to help
Speaker 1: us work on research and to help us come to
Speaker 1: work in these labs. I mean you go to like
Speaker 1: USA Staff and Stanford and you see these people work
Speaker 1: making these labs on important stuff. And that's another like,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's something.
Speaker 3: We're gonna lose.
Speaker 1: And I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope
Speaker 1: it's not, you know something like you say, well last
Speaker 1: generations worth of damage. But it's hard to see how
Speaker 1: it won't at this point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was just looking up one hundred percent agree
Speaker 4: and to your point about how much of the science
Speaker 4: and even other amazing things that are done in the
Speaker 4: country are are done by immigrants. I think it's over
Speaker 4: just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United
Speaker 4: States have been immigrants to the United States.
Speaker 2: You know, And it's sort it's sort of a nationalist thing, right,
Speaker 2: but like for ninety nine percent of the time for
Speaker 2: better like, the US has been very very good at
Speaker 2: absorbing other country scientists. When you know this, like we
Speaker 2: we got to you know, okay, so like it's hard
Speaker 2: to take too much credit for it because we also
Speaker 2: took a bunch of scientists from the Nazi like from
Speaker 2: the actual Nazis, but we also like a bunch of
Speaker 2: very famous US scientists, Like we're in the US because
Speaker 2: they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis. And you know,
Speaker 2: we are looking at a situation where we are going
Speaker 2: to be the opposite of this, where like our scientists
Speaker 2: are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government
Speaker 2: is being run by these people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I wanted to highlight, I think that's literal
Speaker 4: all really great points about the effect of not getting
Speaker 4: the funding and who it trickles down to. But I
Speaker 4: also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of
Speaker 4: ways that the funding can be withheld. The one is
Speaker 4: just that review process and not actually reviewing grants. Right, So,
Speaker 4: like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall, who
Speaker 4: knows if when that will get discussed. There are people
Speaker 4: in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent
Speaker 4: on or really hoping to get funding this round, and
Speaker 4: now they don't know if or when that proposal will
Speaker 4: get reviewed. Of course, you never know if you're going
Speaker 4: to get funded, but to not even have a chance
Speaker 4: at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then On the other side,
Speaker 4: there's people who have been funded and are in the
Speaker 4: position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm
Speaker 4: going to receive the next payment. Because the NIH, so
Speaker 4: I have a five year grant and we are currently
Speaker 4: in year three. Every year you have to submit a
Speaker 4: status update on your project, and then they determine, based
Speaker 4: on lots of different things, including what budget they are
Speaker 4: given from Congress, how much of the funds that they
Speaker 4: had originally projected they'll be able to give to you.
Speaker 4: And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of
Speaker 4: people who are doing work that's related to health disparities,
Speaker 4: help equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now
Speaker 4: do not know if our work falls under quote unquote
Speaker 4: DEI or deia or gender ideology or all these vague
Speaker 4: terms that the administration is using, and so we actually
Speaker 4: don't know whether, like for me, I don't know if
Speaker 4: I'm going to get my next set of funds. In July,
Speaker 4: so I was in the process of interviewing to hire
Speaker 4: someone to join my lab, and I genuinely don't know
Speaker 4: whether I should hire someone at knowing that I may
Speaker 4: lose funds, and you know, five months or do I
Speaker 4: just try to make do without? And then that's a
Speaker 4: job that no one gets. And if you play that
Speaker 4: out over the three hundred thousand people who are funded
Speaker 4: in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand
Speaker 4: the scope of damage that's being done here.
Speaker 1: Can you tell people what your current grant is? And
Speaker 1: because I think that is pertin into this conversation, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 4: You're right. Okay, So my grant is called ending sexual
Speaker 4: Harassment Teaching of Principal Investigators as a q acronym E STOPS.
Speaker 4: So our goal is to try to help people intervene
Speaker 4: when there is sexual harassment, with the ultimate goal decreasing
Speaker 4: the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research.
