I'm TT and I'm Zakiah, and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. Okay, we got to jump into it because a lot has been happening in the education and research space.
Absolutely.
I mean, on June fourth of this year, so twenty twenty five, Trump issued a proclamation suspending the entry of international students to Harvard for six months, and he cited what he's calling national security concerns and non compliance with federal information requests regarding foreign students' activities.
And the president of Harvard says that's nonsense.
And people just think that's undergrad but that's graduate students and postdocs, okay, And Harvard's just the headline for now. But last month, the White House froze two hundred ten million dollars in Princeton's grants, and within days we saw Columbia pen Brown, you know, all the other IVY leagues, we saw half billion dollar funding holes on all of their funding for ideological non compliance or.
What they say is ideological non compliance.
Right.
All this weird, right, this feels like to me, I know, beef when I see and this feels like beef. Absolutelyef, absolutely, I mean, the Department of Homeland Security is saying this is a national security issue and is accusing Harvard of everything from anti Semitism to like being in bed with the Chinese Communist Party, and a federal judge is already hit pause on this. But the message is loud and messy.
It is definitely beef. And the hit list is not just on the education side, it's on the agency side too. So we've seen budget slashes to NIH, CDC, NSLF SO anywhere from forty to sixty seven percent overnight sometimes. So it doesn't matter if you are a biologist at Hopkins or a grad student at MIT, or a postoc like you were saying, Zakiya, the message is the same, and that feeds straight into today's big conversation on the impacts of these cuts. This is a great place to jump
into the recitation. So let's start there. What do we know tt Well, we know these executive orders and cuts are coming fast and furious.
It feels like every day there's something new.
It's almost disorienting because every day a new cut happens or a new regulation comes out and it's just like what is going on?
You can barely keep up with the news.
And I think what's interesting is that some of this, I guess feels illegal, but we know that there is some legal ground that the administration has and that they're clinging to that gives the president the right to do all.
Of this stuff, right.
But we also know that folks are not taking this lying down and people are actively suing the administration to try and block these up. So that's what we know. But what do we want to know about what's going on? I want to talk about the different agencies and how the cuts will impact our day today lives, because I know it will.
Yes, it definitely does.
And I am seeing right now a lot of scientists, students, you know, I do a lot of work with students that I'm following. They're saying, do I need to change fields? I'm in the sciences. Do I need to move to another country? So I want to know more about the brain drain? But what that means for scholars in America? What does that mean for America's collective brain? I'd love that question, and I want to know if there are any other cuts that we can expect, like what are the tea leaves saying?
Can we anticipate some of these things?
Mm hmm. And the biggest question for me is figuring out what we can do to help fight the good fight against misinformation and still champion research, innovation and diversity of thought that we know is so important and that's important to us. That's what Dope Labs is all about. We love the science of everything and we know how important it is for our collective global community. So with that,
I think we're ready to jump into the dissection. We are so excited to have our guests in our new very smart friend, doctor Chelsea Clinton, to help us navigate this rarefied air.
Hi.
I'm doctor Chose Clinton. I'm the vice chair of the Clinton Foundation.
I've also been really lucky to teach a lot of classes.
At the Family School of Public Health.
At Columbia, have written a number of books invest in founders that are trying to help our world be healthier and more sustainable.
So I think where we want to start with is setting the stage for what research touches in our society. Because science is under attack and it's in the headlines a lot. Can you speak broadly about how research shapes how we experience our world.
Oh my goodness, TD, what has research not shaped?
We're together here on Zoom, facilitated by computers and the Internet and electricity.
These are all products research.
We have medicine, whether we're thinking about vaccines that are, yes, the product of lots and lots of research to hopefully prevent us from getting sick. And it's terrible allergy season right now. I'm so thankful to allergy medicine and the research that produced it, so I'm not constantly like teary eyed and coughing and sneezing from the moment I wake up. I have three kids and they're all obsessed without our space.
And we got to go to Cape Canaveral last year on a family trip, and I'll never forget when we were just like on a regular amazing tour and saw the control room where scientists and other folks had been stationed when we first sent a man to the moon, and our tour guide either told us or it was on a plaque that there's more computing power now in an iPhone than there was in that entire room back in nineteen sixty nine, or like my kids can't believe we used to get lost.
