How far can you bend science within a society before it breaks?
- sciart0
- Feb 15
- 1 min read
Excerpt: "For decades, the government’s relatively harmonious partnership with science has been a boon for the United States: American research brought the world a polio vaccine, the first crewed lunar landing, the internet. Since the Manhattan Project, science in America has also been explicitly recruited to the project of national security.
The threat of America’s current research infrastructure buckling, though, has revealed how tenuous science’s place in the U.S. really is. “There’s no replacement at scale” for federal funding, Wrigley-Field told me. Universities don’t have the budget to foot the bill for every researcher who loses a grant; private foundations can supplement some funding, but the money they provide might come with strings. And a nation of privatized, commercialized research could invite “all kinds of compromises” and conflicts of interest, Brown told me.
Both by trying to control science and by funding less of it, the Trump administration is starting a slide toward a future where more, rather than fewer, people have reason to distrust science and its results. People whom the government is intent on disparaging may choose to stop participating in research, federally funded or not—further muddying scientists’ ability to monitor the nation’s health or assess how treatments or interventions work for different groups of people.
If gender can be dissociated from health, little may stop federal leaders from burying other realities that they find unpalatable—the extent and severity of the growing H5N1 bird-flu outbreak, for example, or the costs of declining vaccine uptake."