Part the First: Pope Leo XIV and the Larger World. Of the academic historians currently writing for both their colleagues and students and the general reader, Greg Grandin is among the finest. In The Education of Pope Leo XIV he places the former Father Bob Prevost and current Pope Leo XIV in context of our so-called modern world:
Father Bob Prevost, today known to the world as Pope Leo XIV, says that when he first arrived in Peru as an Augustinian missionary in 1985, thirty years old and three years a priest, he was naïve. “It was all very natural to me,” he recently told his biographer Elise Ann Allen, to see the clergy working “to build up small communities” and treating the parish as a place “where people come to know one another and help one another and support one another.” When you went to “other places of the country,” however, “there was a very different perspective.”
He was putting it mildly. Prevost had landed in a country where the Catholic Church was at war with itself—where some theologians were preaching a gospel of class struggle and political liberation, while others were holding the line for a more doctrinaire faith. Over the previous two decades the movement called liberation theology—which depicted Christ as a revolutionary and read the Book of Exodus as a parable for how to escape modern bondage—had spread among the disenfranchised of Latin America. Peru was a stronghold…The movement’s most well-known theologian was the Peruvian Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, who argued that true Christian faith demands solidarity with the poor and the dismantling of structural causes of their oppression. His 1968 lecture “Hacia una teología de la liberación,” delivered in the impoverished port city of Chimbote, had given the movement its name.
From Latin America, liberation theology had traveled around the world, to the newly decolonized countries of the Global South and the cities of the industrial heartland, including Prevost’s hometown, Chicago. There Gutiérrez was a frequent visitor to DePaul University and the Catholic Theological Union (from which Prevost had graduated in 1982 with a Master of Divinity degree); both included his writings in their curricula and exchanged students and teachers with his Lima-based Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas. Even the Church of England drew on Gutiérrez’s writings to protest Margaret Thatcher’s gutting of the United Kingdom’s welfare state. Rome and Washington perceived the movement as a threat. In the “old days, you could count on the Catholic Church for many things,” Richard Nixon complained to Henry Kissinger in a March 1971 phone call—including for help in the fight against communism. Not anymore.
But in 1978 the Polish cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła became pope, taking the name John Paul II, and tried to recommit the Church to that fight. When he launched a major campaign to contain liberation theology, Peru was one of his first targets. In 1983 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith—an institution charged with safeguarding Catholic doctrine that traced its lineage to the Inquisition—opened what would be a multi-decade investigation into Gutiérrez’s writings in search of doctrinal errors. Prevost had arrived in Peru when this inquest was in full swing…
And the rest is history up to this day. From John XXIII to the reaction of John Paul II and Benedict XVI (along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in their secular roles), perhaps the one true church is regaining its fundamental Christian bearings with Francis and Leo XIV. There is much to ponder here. Given the life of Karol Wojtyla in a Poland stifled by Soviet imperialism, his reaction is understandable, to a degree. Ratzinger seemed to be just the face of the contemporary Inquisition. Those of us of a certain age remember the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Father Oscar Romero and the Maryknoll nuns who were murdered by American proxies in Latin America, and it could be that Leo XIV will be a force for good in this world. As Liberation Theology was squashed, Pentecostals made great inroads in Latin America that continue to this day. Consequence or coincidence?
And then there is this:
Leo has wasted little time, as pope…His first major papal document, Dilexi Te, issued in October 2025, dismissed as “pseudo-scientific” the claim that free markets would eventually lift people out of poverty, and warned against a Church that cozied up to elites in exchange for privilege and security. He has decried the treatment of migrants “as if they were garbage and not human beings,” called the US war on Iran “unjust,” condemned “neocolonial tendencies” in Africa, and denounced Israel’s bombing of Gaza, especially its slaughter of children. His Holy Thursday sermon preached that “the imperialist occupation of the world is disrupted from within; the violence that until now has been the law is unmasked. The poor, imprisoned, and rejected Messiah descends into the darkness of death, yet in so doing He brings a new creation to light.” This is classic liberation theology: the idea that Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection expose the lies undergirding the machinery of worldly conquest and terror.
Hmm…Should we have hope in response Leo XIV? Yes. Optimism, no, because the latter requires no action by anyone. Que sera, sera. Leo XIV and his immediate predecessor Francis are/were willing to mix it up on behalf of those who needed them the most. Whatever one’s theology, they are exemplary human beings despite their faults, and the manifest faults of the Church. We would do well to pay attention.
Part the Second: Eugenicists Just Keep Rewriting the Script. More from The New York Review today in Not in Your Genome by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin:
It turns out that if you begin an assertion with “it turns out” and sprinkle it with statistics and acronyms—especially if it’s expressed in the passive voice and followed by a footnote—up to 83 percent of the variation in whether people buy it is explained by their SCI (science credulity index) and 78 percent by their BDS (baloney detection score).
