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Welcome to Dick It app Here, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host, Miya Wong, And one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump's power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the
US federal government grant system. And I think to a lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for like I would go so far to say, is like the survival of the human species for reasons they will get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone
on Earth. And to get to kind of a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these funding freezes do, and what the sort of threat, particularly to the future of American science is, I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this Arguvon Salis, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of the show.
Yeah, come on.
Yeah, definitely. I I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show, because it wasn't in my notes that was that was ad living it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kami Hoda, who is a Gas show entrologist and the host of the podcast House of Pods, and both of you two, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
I'm excited to be here for your most Persian episode ever. For sure.
We may have done episodes of like that were like about a row.
Yeah, this is a Persians a bit too Persian doctors talking about Trump is about as Persian as a good and you're not You're not overselling it. This is a large scale attack on the healthcare infrastructure of the United States on a massive level, So you're not lying. It is a serious, serious issue, not just for us but for the whole world.
Yeah.
And one of the I mean the places I want to start, I think is with because it was happening I think in n s FNIH a bit before this happened. But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this memo last week that was a it was nominally a response to this very weird Trump executive order. That's him being like every single program that has to do with civil rights, which is like, so, my my description was anything it has to do with civil rights at all,
like gone. His description of it is like dei and woke, so like anything it has to do with queer people, anything that has to do with like racial inequality. And they were supposed to like go through and review every single government grant program for anything.
But don't forget he also included the gender ideology, which is a meaningless praise and the Green New Deal is all part of.
It, yep, yep, yep, you know, and this is part of the raft of executive voters, particularly the anti trans executive voters. But OPM's response to this an awful Personnel Management's response was to just freeze literally every single grant
program in the country. And this was everything from pell grants and like work study for college students, to like food aid for single mothers to my personal favorite and I don't know why this never made it into the press, because I'm apparently the only one who went through and read the list, but one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites. So like we almost like, why, yeah, why is that included?
It was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that like anyone does like and any like program that gives out grants, and they froze all of them, and so like another one of them that when I said this is like, this is a threat to all life on Earth, I was not
I was not joking here. One of the other ones was defunding one of the very important like international nuclear non proliferation organizations, like specifically the one that's there to make sure that like random people don't get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons. So like we we dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet. When when like most of these programs got their money back after a
judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this. This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding, Like the Constitution like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress, not the president.
Eight like stop, yeah, but I would just want to clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just grant specifically, it was like all federal assistance. So one of the things that was very confusing and chaotic was this question of does this mean Snap is gone? Does this mean Wick is gone? What about headst what about meals on wheels? I mean, there are tons of federal assistance programs out there, and they had only made an exception for Social Security and medic care in the memo,
but not Medicaid. And what happened the next day, but the Medicaid portal went down?
Right, Yeah, And it's chaotic too because like all of the programs you just named were on the list of like programs that they were putting a freeze on, but then it wasn't clear what was going to happen with them, end.
Right, And it's still not right, right.
Yeah, we just have a judge.
We have We found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far, and he said, no, you cannot.
Yeah.
Yeah, I am surprised actually that Trump hasn't gone out on the attack. Maybe I just missed it, like attacking that judge, you know.
But it is.
I mean, what's so confusing to me is, you know, I get it, at least in some part of their weird internal terrible logic, transphobic logic. I get why they're doing some of the things they're doing. But then some of them don't even make sense within their own whack internal logic, like when they scrub, for example, the CDC for all the terms that they didn't like, gender terms,
transgender terms, things like that. They also scrub things like following maternal morbidity or opioid use, things that don't, at least on the surface, even fit with their attacks on woke ideology. So it seems like it's a complete mess to me what's happening. And it's what's terrifying about it is not just that it's a mess, but it is happening.
I mean, they are doing it, they are pushing it, even though they clearly don't even seem to really know what they're doing or even have a great sense internally of what they're doing.
I think that's the danger of this right now, is that this is revenge. Right They're lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred, and they have been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand at all, Right Like that, that's how you get defunding a nuclear police. That's how you get them defunding like the very Goldwater Memorial grant thing that gives money to
kids who're writing essays about Bury Goldwater. They don't understand what the state is and what it does, and they're just trying to take the whole thing apart, and they're just trying to sort of rampage their way through it. And it means that we're in this situation now where like for a long time, the line on like trans Rice was like, well, you should defend trans Rice because they're going to come for you next, And that's no longer true. This is actually happening here is in order
to kill us. They are willing to kill every sit They're willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire. It's like specifically in order to hurt us. Right, that's the sort of line we're at where you know, all of these all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care.
Right, just out of spider or something, for sure, out.