Speaker 2: Oh they don't, they don't what you do with that?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Oh no, right, because one of the great terrible ironies
Speaker 1: of this whole thing is that their argument is that
Speaker 1: they're doing a lot of this to protect women, the
Speaker 1: sanctity of women or whatever this is. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: hopeful that I'm wrong for you. I hope that this
Speaker 1: is not the case, but I could see them very
Speaker 1: easily saying that this somehow fits underwoke ideology and even
Speaker 1: though it's something clearly that is designed to help not
Speaker 1: just women, but a lot of women could benefit from this,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and to your point, like everyone is at risk
Speaker 4: for hearingcing sexual harassment, it's just that the majority of
Speaker 4: folks who experience that are women or sexual engender minorities.
Speaker 4: And so yeah, I've really, obviously, as you can imagine,
Speaker 4: been thinking a lot about how they are interpreting these
Speaker 4: words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which by
Speaker 4: the way, is a form of discrimination, Like is that
Speaker 4: DEI is stopping discrimination?
Speaker 3: DEI? Who? Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I
Speaker 3: can go over this.
Speaker 1: There was this email that was dispersed from the the
Speaker 1: CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used,
Speaker 1: that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases.
Speaker 1: And they include words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual,
Speaker 1: non binary, non binary.
Speaker 2: They use both to one with a hyphen and without
Speaker 2: the hyphen.
Speaker 1: Signed male at birth, assign female at birth, biologically male,
Speaker 1: or biologically female. So anything that terms like that they're
Speaker 1: gonna scrub Wait, let me, can I.
Speaker 4: Just clarify that, because actually it's even worse, I think,
Speaker 4: than what you just described, because what they actually said
Speaker 4: in that email, as I understand it, is that there's
Speaker 4: all these researchers who work at the CDC. So they said,
Speaker 4: if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any
Speaker 4: scientific or medical journal that has any of these words
Speaker 4: in it, you must retract that manuscript. So it's even
Speaker 4: much much broader than just what's on the CDC's website.
Speaker 4: It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done,
Speaker 4: any researcher to say that they've done that they're in
Speaker 4: the process of publishing, they have been asked to rescind
Speaker 4: that work so that they can remove these god awful words, right,
Speaker 4: that are actually words that are used routinely in science,
Speaker 4: but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts.
Speaker 4: And how nonsensical would their manuscript be without these words?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's yeah, it's terrible.
Speaker 1: The other thing that blows my mind about this is
Speaker 1: how incredibly inefficient. Maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous
Speaker 1: it's going to be. Who's going to be doing this,
Speaker 1: who's going to be looking over this. To my knowledge,
Speaker 1: there's only been one political point in regards to this,
Speaker 1: and that's that the CDC. It's Susan Monerrez is the
Speaker 1: acting director there at the CDC, and it's all going
Speaker 1: to go through that one person. All every study is
Speaker 1: going to go through that one person. It makes no sense.
Speaker 1: I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced.
Speaker 1: It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try
Speaker 1: to make some examples out of people, but how are
Speaker 1: they even enforced this. We're gonna find out what your grant,
Speaker 1: I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact
Speaker 2: that the study retractions and it's just you know, this
Speaker 2: attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right, is
Speaker 2: that like the problem for them with medical research about
Speaker 2: trans people is that everyone who's doing this who isn't
Speaker 2: a like unbelievably rabid anti trans person from the beginning,
Speaker 2: you know, looks at everything that they want to you
Speaker 2: to trans people and goes, this is going to kill
Speaker 2: unbelievable numbers of us. And I think like part of
Speaker 2: what they're doing here is they're trying to before any
Speaker 2: of this stuff come out, they're trying to stop the
Speaker 2: scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying
Speaker 2: to wipe us out. And that's yeah, an unbelievably bleak
Speaker 2: thing to live through.
Speaker 1: I guess, like, yeah, so sorry. I mean, honestly, I
Speaker 1: wish I could say something more. It's really terrible.
Speaker 2: I will say this like Jenny Wineley, because it never happens. Obviously,
Speaker 2: the best the best thing you can do for trans
Speaker 2: people is like something that involves the follow of the regime.
