Dear gentle readers: Apologies for a somewhat ragged Coffee Break today. Traveling in Scotland and time has been taken up with details (all good) along with a few unexpected disconnects (as in stuff happens).
Part the First: Scientists to the Rescue? Economic growth is not the answer to any of our problems in this finite world. Development without increased material and energy throughput in the economy is possible, however. This has been recognized for a long time by the few perspicacious heterodox economists who realize that economics is not a natural science despite its excessive and generally spurious theoretical mathematization. This truth has never quite penetrated the world of conventional “economic sciences,” for which the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded since 1969.
“Growth at any cost leaves us all poorer.” Those were the words of United Nations secretary-general António Guterres last week at the launch of a landmark report, Counting What Counts, which he commissioned from a team of researchers and policymakers (www.un.org/beyondgdp). It proposes how countries can move beyond gross domestic product (GDP), the world’s main indicator for the health of economies.
GDP has its roots in a concept proposed in the 1930s (see go.nature.com/4324jwf; this is a pdf download of Simon Kuznets’s paper from 1934 on national income), and GDP growth has since become the main economic-policy objective for most governments. Drops in GDP are often seen by markets, the media and commentators as a sign of government incompetence. However, this kind of growth has coincided with persistent inequality and environmental degradation worldwide, as the report says. If economic development is to benefit as many people as possible and to be sustainable in the long term, a measure is needed that captures these factors — and GDP does not.
The authors have compiled 31 indicators, covering human rights, peace and respect for the planet, that they recommend governments measure (see Nature https://doi.org/q57n; 2026). Of these, 15 are already indicators for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The report also recommends that a committee of scientists be appointed to work on one or more headline indicators that could aggregate variables into one quantity, much as GDP does. The governments of Spain and Guyana have been handed the baton to take the recommendations forwards.
The invitation of scientists to participate in the process is a welcome development, because until now the theory and application of GDP has mostly been the preserve of economists and economic statisticians. Any effort to distil the 31 indicators into a few headline statistics will need input from many disciplines. All who are involved in the next phase must study previous efforts to complement GDP and learn from past successes and failures. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to correct a long-standing flaw. (emphasis added)
Sustainable development (not growth!) is much to be desired, and the only way for development to be sustainable is for it to not contribute (very much) to the breakdown of the ecosphere in a full world. Now comes this effort to get scientists involved.
Can scientists really help? That remains to be seen. Personally I am not particularly optimistic, because most scientists’ understanding of political economy is nil. Many preen that they are above politics. More than a few in my experience are in love with the flat income tax, now that they have become “middle class” with family incomes at 3-5 times the median family income in the United States. Then there is the parlous state of the scientific community, much of this self-inflicted. To be of any help, scientists must move very far beyond their “comfort zones.” As for a report prepared by a “High-level Expert Group on Beyond GDP,” this is a natural target for politicians from all sides, especially among those on top at the moment.
Besides, Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. developed the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) in For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future in 1989 (this revision is still in print and remains as fresh as it was 37 years ago). There is no mention of this work in the 49-page UN report (download here), but the ISEW is the natural place to start. Continually reinventing the wheel will never get us anywhere we need to go, but it will keep the logs rolling for the powers that be who need, above all, to keep their grift in perpetual motion.
Part the Second: Democrats Send the President Sternly Worded Letters. We discussed the firing of the entire National Science Board two weeks ago. Earlier this week we read that Congressional Democrats have responded with those dreaded sternly worded letters: Democratic lawmakers demand Trump explain – and reverse – termination of NSF’s governing board:
Democrats in Congress are criticizing President Donald Trump’s unprecedented firing of all members of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) governing board—and demanding answers on what the administration plans to do next.
“Dismissing the full [board] without explanation, without replacement, and without plans to ensure continuity of the Board’s work is an assault on both the independence of American science and the rule of law,” states a letter sent today (pdf) to Trump and NSF by 26 senators, led by Ed Markey (D–MA) and Maria Cantwell (WA), the senior Democrat on the committee that oversees NSF.