Yeah, like they're so surprised.
Like when I talk about like when Grandma and pop Up and I would go on trips and we would drive. Often we'd go to Atlanta and drive to South Carolina, and sometimes we would take purposeful side adventures, and sometimes we would take accidental side adventures and we would have to stop and.
Ask re directions. Like they can't get over that.
And I'm like, I know, we didn't have maps on phone in our pockets.
They've never seen a map quest print out.
Right, like not Lattice West. It's like research anyway. Research.
Yes, my niece and nephew don't understand commercials. They're used to everything being on demand.
Yes, converged, isn't it funny?
And I think that brings up like when you talk about just how leaving your home and choosing Google Maps or Apple Maps to take you from point A to point B. First of all, some people are getting lost with that. And can you imagine traveling in space with less technology? Going to space with less technology than that is wild to me. But I think these research initiatives that lead to products and tangible things that materially change
how we exist, how we interact with one another. I think the thing that people sometimes separate from researchers.
They're like, oh, that's innovation or technology, but.
It takes so much, it takes so many resources. I think about how these huge institutions like the National Institute of Health, the FDA, the CDC, these are huge pillars in our national society, but globally what as well, And I think it's important for people to understand why we need these huge research institutions.
We absolutely need the National Institutes of Health and the other parts of our public health infrastructure and ecosystem in our country. I think not only about the National in Suits of Health and all of the extraordinary research that it has supported over the years to help on everything from enabling the first sequencing of the human genome right.
Yes, the human genome project was huge and from nineteen ninety to basically two thousand and three a long time scientists were working to give us the full genome of a human, but also other organisms that we used to
understand human conditions and science. So you coline that bacteria Baker's yeast, sacromic Sarah visit sounded like Harry pottersmatos yes, and mice just a couple episodes ago, we were talking about fat studies understanding fat metabolism in mice that wouldn't be possible without the Human Genail Project.
Which was a lot of work that was made possible because of NIH funding. To everything that we're still learning about cancer, to all that we thankfully do know about allergies, to all the vital work that's being done on mental health, which historically hasn't received the funding that would be merited if we just think about all of the mental health challenges across our population. Overdose deaths dropped last year for the first time in decades and dropped, and I think
this is right. Forty eight out of fifty states, I think only two states had an increase in overdose death. So much of what we know about how to help prevent addiction use disorders, treat addiction use disorders, save someone's life so that they can get into treatment.
Narcan the nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose.
And I think what you said before is just so spot on, Like people think of it as innovation or discovery, like these other words are so closely linked to research, but may not always be understood as such.
Just thinking of the impact that research has had in the ways that you were saying, cancer research, allergy research, all of these things that totally progress us are now being impacted. We saw that a leaked budget pass back shows that of NIH is going to get cut and then forty four percent to the CDC. Can you speak about how losses on that scale have a ripple effect through biomedical discovery and the public health safety Net?
Yeah, so I think TD I also saw that leak budget, I guess about a month ago now, and I think we can think about this in a number of ways, and I think they're all super critical for people to understand. And I will say too, like I also am a believer in efficiency, but efficiency generally means doing more with the same amount or trying to have even better outcomes with the same amount of money.
It's not getting rid of things wholesale.
And we know through multiple research efforts that for every dollar that the NH has invested, many many times that amount is generated through how those research innovations and discoveries get commercialized in ANH case, often with medical device companies
or pharmaceutical companies. And I think what also often isn't well understood, is yes, of course, like that those innovations and help save so many lives, help really disrupt diseases that have beleaguered humanity for not only thousands, but sometimes millions of years. But it's also about all of the jobs that are supported through those research grants. The NIH, I think, over the last handful of years, has supported research funding and more than two thousand academic institutions and
hospitals through small research partners. You think about all of the jobs that are supported directly by those research grants in laboratories, but also the people who work in those buildings, then the people who work in the coffee shops or the restaurants or the bars, where the people who work in those buildings then spend time before after work, where
those people's children go to school. And so it's really, I think purposefully in a wonderful way that NIH has really been the National Institutes of Health and recognize that super smart researchers are in institutions big and small, in like every corner of our country, and that their potential, their ideas, they're hoped for discoveries and innovations merit being funded. After of course going through a super rigorous process to assess which among those really deserve the dollars.