Speaker 2: Like the second best thing is like hire us, because
Speaker 2: no one does it and we can't no one can
Speaker 2: get jobs, right and but like like that, the third
Speaker 2: minimum thing after like money or like housing, is like
Speaker 2: like check in on the trans people in your life
Speaker 2: because nobody actually ever does it, and it means a
Speaker 2: lot and it's not going to like stop the wrath
Speaker 2: of the state. But like, I don't know, a lot
Speaker 2: of people feel us alone. This This has been to
Speaker 2: be a trans public service announcement. It's now over.
Speaker 1: I think that's great advice. In other friend of the show,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy that she also said, you know when you
Speaker 1: hire people, you hire trans people, put them front of house,
Speaker 1: make it visible, and then when you go and you
Speaker 1: frequent these places, let them know that's part of why
Speaker 1: you do it. Like, I like that you guys are
Speaker 1: doing this. I'm here to support that. I mean, because
Speaker 1: we're talking about money, talking with people's livelihoods or at stake,
Speaker 1: and we have to show that these are people that
Speaker 1: are not only employable but could benefit your business.
Speaker 4: Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either,
Speaker 4: aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is
Speaker 4: a scientific it is inhumane. It will it will harm people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people are going to die. People probably have already died.
Speaker 2: If you're transit you're listening to this, fucking don't die.
Speaker 2: Think about how good it's going to be to get
Speaker 2: a piss on these people's graves in like eight years.
Speaker 3: It's gonna but it is.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 1: I agree, it is in dad to Argawan's point, it
Speaker 1: is dumb on every metric. I can't think of a
Speaker 1: single metric and that these actions are not hurtful and
Speaker 1: going to harm us in the long run.
Speaker 2: To close this out, this is a thing that I
Speaker 2: think is very important because no one in the US
Speaker 2: apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the
Speaker 2: grant process actually work and what is it? Because you know,
Speaker 2: this process is the difference between you, like having clean
Speaker 2: water to drink and like that study that was going
Speaker 2: to determine if your water is clean or not not happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, first thing I will
Speaker 4: say is that the word grant applies to lots and
Speaker 4: lots of different opportunities, and there are grants as small
Speaker 4: as like one thousand or five thousand dollars in grants
Speaker 4: as large as multimillion dollars, and the processes actually are
Speaker 4: I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different because,
Speaker 4: as you can imagine, for a smaller grant, the amount
Speaker 4: of work that you have to do to earn that
Speaker 4: grant generally is a little bit less. But I can
Speaker 4: speak in the most detail to the NIH review process
Speaker 4: and specifically to these grants that they call R one
Speaker 4: because are like kind of their fanciest grants that go
Speaker 4: to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by
Speaker 4: an individ researcher often. And the way this works is,
Speaker 4: first of all, I want folks to understand it takes
Speaker 4: a year from the time that you apply until the
Speaker 4: time that you get money. Can take up to a
Speaker 4: full calendar year, and so you put in an immense
Speaker 4: amount of effort. So I'll use myself as an example.
Speaker 4: I apply for a grant in October, huge amount of
Speaker 4: effort I don't know how many hours leading up to
Speaker 4: that brand submission, and then I just sit and wait
Speaker 4: for months, months and months before there's even a study section.
Speaker 4: If study section happens, and then after that, it's still
Speaker 4: a couple more months before I might get information. It depends.
Speaker 4: Of course, there's some variability there, but it's a long,
Speaker 4: long process, is what I'm trying to say. And the
Speaker 4: way the process starts is often you will send with
Speaker 4: called the letter of interest to the agency that you're
Speaker 4: applying to. So, as you said earlier, it's the National
Speaker 4: Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own notice
Speaker 4: of funding opportunities or no fos that are like, here's
Speaker 4: what we're actually asking people to submit for at this
Speaker 4: point in time, and then people will send a letter
Speaker 4: of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will
Speaker 4: have its own grant off the program officer, and you
Speaker 4: will send a letter of interest, maybe you get some feedback,
Speaker 4: and then you move forward to the actual grant itself.