Here’s how it works. “It turns out,” writes Dalton Conley, the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton, in his new book The Social Genome (The New Science of Nature and Nurture), “that almost every trait that has been studied is at least partially influenced” by genetic differences, including “about 40 percent” of the variation in how far people advance in school. “For income,” he continues, “it’s 70 percent. For cognitive ability, 75 percent.” Turning to the footnote, we find no evidence but instead a further assertion that PGIs (“polygenic indices”)—statistical treatments of genetic variants—are “incredibly useful for studying the social world.”
This is Conley’s central claim: that genetic analysis offers the key to understanding not just people’s biology but their social environment. To grasp what a PGI is, you need another acronym, GWAS, for “genome-wide association study.” This statistical practice emerged a couple of decades ago, after the Human Genome Project completed the first map of a composite human genome. A GWAS identifies tiny statistical correlations between millions of genetic variants and some measured trait in a sample of individuals. A PGI then takes a given person’s DNA variants, assigns a number to each based on the correlations of the GWAS, and creates a weighted sum intended to predict the person’s likelihood of having the trait.
Conley is a true believer in the power of the PGI. “We can take a saliva sample from a baby,” he writes, extract its DNA, calculate a PGI, and “predict that baby’s odds of completing college.” (He adds the caveat that the predictiveness of the PGI depends on the environment, and if the society changes, “all bets are off.” But this is trivially true and therefore not really a caveat, as we will see.) Elsewhere in The Social Genome he writes that PGIs “have become the FICO scores of human genetics” and declares that “the PGI, with its X-ray powers, has revealed the hidden logic of social life.”
It was not long ago that genome-wide association studies would be the answer to a host of diseases that probably have some genetic component.. Not so much, yet, “as it turns out.” As for the polygenic indices, they are the exact analog of a FICO score, but much less predictive. Regarding FICO scores, as it turns out, there was a time when one’s credit score was not the visible-to-the-few “Scarlet F” on your forehead. Anyway, this entire exercise demonstrates the futility of an “engineering ideal in biology.” Despite the fever dreams of a distressing number of biologists, at the organismal level the engineering of biological responses is generally little more than:
Input – Dark Gray Box – Output
Feldman and Raskin do go there, however, as I expected they might, given the President’s repeated mention of “High-IQ” people (those who adore him) and “Low-IQ” people (those who take even a tiny exception to his attitudes and actions):
In another curious passage, Conley mentions Donald Trump’s frequent invocations of “good genes,” acknowledging that “only white supremacists compare humans to thoroughbreds in what’s called ‘racehorse theory.’” Depending on how you feel about white supremacists, you might assume Conley is headed toward repudiating racehorse theory. But you would be mistaken. As compared with racehorses, he says, humans make an even “more interesting game to calculate the odds on.” There is perhaps comfort to be found in the thought that this is a losing proposition: the field Conley calls BG amounts to a similar acronym we’re too polite to mention.
An interesting question regarding Conley is, “What happened?” Did he discover that children in poverty are there because of their genes? Probably, because of the various GWAS projects on which he has been one of multitudes. In the end GWAS are likely to founder because “statistically significant” and “clinically relevant” are not and never will be one and the same. But early in his career, we find this (mentioned in Feldman and Riskin) from an abstract in Annual Review of Public Health (1997):
Poverty has been shown to negatively influence child health and development along a number of dimensions. For example, poverty…is associated with increased neonatal and postneonatal mortality rates, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents or physical abuse/neglect, higher risk for asthma, and lower developmental scores in a range of tests at multiple ages.
Imagine that! I repeat myself, but for those who want to read Feldman and Riskin’s previous takedown of another recent eugenicist, their review of Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is here, and the inevitable exchange of views is here. Professor Harden of the University of Texas has a new book out, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. A very small part of me wonders if she begins with Augustine of Hippo. I think I’ll wait for the TED Talk, except I have yet to be able to sit through more than 5 minutes of a TED Talk. I probably need to get over that.
Part the Third: Do We Really Want Trofim Lysenko Russell Vought Choosing Winners in our Research Grant Lottery? Over the past week I have gotten emails from every scientific society of which I am a member. For example:
Dear KLG,
Yesterday, AAAS spoke out against a damaging proposal from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would jeopardize future scientific discoveries and breakthroughs by bringing politics into the heart of scientific evaluation and priority setting and rejecting the will of Congress and the American people.
The proposed rule forgets what has made America the world’s R&D leader for generations. Among many bad policy choices, the most damaging is that it would prioritize politics over merit by enabling OMB budget analysts to override scientific peer review to decide what science is worth funding. If this rule is implemented, Americans’ hopes for future cures, national security, and economic strength will rely on the scientific sensibilities of the Director of OMB, the nation’s chief bureaucrat. We must speak out against this with all of our voices.