A second letter sent today (pdf) led by Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives science panel, and signed by 31 lawmakers, takes an even stronger stance. “We write to you to express our outrage,” the letter begins, “and we demand that you re-appoint the 22 non-partisan [members of the board] so they can resume their vital work in providing steady, expert advice to [NSF].”
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The senators want answers by 29 May. The administration is not legally required to reply to the letter, however, and as the Senate’s minority party, Democrats have limited options for compelling a response.
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Under the Trump administration, NSF has suffered a series of blows, including the loss of its building, a 30% cut to staff, and repeated attempts to cut its budget by more than half. The agency is currently far behind its traditional pace in doling out new awards. (emphasis added)
Okay then. I am certain this will work as well as it has done in the past! While the current administration eviscerates American science (the management of which can and should be improved), the Democrats in Congress reinvent this creaky wheel one more time.
Part the Third: COVID-19 Sequelae. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina is probably the leading coronavirus virologist in the world. He has had a productive and distinguished career and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless the Department of Health and Human Services remains unimpressed:
Alleging a “pattern of deception” in virus studies done more than a decade ago, the U.S. government has proposed a ban on federal funding to a prominent coronavirus researcher whose more recent work has incited unproven accusations that he helped start the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already suspended Ralph Baric, a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), from receiving further money for his virology studies. Now, it has begun formal debarment proceedings, which could cut off his funding for 3 years or more. As Science finalized this story, UNC announced that Baric, 72, was retiring, but he told Science he plans to appeal the recommended debarment, likely with legal help from the school.
Baric received details of the allegations (pdf) in a 7 May email from HHS, one of several documents he shared with Science. HHS accuses him of deception in communications with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has provided his lab and collaborators with awards that total more than $200 million over the past 40 years.
Most of the charges center on mouse experiments done with bat coronaviruses in 2014, which HHS contends created a virus that had a “gain of function” (GOF), becoming more dangerous and potentially posing serious risks to human health. On an unrelated charge, HHS says Baric was “not forthcoming” about a 2017 grant from the Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical funder, that the department says overlapped with one he received from NIAID and should have been declared to the agency.
Much of the creaky political foundation for these accusations is based on the politics of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services:
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And its suspension letter does not mention SARS-CoV-2, let alone allege that Baric helped create it. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (the blurbs identify this book as the political screed that it is; the same is true for RFKJr’s “book” on the real Anthony Fauci) attempted to link Baric’s work to the origin of the pandemic because he collaborated with researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on the 2014 experiments. The first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, and Kennedy and others argue SARS-CoV-2 escaped from WIV—and may have been created there rather than being a natural virus (Editors’ note: The book repeatedly criticizes COVID-19 origin reporting by Science and this reporter.)
Kennedy’s view has increasingly gained traction with Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration despite a lack of direct evidence and other data suggesting the virus jumped into people from an animal host at a Wuhan food market. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has frequently referred to a “lab-leak coverup.” And Trump has publicly championed the theory as well.
Virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Trump’s first term and the start of the pandemic, has gone further still with regard to Baric. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’ birthplace was Chapel Hill,” Redfield said on a podcast in 2024. He has called Baric “the scientific mastermind” of a Chinese government project to engineer the virus. Reflecting the lack of evidence around the possible lab-leak scenario, another camp asserts Baric did not create the virus, but taught the WIV scientists the methods they used to make it.
If SARS-CoV-2 escaped by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, one would have expected the scientists in the laboratory to have been the first to become ill from COVID-19. This apparently did not happen. Still, it is not unreasonable to consider that this coronavirus research was conducted in Wuhan due to different regulatory requirements than those in the United States. As it is, the likelihood is small that the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2 will ever be known with certainty. But what is clear is that the political and scientific establishments did not respond to the pandemic very well. And the problem with that is they still don’t seem to get it, as the muddled responses to the recent hantavirus outbreak have demonstrated.