Speaker 4: And I just want to say that it is more
Speaker 4: work than probably anything else I've ever done, except maybe
Speaker 4: my dissertation, and so it's a huge amount of work.
Speaker 4: The R one includes, for example, a one page specific
Speaker 4: aims page, which is you have the entirety of the
Speaker 4: study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims.
Speaker 4: And if that doesn't get the reviewer's attention, and if
Speaker 4: they don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that
Speaker 4: may be the end. You may have done all the
Speaker 4: rest of the work and they may only read that,
Speaker 4: and then you have a twelve page These are single
Speaker 4: space pages. Single space page is happing toward twelve page
Speaker 4: research strategy. I don't know how many thousand words, thousands
Speaker 4: of words that it's been, so I'm just telling you
Speaker 4: twelve single space pages. There's a lot of effect about
Speaker 4: your research. And it's like one of these puzzles where
Speaker 4: it has to be exactly right and you have like
Speaker 4: these figures and you have to get them exactly the
Speaker 4: right size in the exact right place on the page
Speaker 4: with the legend and everything, so that all magically sits
Speaker 4: in these tall pages. Because if you don't do it right,
Speaker 4: they will literally reject your grant for formatting problems, and
Speaker 4: so you may have spent months writing this grant and
Speaker 4: because you had the wrong size or the wrong margins
Speaker 4: that they can literally choose not to even read it,
Speaker 4: and then you're then having to wait till either six
Speaker 4: months later if there's another opportunity, or sometimes a full
Speaker 4: year later before you can try again.
Speaker 2: Also, it's worth noting you also have to like do
Speaker 2: a bunch of science. Like if it was just you
Speaker 2: must do twelve you must write twelve pages of stuff
Speaker 2: at formatta, it would probably be okay, But like you
Speaker 2: also have to do science, like both for it and
Speaker 2: also while you're doing it.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant,
Speaker 1: we all celebrate it for them because they're also excited
Speaker 1: because you know, it's not easy. So what's funny about
Speaker 1: that is the Republicans make it seem like all you
Speaker 1: have to do is put in a couple of terms,
Speaker 1: like you know, non binary, and you automatically get a grant.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, idea, how like challenging it is?
Speaker 2: No, It's like the only thing that could even potentially
Speaker 2: work like that is to say, say whatever, you're doing
Speaker 2: is cancer research, Like that's the actual thing, right, Like
Speaker 2: so sometimes you could like defraud the DoD by telling
Speaker 2: them like whatever research you're doing is camouflaged, like it's not.
Speaker 2: It's even that is like it makes it like one
Speaker 2: percent more likely that you're endless hours of work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I wish I could just by woke Ideology the
Speaker 5: Future bulk pages and they're like ghetagras us. But yeah,
Speaker 5: to your point, you have to part of what's in
Speaker 5: those twelve pages is what is the work that you've
Speaker 5: done that builds up to the work that you're proposing
Speaker 5: to do, And that's stuff whole section called preliminary studies.
Speaker 4: And what's in there very is depending on like what
Speaker 4: kind of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research,
Speaker 4: it might be various animal models that you've tested different
Speaker 4: things on that straight for example, that you are able
Speaker 4: to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing
Speaker 4: to use in this study, and that you have the
Speaker 4: specific methodological skills for whichever type of sace cellular analysis
Speaker 4: or whatever it is that you're doing, that you have
Speaker 4: those skills, that you have the equipment that you're able
Speaker 4: to actually carry out that research because part of what
Speaker 4: they're evaluating is can the person who's proposing to do
Speaker 4: this work actually do the work. Last thing they want
Speaker 4: to do is give you millions of dollars and have
Speaker 4: you fall flat on your face because you don't have
Speaker 4: the skills that are needed. So you have these pages.
Speaker 4: Part of those cull pages like often a page two
Speaker 4: three pages about what you have done to prepare for
Speaker 4: the work that you're proposing, and a lot of times
Speaker 4: to your point that work may or may not be funded.