You can find my full statement here and an editorial from Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp here. For further details on the proposed rule, read the ScienceInsider article…
Sincerely,
Sudip S. Parikh, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
Executive Publisher, Science journals
American Association for the Advancement of Science
For a more “nuanced” response to this, David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine is on the case, as he has been for a while. I encourage you to read him at the link when time allows. But before that, a few comments about how the funding system works based on my long experience (more than forty years) during which my research has been funded by NSF, NIH, American Heart Association, and the American Cancer society. I have had acquaintances imply, when not making outright accusations, that scientists use their research support to “get rich.” I have then asked them to explain how the system works. “Absolutely clueless” doesn’t begin to describe their understanding.
In the first place, there are much better ways to get rich for the vast majority of working scientists who do not “cash out with a unicorn” courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 (medical school, for example, which is a topic for another time). While success in the grant lottery often but not always results in promotion and pay raises, no grant money gets directly to the principal investigator (PI). Most institutions do place a small percentage (typically 10-25%) of the PI’s “overhead” in an unrestricted account that can only support the laboratory. This money is used for student travel to scientific meetings, membership dues in scientific societies, subscriptions to scientific journals, computer purchases that are virtually forbidden by granting agencies, and miscellaneous other needs. However, these accounts and grant accounts are audited in real time, and every dime spent must be accounted for according to rules that every scientist and departmental administrator knows. The amount of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is miniscule for these reasons, notwithstanding the very rare miscreant who is always caught.
Control is everything, as the United States has learned in the aftermath of the catastrophe known as NAFTA and deindustrialization as we lost control of what matters. Russell Vought wants to control what research is done so that it dovetails with the “priorities of the Current Administration.” I look forward to new research on how smoking really does not cause human disease. Enterprising scientists can build on the “research” of Hans J. Eysenck (one of the most cited psychologists ever and a graduate student of Sir Cyril Burt) that concluded people get cancer because they have a cancer-prone personality. That should be interesting.
Part the Fourth: A Stopped Analog Clock Is Right Twice a Day. The current US Secretary of Health and Human Services thinks ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are unhealthy. He is correct, and the American Journal of Public Health has published a special edition showing why. From STAT News:
The all-star lineup of ultra-processed food researchers who teamed up on a new special edition of the American Journal of Public Health have an overarching message for policymakers: “Do policy!”
That directive, offered by food politics scholar Marion Nestle during a press call ahead of the issue’s release, is accompanied by new polling that shows broad cross-partisan concerns over the health harms associated with ultra-processed foods.
A survey of 2,000 U.S. adults included in the new issue found that the overwhelming majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents agreed that ultra-processed foods are addictive and a major cause of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The survey also found majority support in all parties for government interventions including testing additives for safety before they can be included in food products, banning artificial dyes, requiring warning labels, and ordering companies to reduce the amount of sugar and salt in their foods.
“In this polarized era where Americans disagree on so much, this is actually something where we’re seeing a lot of agreement and public support, which should be a catalyst for policymakers,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at UNC Gillings School of Public Health, who co-authored a paper for the new issue on the environmental toll of the single-use plastics that package many ultra-processed foods.
But despite both public support and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s focus on ultra-processed foods as a major health issue during his current tenure as U.S. health secretary, experts said that the federal government is not doing enough to take action against the food industry. Top of mind was Kennedy’s promise that the Food and Drug Administration will soon release a formal definition of ultra-processed foods, which Taillie said was crucial to get right. “What’s at risk here is … you only capture a small fraction of the ultra-processed foods on the food supply, which will also have minimal health impact,” she said. (The assembled experts voiced support for the widely used Nova classification system.)
That so many people agree on something does not mean they are correct. But in this case, the data are overwhelming, and a change must come. Perhaps the most interesting, and infuriating, article in the special edition of AJPH is Ultra-Processed Foods in the Global Food System: The Role of US Tobacco Companies (this issue seems to not be paywalled and a click on the PDF or EPUB links opens this paper and the others). From the Abstract:
We sought to characterize the involvement of US tobacco companies in the global food industry, where they disseminated ultra-processed and hyper-palatable foods, and the methods they used to expand globally. We reviewed and extracted data from 113 primary source industry documents.
US tobacco companies developed billion-dollar food businesses that were prominent internationally between the 1980s and mid-2000s. Tobacco companies developed their international food businesses with the same strategies they used to establish their international tobacco businesses.
Our findings suggest that US tobacco companies used their extensive experiences from their tobacco businesses to maximize the successes of their international food businesses in disseminating ultra-processed foods globally. Regulation of the multiple addictive products that tobacco companies have disseminated to markets globally may be needed to protect public health. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print June 3, 2026:e1–e11. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308501)
No surprises here. Business is just business. One can only hope this issue has legs. But one thing to keep in mind is that there is no need to tighten up the definition of UPFs. Carlos Montiero and his colleagues have already done that, and if the Nobel Committee is paying attention he should get the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Soon.
Thanks for reading! As always, comments and criticism most welcome. See you next week.
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