In any given year.
So TD, it's really just it's not only catastrophic for what we won't discover to help keep all of us healthier, it's what we then won't create in terms of wealth because we're not having those companies created, or people who are healthier who can then go to work for longer. It's also about all of the people whose lives are being currently disrupted or who are worried that their lives are going to be disrupted because of interruptions and funding.
Absolutely, this is a great point because when we're thinking about research, sometimes folks think of this as people in lab coats, but there's an entire infrastructure that supports those folks and their equipments. There's industries and jobs outside of research that will be impacted by funding cuts. And because of this, we're seeing a lot of scientists choosing to take their talents to South Beach like Lebron And when
I say South Beach, I don't mean Miami. Now, I'm talking about outside of the United States.
Countries are actively recruiting our scientists.
Yes, I'm sure that you both have a lot of friends like I have friends who've gotten job offers from literally all over the world. The European Union is setting aside hundredsivillions of dollars. Individual countries are setting aside like ten civilians or hundreds civilions of dollars. Some countries have whole new departments that have sprung up, yes, to try
to recruit American scientists. It's very hard for me to reconcile the we're going to make America grade again while we are actively undermining part of what has made America grade again, which is like the many decades long partnership between the public sector and the private sector, between academic institutions and private industry, between people who work in labs and then those who build companies off of the research that those labs generate. And that's part of what hasn't
made our country healthier and more sustainable and wealthier. And I don't think it's an accident that now you have so many countries trying to recruit away our best scientists. And also, as we saw in our recent Nature report, the three quarters of them were thinking about leaving.
Yes.
I talked to someone who was in public health, and she was saying, what happens to my field if we're not tracking what's happening. She was working on maternal health and infant Oh.
Yeah, because we got rid of the pregnancy Risk Assessment monitoring.
Success and so she was the less than is the eighties.
And a couple of weeks after Trump took office, we didn't publish something called the Weekly Morbidity Immortality Report, which I know sounds super wonky and probably a lot of people listening to like, what is that and why should it care? Well, we had published it every week in America, including through multiple wars. After the tragedy of the terrorist attacks on nine to eleven, the CDC had published that every week since the early nineteen sixties, and then we just didn't And.
Now we're back to publishing it.
But it just shows you how much we've taken for granted that we have a government that, through different presidential administrations, even through the first Dump administration, that had a real commitment to tracking the public health and wellbeing of Americans. How many people got sick with bird flu this week? How many people died from gun violence? What are the
rising rates of depression or cancer? What are the questions and we should be asking from shift's immortality, how many people have died and morbidity, how many people may have gotten sick or injured, and we just like didn't do that. And in fact, multiple data sets have now been taken down, which of course makes it harder. Back to the theme of research for researchers, including can you imagine when you were like applying to PhD programs. If you're like, oh,
I think I want to do this. I know the government tracks all this data and anything from food safety, water safety to cancer rates. You're like, I go to this website to check this government data. Worse, then all of a sudden it's not there, gone gone, And.
The Morbidity and Mortality report allows us to find out what's going on in the United States. I can recall reading this back in maybe it was April or May, but there was one of the newsletters that said, hey, people are doing these procedures at this medical spa, and now we realize this was a source of HIV because
of how they were doing this needle procedure a beauty spot. Okay, in order to figure these things out what's happening, you have to have somebody that's tracking and surveilling, which is what some of our major centers do.
Proposed cuts for the centers for disease control, Well, certainly we can our outbreak surveillance and responsiveness. And I do take quite seriously the people who are part of the Trump administration who are committed, as they say, you make America healthy. But I struggle given other parts of the administration are so supportive of the cuts to NIH research funding,
including on chronic disease. Of the cuts that have already been levied against multiple universities are inclusive of cardio metabolic health broadly diabetes in particular. I also struggle because the EPA cuts will make it much harder to enforce clean
water and clean air regulations. There's also been rumors that they may clawback some of the rules and guidelines around how much chemical effluent can be released into water as industrial wastewater, and so I also don't want there to be artificial red and yellow food dye and our food.