Speaker 4: You may have to if you're like at an academic institution,
Speaker 4: you might be using your startup funds, you might be
Speaker 4: trying to get smaller foundation grants or something to be
Speaker 4: able to do that work, so that you can prove
Speaker 4: to the funding agency that you're able to do it.
Speaker 4: And then in addition to this culltation thing, there are
Speaker 4: a bunch of additional documents that are are required, Like
Speaker 4: there's currently this will probably change, but currently there's like
Speaker 4: a diversity plan, there is a how are you going
Speaker 4: to treat participants to our women and minorities. There's like
Speaker 4: an age document, there's a page about resources and facilities.
Speaker 4: There's all these additional documents which again all have their
Speaker 4: own specific formatting requirements. There's a project narrative which is shorter,
Speaker 4: and then a project summary, which is longer. I think
Speaker 4: I could have those backward way way way. It's all
Speaker 4: these additional pages. It's not just the specific games and
Speaker 4: just the reach of strategy. It's all of this plus
Speaker 4: the budget and the budget justification, and like you could
Speaker 4: just go on, but I think you start to understand
Speaker 4: that there are many many files that go into a
Speaker 4: single grant application, and it represents often months of work
Speaker 4: for an individual and their collaborators. And if you have,
Speaker 4: for example, another institution you're collaborating with, they all have
Speaker 4: to do a bunch of this paperwork as well, and
Speaker 4: there's a contract between the two and all this is
Speaker 4: done just to have a chance of getting conded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, the disruptions to the funding system,
Speaker 2: the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the
Speaker 2: payout means that like all of this work that you're doing,
Speaker 2: you know, you have no idea whether whether like again,
Speaker 2: all of this in some cases unpaid labor that you
Speaker 2: have been doing for months and months and months like
Speaker 2: could just not happen. Yes, And also like it's worth
Speaker 2: noting too, Like you also have to like when you're
Speaker 2: figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like
Speaker 2: working out whether or not your grant even has a
Speaker 2: chance of getting approved. Like that like is something that
Speaker 2: is that is that is a long term decision that
Speaker 2: determines like what like you know, what colleges you go to,
Speaker 2: like what institutions you end up at, like all of
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff, and like that thing being all
Speaker 2: the stuffing up in the air.
Speaker 4: And for people who run lab, yeah, trying to figure
Speaker 4: out like can you so I don't personally work with
Speaker 4: graduate students, but a lot of people do, So can
Speaker 4: you afford to bring in and sponsor another support another
Speaker 4: graduate student? Can you afford the support of another postdoc?
Speaker 4: These are all long term decisions. These aren't just like oh, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'm going to hire some for two months until I
Speaker 4: find out the next thing. It's like you would you
Speaker 4: want tom to people, especially trainees. So it makes it
Speaker 4: very difficult for people who run labs to make those
Speaker 4: decisions to bring people in because we don't want to
Speaker 4: let people down. And so I think the kind of
Speaker 4: intuitive and natural consequence is that people will bring in
Speaker 4: fewer people, because that's less risky than bringing in more
Speaker 4: people and then having to either cut their funding or
Speaker 4: let them go or whatever later on when you don't
Speaker 4: get the resources that you need. And I want to
Speaker 4: just point out that institutions here have a major role
Speaker 4: to play. And not all institutions, and by that I
Speaker 4: mean higher education institutions, and not all of them are
Speaker 4: equally resourced, obviously, but we all know that there are
Speaker 4: quite a few in this country that have massive endowments,
Speaker 4: and so are what is the plan there and what
Speaker 4: is the support for the folks at their institutions. And
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to oversimplify
Speaker 4: what is in fact a very challenging issue. But it
Speaker 4: would be nice, it would be fantastic if some of
Speaker 4: these institutions came out and said, we understand that this
Speaker 4: is a very challenging time, wereming committed to supporting the
Speaker 4: work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postoc et cetera,
Speaker 4: and we will and we will fund anyone who's funding
Speaker 4: is withdrawn or withheld.