Of fight and hate. But I want to just take a step back and think about the fact that all of this is happening because of two versus three executive orders, depending how you think about it. But they're literally executive orders. They are not laws in the books. In Congress did
not pass anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and d I A for example, those are the terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is or what DEI A is, And just I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A de I A and they
spell out, you know, as we're accessible. Wiping out everything related to accessibility is directly in violation of the ADA and makes no sense and is cool and all of that, but also just like legally, it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ADA, which I'm guessing is part of their plan to the extent that there is a plan. But the two key
executive orders here are the sex and gender. One that's defending quote unquote defending women, that basically dictates that sex must be only male and female, thereby erasing intersex people completely, and that there's really either essentially saying there's no such thing as gender and that the only genders that they see are willing to recognize are male and female, there by erasing trans folks, intersect people, non binary folks, cutter
a gender, queer, gender whood, all of those people. So for them to go into like the CDC data sets, take them offline so that they can binarize whatever is there eliminate I'm assuming I don't I mean, I don't know that this is not I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking any sex that thought male or female out of there, and then removing gender as a varia will because they've said that no grant funding should go
to any assessment of gender period. So that's when you're talking to me about like how they're willing to throw everyone under the bus just to pursue this transphobic agenda. That's what you're talking about. They're willing to take huge lots of information off of the Internet so people can no longer research or position. Anyone else can no longer access this information, just to make sure that there is
no hint or reference to anyone who is transgender. That seems to be like the key thing that they're trying to do with all of this. So they have thrown the entire government and take chaos and the lives of millions of people into chaos all to remove the t in LGBP.
Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just like taken down and destroyed. Little parts of it have come back up after the sort of backlash, but you know what they're what they're doing is staging a digital version of the nazis burning all of the books at the Institute Sexual Research. Like that's that's exposedly what they're doing.
It's it's literally the same stuff, like it is research on queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire.
Yep.
And you know you know who else lights research on queer and trans people on fire. It's it's the sponsors of this show. It's the products of services.
Yeah, that's the way you get those big bucks. That's how you do it. That's professional broadcasting.
And we are back. So I want to move from that to kind of the next phase after we got out of the sort of oh PM like suspending everything phase, which has been this kind of this uncertainty around a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health. Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into like how this whole process works.
Yeah, So the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living this along with everyone else, and what is time. But the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled. The study sections are meeting where scientists come together. They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions, and
then they come together and discussed. They don't discuss all of them, by the way, They only dissuess the ones that have that seem to have the most merit, and then out of those they make recommendations for which ones they believe should get funded. So these are a critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people grants are not getting evaluated us and recommended for funding.
That means they're not getting the funding. That means they're not hiring people, or they're having to fire people they already had in their layoff, people they already had in their lab. They're not able to continue the important work that they are doing they may lose their job, like really truly people can lose their job because they were not able to secure enough funding to support themselves and
their labs. So these are really really important meetings, and those have been canceled for both the NSF and the nih for at least the last couple of weeks. And as of yesterday, I saw doctor Megan Ray said that her or not maybe not her, but that study sections
were canceled yesterday that were due to happen today. So there had been some communication around perhaps the free of those activities ending on February first today that we're recording as February third, and those study sections for today were canceled. On the other hand, NSS, which is obviously a separate organization, has informally I've heard this that they were going to resume some body sections, although they haven't rexamped yet.
And if I did add, just to be totally clear with your listeners, these are incredibly important organizations for discovery of new medical breakthroughs and for pushing science forward. For the NAIH, for example, the nih IS is a big
part of the reason we have mRNA vaccines now. They were the ones helping to promote that research for decades before we were able to turn them into vaccines, and because a lot of what they did that we're able to do that when we're looking for new breakthroughs and we're looking for something where patient comes to us and they're like, isn't there anything we've tried everything, isn't there anything that we could at least try or some trial that we could be involved in. That's where we find
these things. These are the things that we're talking about, these really important healthcare infrastructure that we're discussing.
Yeah, and you know between NAH and National Science Foundation and you know, Department of Energies having a similar thing to this, because Department of Energy funds all like high energy physics research, so all of your sort of like particle accelerator or stuff like that. It's not just sort of like the National Labs for example, that they get funding from these places, although you know National Labs are like, you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else.
But you know, I mean, this is this is all the way down to the level of like undergrads and college chemistry labs like they're they are getting paid out of these grants from National Science Foundation from the National Institute's for Health, Like all of these all of these institutions pay out everything, and it's like this is the
basis of how all science almost all science. Like there's some private sector stuff, but the thing is like the giant private like Bell Labs, right, like you're your old school giant private sector. Here's our giant R and D thing. Like that's all kind of gone, so you know, like the only people who are getting funded by this are like weird startup guys. And it's like, Okay, look look look what they've invented in the last like fifty years.
It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again.