And I also recognize that we need to do a better job of helping all of us understand the importance of things that all our grandmothers probably new intuitively and we seem to have forgotten, like go outside when you can get a good night's sleep, like drink a lot
of water, eat a balanced meal. And yet it's just it's impossible for me to reconcile that with the cuts to funding around how best to help people do that, with the proposed cuts that are currently being debated now in Congress to supplemental nutritional benefits making it harder for low income Americans to be able to afford healthy food, harder to think we're going to urge people to go outside, but the air quality is going to be worse, and DAN and.
All of those things compound, and it also makes me think about, you know, we are freshly off of a pandemic, all of that research that is trying to be done to understand long term effects of having COVID, some folks that are still suffering with long COVID and just understanding COVID as a virus itself. And you have someone in an administration, You have a cabinet that does not believe
in vaccines. You have folks that are in charge of our health and safety who just don't believe in certain things, and that will have a negative impact on all of us. Chelsea, you talk about brain drain a lot and brain drain is the migration of highly skilled, highly educated, and professionally specialized people from one place to another where their talents are needed, or to another where their talents are respected and that get better pay, research funding, political stability, quality
of life, or career prospects. I want to know what you think about brain drain for the United States or the possibility of it coming up really soon.
So the United States has been, and I don't think this is a controversial statement, truly has been the envy of the world from a research and scientific knowledge production capacity perspective. And that's been true for a few reasons. One the strength of our universities. Partly that strength, of course has been catalyzed and then supported by research investments through our universities, partly because of our student visa program,
which is also under threat. And so for great students from anywhere with great ideas who got into a great American university, that there were pathways for them than to
be able to come here and study. And then on the other side that we have whole countries, not even just like academic institutions and other parts of the world, but whole countries like France, in Denmarket, Singapore, China, many of them saying we would love to have you come here and do your work on log COVID, on depression, on diabetes, on high risk pregnancies, and Alzheimer's, all of these areas that we know at least some people, particularly
in the institutions that have been targeted, including Harvard Columbia, Johns Hopkins and others, you have had their work stopped.
And so I think the brain drain risk is very real.
While we are cutting back many billions of dollars, and we are telling our scientists today and our future scientists that we have disdain for.
Your expertise, and we don't believe your expertise.
We're going to make you continually prove your expertise, and we're gonna have an uncertain regulatory environment.
And then you have China is an exception saying actually we're going to invest a trillion dollars.
We're going to invest trillion dollars in new science over I think it was the next decade. So you have some countries like, all right, hundreds of millions of dollars and China be like, actually a trillion dollars, and we're like, we're just we're just going to like lop Off, like tens of billions of dollars, and I don't think anything about that is efficient.
I think that it is actually profoundly inefficient.
We also saw that the Association of American Medical Colleges is saying that by twenty thirty six, we will be short eighty six thousand physicians. Eighty six thousand. This is real major impact on literally everyone. I think of the people because we've done an episode on maternal health where we were talking about folks who were in like basically health deserts where they had to travel very, very far to see a doctor. Now reduce a number of doctors
that are available even more. We are going to see that people will not have a good quality of life, people will die, will be more sick. America is not going to be a healthy, happy place where people can thrive. And we'll see that probably on the coasts there will be more doctors there, but the middle of America will suffer the most.
I'm from Arkansas originally, and in Arkansas, more than thirty percent of women in Arkansas live more than two hours from anything that could be considered like women's healthcare, and so that also is a painful part of this conversation too, because we think about all of the innovations made possible by research for things like at home testing or where telehealth could be really powerful to help close care gaps.
But what will the next generation of all those innovations be if we don't have research to try to continue to improve upon them and to continue to push them forward.
I don't know.
And TD again, I know we talked about the data sets earlier, but Texas and Georgia have said they're no longer going to share maternal health data and now if we don't have the federal government provide it was ongoing of surveillance function that it had been doing again I think since the nineteen eighties. It's also just going to be well impossible to hold people accountable for either policy decisions or practice decisions that could lead to women dying
while pregnant or in childbirth or postpartum. It also, though, then makes it much harder, if not impossible, to purpose research into the areas where we should be investing. Yes, dollars, but also the people like the two of you, who are looking to do something to help save more women who are pregnant or giving further postpartum because they won't necessarily know what they've died from, right, so they won't know what indications to investigate.