Speaker 1: Let's just say it'd be nice if some of these
Speaker 1: very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the
Speaker 1: same backbone as Costco. Yeah, it's all I ask.
Speaker 4: Okay too, I want to highlight too. It's very early
Speaker 4: yet in this game. But Brown did come out I
Speaker 4: think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating
Speaker 4: clearly that they remain committed to their values of academic freedom. Right.
Speaker 4: So that's the way to say it, right, like, we
Speaker 4: support our staff and employees and students faculty doing whatever
Speaker 4: work they think is important. I think that that was
Speaker 4: their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the principles
Speaker 4: of DEI. But who knows, but that's what they said.
Speaker 4: But the Princeton Princeton actually put out their annual report
Speaker 4: on DEI at Princeton, and I forget the exact worrying
Speaker 4: and I don't have it in front of me, but
Speaker 4: their president talked about how important it is to support
Speaker 4: people from different backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So that
Speaker 4: those two that are trying to do something, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, I got I got to put in my
Speaker 2: word at Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing
Speaker 2: over their unions.
Speaker 3: So I thought they resolved it. I thought they actually
Speaker 3: gave them. No, they didn't. They did in the page increase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not resolved yet.
Speaker 3: I thought the hot Dog was still win fifty though,
Speaker 3: So that's important for me.
Speaker 2: Read Jamie Loftus's book, Raw DOGG.
Speaker 3: I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but even the NFL came out today and said
Speaker 4: that they're not going to end their d programs any Typetube.
Speaker 4: NFL known for being all right.
Speaker 2: I mean that is the thing though, right if if
Speaker 2: if you want to understand why the NFL is doing that,
Speaker 2: like look at who the current heads of the NFL
Speaker 2: Players Association are and like who they're past heads for
Speaker 2: the last like decade have been, and that will give
Speaker 2: you an indication of like why it's like that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely. I can tell it.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, if you're coming from feed Also. Also, I kind
Speaker 2: of owe the NFL Players Association because they did they
Speaker 2: they did put out a statement in support of our
Speaker 2: unionization drive.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it was very sweet.
Speaker 4: That's nice. Well, I do want to say one more
Speaker 4: thing about the grant process, which is that often people
Speaker 4: are submitting the same grant over and over and over
Speaker 4: because the funding rates are so low, and so often
Speaker 4: they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes,
Speaker 4: resubmit later and again. As I pointed out, it's not
Speaker 4: like this is a rolling submission process where any day
Speaker 4: of the week you can submit. I think for most mechanism. Again,
Speaker 4: there's going to be some variability from institute to institute,
Speaker 4: but it's at most twice a year, so like if
Speaker 4: they're if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback.
Speaker 4: By the way, sometimes you don't even get feed because
Speaker 4: if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you
Speaker 4: don't even get discussed. So you may not get feedback.
Speaker 4: But let's say you get feedback, then you try again,
Speaker 4: and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you
Speaker 4: try again. So sometimes it can take many cycles of
Speaker 4: this entire terrible process before you get funded one. And
Speaker 4: to coveys point about efficiency or clear like, I mean,
Speaker 4: if you think about it that way, that it's extremely
Speaker 4: inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make
Speaker 4: is that people work really really hard to get these grants,
Speaker 4: and for some of the folks right now who are
Speaker 4: kind of in limbo waiting for study section Jerusalem. This
Speaker 4: might be their third or fourth submission of something, and
Speaker 4: they were really hoping this was going to be the chance.
Speaker 4: Because at some point you can't keep pursuing unless you
Speaker 4: have some other independent income, like often, at some point
Speaker 4: you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So
Speaker 4: you have to think about what breakthrough is being put
Speaker 4: on hold or will never be identified because of all
Speaker 4: of this, Because someone might have been waiting and maybe
Speaker 4: they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve
Speaker 4: this freeze, and maybe they end up switching their career
Speaker 4: path into something completely different. And I'll just say, like
Speaker 4: even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that
Speaker 4: a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded.