Part the Fourth: The Editor of Science Interviews Timothy Snyder. I have been reading Science regularly for a very long time. This interview may be the first such thing I have seen in the flagship journal of American science. It is, as they say, interesting. But first, who is Timothy Snyder? Most general readers will know him as the author of the short book, On Tyranny, that he published in 2017. He left Yale for the University of Toronto in 2025 during the early days of the current administration’s crackdown on American universities. From H. Holden Thorpe, editor of Science, Lessons in resistance from Tim Snyder:
Federal grant cancellations, restrictions on immigration for foreign scientists, and attempts to cut the budgets of science funding agencies by 60%—the past 18 months have been tumultuous for American science. Even after Congress restored the budgets, following the successful lobbying by leaders of the scientific community, universities are still hampered by the slow dispersal of the appropriated funds. Meanwhile, the continual attacks on science and the uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration have put many scientists in a state of fear and anxiety about the future of the American scientific enterprise, or at the very least, whiplash over the dizzying pace of defeats and victories. Equally nerve-wracking are the differing perspectives across the scientific community on the best course of action.
Across the United States, graduate students, postdocs, and principal investigators are unsure what to do in this environment. Their universities might be sending signals to stay out of the fray—perhaps by restricting protest areas or emphasizing a neutral campus climate lest they or the institution get singled out for a federal investigation or the loss of funding. At the same time, colleagues might be pressuring them to join the latest protest, suggesting a duty to defend science.
To help the scientific community sort through these contrary signals, I’ve started talking to experts for advice and context. I had the opportunity to speak with Timothy Snyder, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies authoritarian movements in history. His 2017 best-selling book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a guide for resisting and fighting back in times like this. The first lesson, arguably the most famous, is “do not obey in advance,” often invoked by those advocating for more resistance as universities and associations grapple with demands from the Trump administration. But Snyder has 19 other lessons and I talked with him about how to balance them all, especially “protect institutions” and “remember professional ethics.” I was curious to know how he would apply these lessons—usually discussed in the context of topics like immigration or the rule of law—to the scientific process and community.
The interview is here (36:05) and worth consideration. Pericles and Trotsky were correct. One thing the current administration has done is show that whether or not scientists are “interested in politics” (most are happily ensconced in their own thick, little bubble) is immaterial because politics is certainly interested in them.
Part the Fifth: Wither Food. I have spent the past five days in the Kingdom of Fife surrounded by fertile agricultural land that is well tended and by all outward appearances very productive. Nevertheless, James Rebanks asks the question: Could Britain run out of food? Apparently it could:
Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertiliser, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re ploughing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per litre before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per litre.
Then there’s synthetic fertiliser, which is the biggest single variable cost for many farmers. In recent decades, the world’s food production system has become heavily reliant upon ammonia and sulphur from the Middle East. Around a third of the global trade in raw materials for synthetic fertilisers flows through the Strait of Hormuz. So the crisis has caused the price of fertiliser to skyrocket.
Right now, it is crop planting season. Farmers have two choices in the face of rising expenses — buy less fertiliser and accept lower yields, or buy fertiliser at the inflated prices and pass on the higher costs to the consumer. Either way, food will become much more expensive.
The farmers I’ve spoken to this week say that the cost of growing crops in the UK has risen because of the war by as much as £150-£250 per hectare. That’s £30,000-£50,000 in extra costs for a typical 200-hectare arable farm. At this rate, some nitrogen-hungry crops, such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape, might not be worth planting this year. Farmers are nervous of borrowing tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to get a crop in the ground when they know they’re probably not going to get a fair return on their investment. Jack Highwood, who farms in Kent, tells me he used to grow 300-400 acres of arable crops, mainly milling wheat — “enough to feed Kent for a week”. But he has stopped sowing crops because the cost of growing is now above the market price.
Either we learn to do better, sustainably, or we get hungry and stay that way. But for institutional obstacles, this is not a hard problem to solve. We will return to this in the coming weeks in a discussion of How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy by the inimitable Julian Baggini.
Thank you for reading! See you next week, after local primary elections in my part of the country.
Travel note: If your book budget is strained and/or your luggage is full already, stay out of Topping & Company Booksellers of St. Andrews.
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