Part the First: They Really Are Serious About Destroying American Science (but that has been clear from the beginning). The Wall Street Journal writes: White House to Direct Billions in Research Funds Toward AI, Away from Colleges (no archive).
In a new report and memo released Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy argues individual scientists can help the nation move faster to use AI in scientific research. The directives from the office will help shape a roughly $200 billion annual federal research and development budget across the government for the rest of President Trump’s second term.
The new guidance could further hurt large universities that rely on federal research funding. The administration hopes to give priority to programs such as fellowships and awards that give opportunities to individuals rather than colleges, it says in the report. Examples of model programs the White House says should be emulated include a prestigious National Science Foundation program for graduate students and a National Institutes of Health award for creative scientists.
Someone needs to tell these people that “individuals” without an institutional home that provides the library, the laboratory and office, the graduate students, and the core facilities, including animal care and use, that allow the individual to do his or her research cannot do anything. It was a long time ago that a theoretical physicist worked in the Swiss Patent Office and spent his spare time starting a revolution in his discipline. Now, without the institutional home that pays for the electricity, internet, and other utilities, that individual can do nothing. That is what the overhead (indirect costs) does. And it is just as essential as the direct costs. Arguing whether the individual, institution, and indirect costs are important is like trying to decide which leg of a three-legged stool is the most important.
The typical reaction to this story is the following comment:
Universities typically steal 40% of federal research funding for their own bureaucracies. This effort redirects the funding directly to scientists, especially those leveraging AI in scientific research. This should dramatically increase the amount of science funding without the government spending any more money.
Just another person who has no clue. A similar story is at STAT News: White House offers its science blueprint: More AI, less life sciences (archived). It would be funny if it were not so ridiculous:
Taking inspiration from “Science — The Endless Frontier,” a 1945 manifesto that became the blueprint for the rise of American research universities, Trump’s science adviser, Michael Kratsios, this week put forth his version of such a report. Called “Science: A New Golden Age” and drafted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, it calls for shifting hundreds of billions of research dollars from universities to industry, primarily tech and artificial intelligence companies.
We have discussed Vannevar Bush here many times before (the first hit is courtesy of Jerri-Lynn Scofield!). It seems that young Michael Kratsios has no idea what Vannevar Bush did. But within a few years his vision transformed American science into the world’s leader, where it remained until 2025. Let’s be clear. No one who has been a part of this vision has failed to notice where it could be improved. However, improvement is not on the current agenda.
A former graduate student at my current institution asked me earlier this week whether he should bail out on a career as a research scientist. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at a top medical school. That life has always been a crapshoot. Some of us have been lucky, some have not. I look back on my career and it could have derailed at multiple forks in the road. But I never thought I would feel duty bound to tell a young, up-and-coming scientist that he probably has no future in the United States, unless he wants to be an itinerant “technician” flitting from gig to gig without a chance to every make an independent contribution to neuroscience, which was a priority not so very long ago.
Part the Second: A Short Note on Dr. Anthony Fauci Shows that Several Things Can Be True at the Same Time. One would expect The Atlantic in its current iteration to publish The Unmaking of Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci was present at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis and after a short delay he changed his approach to allow promising drugs to be used before doctors could be sure they worked. His illustrious career (see the wall of honor in his own office at the link) ended during the post-pandemic lull and was put paid with the return of Donald Trump to the White House:
This is not the professional coda that Fauci’s half century in government once seemed to be heading toward. For decades, he has been one of the nation’s best-known and most-respected scientists. In the late 1960s, Fauci helped lead a team at the National Institutes of Health that repurposed cancer therapies as cures for several once-fatal rheumatological conditions. His later partnerships with AIDS activists and his push to accelerate experimental-drug trials for HIV helped transform the infection into a survivable condition. He went on to serve as a chief architect of PEPFAR, a global HIV-prevention-and-care program that has prevented an estimated 25 million deaths since 2003. And over the course of his nearly 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he turned one of the NIH’s quietest branches into a $6 billion research juggernaut. Fauci has “saved more lives, created more amazing infrastructures for developing research opportunities, cured more people, provided health care to more people both in the United States and abroad, probably, than any single scientist in his lifetime,” Larry Corey, an infectious-disease expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, told me.
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But ever since President Trump retook office in 2025, his administration has engaged in a systematic effort to obliterate Fauci’s legacy. One of Trump’s first actions in office—just days after Biden issued his pardon—was to strip away Fauci’s government-funded security detail. Fauci’s image was cut out from a mural on the NIH campus around the same time. By the end of spring, the administration had rerouted government webpages once dedicated to information on COVID resources to a new site, alleging that Fauci had tried to hide the “true origins” of COVID. Trump officials went on to largely dismantle PEPFAR, imperiling many of the 20 million people the program has supplied with lifesaving therapies. They ousted most of NIAID’s long-standing leadership, including several officials who served under Fauci for years, as well as Jeanne Marrazzo, the director who succeeded him; they forced out Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, once a bioethicist at the NIH, and arrested David Morens, one of Fauci’s longtime advisers. (Morens has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to hide and destroy government records.) “Anything that he had his name on, or that was under his accomplishments, is being destroyed,” Judith Currier, an infectious-disease expert at UCLA, told me. (The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)
Earlier this week Dr. Fauci exercised his rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution to refuse to answer the questions of a Senate Committee. And this is where the other true thing lies: Senator Rand Paul, a former ophthalmologist who established his own National Board Ophthalmology, has been out to get Anthony Fauci for years and only a fool would answer his questions. In the meantime, the origins of COVID-19 remain obscure and are likely to remain so. And that is primarily a failure of “my people.”