Speaker 4: That was a very competitive grant. It was not a
Speaker 4: federal grant, It was a foundation, very competitive and we
Speaker 4: were delighted. We were I mean just thrilled to get funded.
Speaker 4: And then we could not in the end take the grant.
Speaker 4: We did not do the work of the grant because
Speaker 4: he ended up not being able to find an appointment
Speaker 4: that was going to work for him in academia, and
Speaker 4: so he went to industry, and so that work never
Speaker 4: got done. To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I would love for it to be done. But those
Speaker 4: are the types of consequences that we're talking about when
Speaker 4: we're looking at like what's happening with these funds and
Speaker 4: the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that
Speaker 4: funds will be revoked from people. They really changed the
Speaker 4: course of not just individual lives, but of science. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I mean, like the most visual example I could
Speaker 2: think about this was I knew some people who wanted
Speaker 2: to work in a coronavirus lab in twenty nineteen and
Speaker 2: couldn't do it because they didn't their PI didn't have
Speaker 2: funding for We're got a coronavirus thing. It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: it would have been useful if they if they got
Speaker 2: that grant. So I think this is a decent enough
Speaker 2: place to wrap up. I do have one thing that
Speaker 2: I want to plug, which is something you were talking
Speaker 2: about earlier, which is putting, which is these institutions like
Speaker 2: coming out and backing their scientists right, And that's that's
Speaker 2: the thing that you can do. You can put pressure
Speaker 2: on these institutions to do the right thing. And so
Speaker 2: it might be over by by by now, but like
Speaker 2: literally as we were recording this, there was a protest
Speaker 2: going on at NYU's hospital. Yeah, because they've cut off
Speaker 2: care to transuse.
Speaker 4: They cut off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so you know, you can do this the
Speaker 2: people who actually run these systems, and you know, and
Speaker 2: the entire federal government. Right while the people running the
Speaker 2: federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting
Speaker 2: there being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing,
Speaker 2: and you know, you can go show up to the administrators,
Speaker 2: the offices of the administrators at these places, and you
Speaker 2: can confront them and you could be like, Okay, you're
Speaker 2: either right here right now, you're going to be a
Speaker 2: coward and you're going to go along with this, or
Speaker 2: you're going to.
Speaker 3: Go back your own people. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's something that you could do right now.
Speaker 4: And I just want to add we didn't talk about
Speaker 4: this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and
Speaker 4: everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that
Speaker 4: is that there's an Office for Research on Women's Health.
Speaker 4: It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the
Speaker 4: entire National Institutes of Health. We do have a National
Speaker 4: Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National
Speaker 4: Institute of Women's Health. We have an author for research
Speaker 4: on women's health.
Speaker 2: Right if we love the US government, Jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy the Science
Speaker 4: is Engineering in Medicine, which is, like I would say,
Speaker 4: one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed.
Speaker 4: A review of funding for women's health research at the NIH,
Speaker 4: and they put out a report in December. It's pretty
Speaker 4: scathing if you read it, and they share that from
Speaker 4: twenty thirteen to twenty twenty three, research for women's health
Speaker 4: was like eight point eight percent of the entire NIH
Speaker 4: budget as a reminder, women are the population and just
Speaker 4: a reminder, and they called for almost sixteen billion dollars
Speaker 4: of additional funding to go to women's health research in
Speaker 4: the coming five years and the creation of an Institute
Speaker 4: for Women's Health. So what happened last week with almost
Speaker 4: everything on the website for the Office of Research for
Speaker 4: Women's Health was deleted.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, it's gone.
Speaker 4: So they're funding. An opportunities page is gone, their bios
Speaker 4: about their staff are gone, their updates on advances in
Speaker 4: medicine for women over the last twenty five years. Gone.
Speaker 4: Their pages on maternal morbidity, immortality gone, the importance of
Speaker 4: including women and minorities, and clinical trial gone, their page
Speaker 4: on health equity gone. You get the picture. So all
Speaker 4: of that except for just a very bare minimum landing
Speaker 4: page and kind a link to the office of I
Speaker 4: forget the official in the office. So that's an office
Speaker 4: that works on autoimmune diseases. Like everything else is gone.