I think there are so many things it feels almost insidious because we are losing the tracking, We're losing the surveillance, the ability to see what's coming. We're losing the strength to fight anything once it arrives. And I think we want to consider these are decisions being made, but what I don't want us to lose is both hope and agency and ability to act.
Absolutely when we think.
About standing in the face of calls that are coming from far away, and some people are choosing to privately maintain things. I'm hearing about citizen science efforts, I'm hearing
about a lot of community things that are happening. While we might not be able to stop funding cuts and talent flight, there may be other things that we, as people with platforms, our listeners, as people with platforms and communities, can do to push back against the negative rhetoric we hear around science and research and even how they might engage people in their day to day lives.
Oh gosh, well, I would say one they are probably as many right answers as there are are people listening, like we each know, like our families are our communities best. I do think at a kind of at a community, at a state level, I would certainly urge all of us to know what is happening in our communities and our states when it relates to research. There are states that very much are who have taken action against the
Trump administration. In some of these areas, there are universities who've taken action against the Trump administration, effectively saying, oh, you can't stop paying for work that you committed to pay for, like these grants or contracts, like this is illegal.
I think it's channeling my grandmother again here.
Like the discipline of gratitude I think matters, Like saying thank you and like we're so grateful and we're standing with you.
I think matters.
I think only thirty nine states have currently the ability to assess even some level of food safety. If you're in one of the eleven states where that's not true, you should probably know that about calling actually not only your governor and state legislature, but probably you're senator and congress people too, if that's something you're concerned about.
So I just think You're so right. These have to be such localized efforts.
And I think even one of the things I do with our kids, and I don't know if this is helpful for other people who might be parents or who have small humans in their lives, they do try to help my kids understand like there really is science all around us, right, and so whether that is there just amazement that we have maps in our pockets, or it's the multivitamin that they take with breakfast in the morning, that really science is all around us, and that means
like research is all around us. And I hope that then helps them, whether they grow up to be scientists or not, understand and just the incalculable debt that we owe to the many generations of people who have had such profound optimism, which I think science is to believe that there's more to know and more to understand, and more to do to try to help keep our world healthier and safer and full of even more wonder.
That's one of me and the Key's favorite things to say. We say science is in everything in science is for everybody, and so everything you're saying that just speaks to our heart. We firmly believe in continuing to educate yourself and don't shut up.
That was the takeaway.
Keep talking, keep talk, learning more, talking about what you've learned, and making sure that we are holding folks accountable and saying no, that is not true.
This is what we need.
These are the things that we require when we live in this country. It is our right to ask for those things.
It is our right to demand more from our governments, and so we should not be quiet, turn up our marketphone.
Yes.
And also the Trump administration saying they're no longer going to prove the COVID vaccine for healthy kids and adults.
Also call it the hypocrisy.
Like you say, in one side, you think parents should have vaccine choice, and now you're saying to parents that we don't have vaccine choice.
Right. The math isn't mathing.
Yeah, that math doesn't math like that is not that is not reconcilable.
The more we talk about these things help people frame them, because you don't always get to put these pieces of information.
First of all, there's so much coming out day to day you don't get to and.
That's on purpose.
To write the chaos and the there was like a brief period a few weeks ago where the trumpstration proposed like cutting all like pet food safety regulation, and then a few days later there was a salmonella outbreak in pet food and so then they were like, oh, wait, no, we maybe need this people, because there is such a barrage that I think is purposeful to force a response.
And then also the barrage is partly fueled by whatever the reversals are to what had been said, sometimes even earlier that same day.
So's the goal is not to get disoriented, to stay the course, pick a topic.
Yep, and understand what's real and not real. Yep.
This has been such an important conversation and one that I think puts a lot of context around how these cuts will impact all of our lives. Yes, I think what you said at the n Chelsea is crucial. Don't let the disorienting nature of the news quiet you. Yes, we have to stay the course. We have to keep educating ourselves so no one can pull the wool over our eyes, and we can't stop calling out the lies
and hypocrisy. We have our marching orders. We know what we have to do, and so me and Zekiah will continue to yell into these mics. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast, tt is on X and Instagram, at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at z said So.
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