Part the Third: Will Polio Come Back? Not that it ever left completely, but just as with smallpox, the world’s scientific establish has the wherewithal to eliminate this scourge once and for all. As this opinion piece in Nature puts it, Polio will come roaring back if the task of eliminating it isn’t finished soon:
But the polio eradication curve is not flattening to zero. The tiny gap that remains isn’t closing. Polio should be long gone, but remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which this year reported a total of 18 confirmed cases, as of 21 July. There has to be renewed urgency to finish the job once and for all. The stakes are sky-high: some disease modellers are forecasting a resurgence of hundreds of thousands of cases a year if the world abandons the cause (K. M. Thompson et al. Expert Rev. Vaccines 21, 1667–1674; 2022).
In countries that recently became polio-free, a kind of complacency is setting in, according to an assessment by the Independent Monitoring Board of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). The GPEI has been striving to eliminate polio since 1988 and does phenomenal work, administering more than one billion doses of polio vaccine to some 400 million children every year. But there are many reasons why the ‘last mile’ is proving difficult. These are articulated in the latest report by its independent monitoring board, published last September (see go.nature.com/4g2evvd), and in a Nature News Feature (Nature 655, 840–842; 2026).
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The abrupt dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year disrupted $85 million of funds for crucial polio activities such as surveillance and health communication. Although much of that money, along with broader funding for global health, was reinstated by the US Congress in April, these funds now go through different channels, mostly through the State Department. And there is a key difference between old and new funding: the US has insisted on bilateral health arrangements with 34 countries so far. That rules out money for global campaigns such as GPEI.
In a world in which the former doctor Andrew Wakefield remains an influencer, it seems safe to state that polio will be with us for the foreseeable future and beyond.
Most of us received the Sabin polio vaccine, which supplanted the Salk vaccine (killed virus) relatively quickly after the Salk vaccination campaign matured. In many ways the Sabin vaccine (live attenuated virus incapable of causing disease except in very rare cases) was better. For my family and me when I was in the second grade it was delivered more than 60 years ago to the whole community in my elementary school cafeteria as a blue/purple spot on a sugar cube.
Albert Sabin always told the world he was a better scientist than Jonas Salk. That may have been true. It is also irrelevant. It is true that Jonas Salk was the better colleague and friend. The two did not get along, but it isn’t clear that Sabin got along with anyone. This story is told in the first serious biography of Albert Sabin, which was recently reviewed in The New York Times.
The positive results turned Salk into a superstar, much to the displeasure of other polio researchers who viewed Sabin, for all his nasty bluster, as the superior scientist with the better product. (Tom Rivers referred to Sabin as “the smart Jew” and Salk as “the young Jew.”) To compound matters, Sabin couldn’t test in the United States because so many children had already received the Salk vaccine. But in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, the Kremlin and the U.S. State Department gave him permission to run trials in the Soviet Union, where polio was rampant. Nearly 78 million oral doses were consumed, and the early reports were glowing. The vaccine was “close to 100 percent effective.” No dangerous side effects were listed. It was cheaper than Salk’s vaccine and easier to administer. Who wouldn’t choose a sugar cube over a painful injection?
Sabin’s vaccine was fully licensed in the United States in 1962. The number of confirmed polio cases in 1960 causing permanent paralysis or death stood at 2,525 — a dramatic drop from a high of 21,269 in 1952, before Salk’s vaccine became available. By the mid-1970s, that figure had dropped below 20, thanks largely to Sabin’s laboratory magic. Polio seemed on the verge of eradication.
Sabin’s professional success did little to quell his personal demons. Fortunately, Torghele doesn’t play psychoanalyst. Her portrait of Sabin’s private life is both straightforward and painful to read. He had multiple affairs. He showered family members with verbal abuse. His first wife killed herself by placing a plastic bag over her head. His second wife quickly realized her mistake and divorced him. He remained so distant from his two daughters that he cut them from his will. His gods were science and self-promotion, not necessarily in that order.
Albert Sabin was not the first scientist whose gods were the same or the first to be a disagreeable human being. The problem with the Sabin vaccine was that one-in-a-million case in which the vaccine caused the disease. One of these people is a close friend. A new killed vaccine supplanted the Sabin vaccine in 2000. One wonders if he would have approved. On the other hand, when he was asked why he didn’t patent his vaccine, Jonas Salk asked if you could you patent the sun. He was a true scientist and benefactor of all of humankind.
Part the Fourth: Ancient Art, Again! We moderns sometimes tend to think we have it all over our predecessors, recent and remote. In 40,000-year-old bird carvings provide clues to how ice age humans flourished, we learn of art that astonishes the modern from a site in Germany that is being painstakingly excavated a few centimeters at a time. The artifacts are breathtaking and make one feel privileged to be related to these artists. Can we really learn from these little sculptures how these ancient humans thought about the world? No. But we can see for ourselves how they saw their world. We would do well to develop similar sensibilities.
Parting Shot: Do the Zionists know that Moses Maimonides wrote A Guide to the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic? This new translation is highly recommended, by the way. As my much better half would agree, I have no shelf control…But I am determined that my grandchildren will have a library of real books to read and ponder, should they be so inclined. We just gave our 8-year-old granddaughter Where the Sidewalk Ends, and she is enthralled. A good sign!
Thank you for reading! Apologies for this fragmented Coffee Break, but sometimes life intervenes. Reading poetry calms the soul and reminds us to be present where we are needed, though. I recommend Mary Oliver for what ails all of us, once in a while. See you next week!
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