Speaker 4: And so I did create a script. If anybody wants
Speaker 4: to call their member of Congress, I have a script
Speaker 4: for that, and the CDC pages that people can use
Speaker 4: in terms of actions. That's something I think that is
Speaker 4: about as real as it gets for us at this point.
Speaker 4: And I think that the more we are emphatic in
Speaker 4: our messaging that none of this is okay, that we
Speaker 4: demand to have these resources back online, that we demand
Speaker 4: to continue funding research on health disparities for all the
Speaker 4: different groups affected, I think the better the chance is
Speaker 4: that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants.
Speaker 2: That, Yeah, well we'll put links to that in the description. Also,
Speaker 2: I'm going to put it a personal plug to call
Speaker 2: your congress person to yell at them about all of
Speaker 2: the anti trans stuff, because they are legitimately in a
Speaker 2: flux point right now where the party is slipping back
Speaker 2: and forward between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass
Speaker 2: a defense bill that like banchanz people from the military,
Speaker 2: and we're going to stop things from happening, and so
Speaker 2: this is the thing that can go either way and
Speaker 2: getting yelled at by because situents legitimately does help with us.
Speaker 3: So yep, absolutely, yeah, do that.
Speaker 2: Do that too when you're called while you're calling what
Speaker 2: the CDC, multiple things, different calls, even Yeah.
Speaker 4: You might just want to put them on seed Dell
Speaker 4: and make it, you know, on your drive if you
Speaker 4: go into work, maybe every day on the drive you're
Speaker 4: just calling, Hi, here's the issue of the day, because
Speaker 4: there's no shortage of issues that we need to be
Speaker 4: communicating now.
Speaker 2: So, speaking of things in bios, where can people find
Speaker 2: you two for stuff that you want to promote the
Speaker 2: way you do, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing,
Speaker 4: which is most of them are terrible, but I'm on TikTok.
Speaker 4: If you just put my first name, usually all come up. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter,
Speaker 4: I know, I know, and Blue Sky and I'm not
Speaker 4: the only one I don't really do is Facebook.
Speaker 3: You're too cool for that.
Speaker 4: Oh I have a subset. That's where the script is
Speaker 4: bum subset. Now not too cool for Facebook. I'm just
Speaker 4: too lazy for Facebook.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, listen, if you're on these things,
Speaker 1: you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool
Speaker 1: kids are not in any of these things. You can
Speaker 1: find me at on Blue Sky, at cave.
Speaker 3: Ka V E H M D.
Speaker 1: And more importantly, you can listen to my podcast, The
Speaker 1: House of Pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine.
Speaker 3: We tried to make healthcare more relatable, you know.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or griffs
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will
Speaker 1: like it. Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez
Speaker 1: or Argavon here to musicians like Portugal the Man, or
Speaker 1: a lot of the Cool Zone family that you all
Speaker 1: know and love, Prop and Robert and hopefully me as soon.
Speaker 1: So find it anywhere you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: The House of Pod.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can find all of that. We've talked
Speaker 2: about like a staggering number of the other shows that
Speaker 2: we do in this one, but yeah you can. You
Speaker 2: can find our other shows where there are podcasts, And yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you God, I'm so bad at plugging these things.
Speaker 2: You think it's my living but now can't do it,
Speaker 2: so you're out of ten. Absolute failure. But yeah, thank
Speaker 2: you to both for coming on. And I hope you
Speaker 2: get your grant arka pod because that, like Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Well. If I if I don't get my
Speaker 4: funding renewed this summer, I will, I will let you know.
Speaker 4: I mean we can talk about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'm dot Yeah, this is this is big.
Speaker 2: Could happen here? Go go harass your legislatures, your local
Speaker 2: administrators for universities, your local police department. I make sure
Speaker 2: they do not bad stuff and do good things. It
Speaker 2: could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 4: pool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 4: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4: You can now find sources for it could Happen here
Speaker 4: listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,