Theranos don't forget.
Yeah, they dose the metaverse juicer row like they're they're doing great. It's really great. And people will be like, oh, the Veta eye. It's like no National Labs were using those AA algorithms like a decade and a half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative blah blah. Okay, we're not we're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI. Go go go go listen to Edgittern's entire like yeah, yeah.
I mean I think the bottom line of what you're trying to communicate here is that a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs have come from labs and from researchers who have been funded by the NFF and the NIH And I will just say as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premiere funding opportunities that we have. Like it also was really critical in the careers of researchers to be able to show that their work is
worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of why I would think people's jobs, the people we pay off of our grants, but also people like me, our jobs can be really dependent on whether we get this funding or not.
And it's a generational thing too, because the students also need this funding. And so people people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right, Like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhD so they can become scientists. That's all
also like funded by these grants. And if that stuff goes away, like, it's not just that you're obliterating this generation of science, like you're decapping the next like three generations of scientists, right, because each one of them down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have.
Exactly, yeah, right.
And also, who would want to go into science if it's going to be right, if there's just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and never mind, we're not doing that anymore. Who are to be exposed to those kinds of wins.
A lot of the smartest doctors and scientists I know that tend to be risk averse people. I mean, there's a lot of people the CDC that could try to maybe sue for you know, for not being able to use the terms that they want to use and study the things they want to study, and they might even I don't know, maybe they could win. You talk to Laurier about that. Seems unlikely because they're not private sector. But to them, they're not going to because they're living paycheck to paycheck too.
Some of these people that are the lower levels, people that.
Aren't making a ton of money and they have livelihoods that they're trying to maintain, they're not going to try and rock the boat when it comes to these things. It's putting them in a really tenuous position already, they're already worried about their next grant or their next what however they're going to fund their labs.
Yeah, and I just want to highlight that postdocs I think are particularly vulnerable because they are often like this NFF where you actually demonstrated this girl, they aren't as said like, they're definitely often living paycheck paycheck. And what the NFF freeze did was that it made it so close could not get their next paycheck. Yeah, because we were this was happening at the end of the month, right,
So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And in particular and talking about POSTOC, yes, it can affect graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding, like one of the grants that I have actually we worked directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral
training programs that fund POSTOC. And to the extent that any of those grants are put on hold, that is threatening the income of people who really don't have buffer, who cannot afford to not get paid.
And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too, and I really doubt they understand this, but you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the US right there, who are either international students, international students who are just you know, coming in from other countries. And those people, if you suddenly don't have a grant, you don't have a job, and that is really really bad for your immigration status. Like that that is enough to get you kicked out of the US.
And this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in sort of labor organizing, right or like one of the threats that universities will make.
Usually they do it implicitly.
Sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally, will be like Okay, if if you this postoc or like you, this grad student like tries to like join this union, like your legal status in the US is going to be compromised. But that's another sort of risk from this is like those people's ability to stay in the US and not get reported basically.
Exactly, yeah, exactly.
And then then we talk about bringing in you know, I know there's a lot of internal debate right now between the publican party on you know, bringing in people to work these jobs and bringing in these minds. But this is a clear example of where the United States has excelled in the past. We've been able to bring in great minds from all over the world to help us work on research and to help us come to work in these labs. I mean you go to like USA Staff and Stanford and you see these people work
making these labs on important stuff. And that's another like, that's that's that's something.
We're gonna lose.
And I hope we don't lose it permanently. I hope it's not, you know something like you say, well last generations worth of damage. But it's hard to see how it won't at this point.
Yeah, I was just looking up one hundred percent agree and to your point about how much of the science and even other amazing things that are done in the country are are done by immigrants. I think it's over just over a third of Nobel laureates from the United States have been immigrants to the United States.
You know, And it's sort it's sort of a nationalist thing, right, but like for ninety nine percent of the time for better like, the US has been very very good at absorbing other country scientists. When you know this, like we we got to you know, okay, so like it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the Nazi like from the actual Nazis, but we also like a bunch of very famous US scientists, Like we're in the US because
they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis. And you know, we are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this, where like our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people.
Yeah, and I wanted to highlight, I think that's literal all really great points about the effect of not getting the funding and who it trickles down to. But I also wanted to highlight that there's two different kind of ways that the funding can be withheld. The one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants. Right, So, like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall, who
knows if when that will get discussed. There are people in that kind of position where they maybe were dependent on or really hoping to get funding this round, and now they don't know if or when that proposal will get reviewed. Of course, you never know if you're going to get funded, but to not even have a chance at review is an unanticipated barrier. Then On the other side, there's people who have been funded and are in the position that I'm in, which is not knowing whether I'm
going to receive the next payment. Because the NIH, so I have a five year grant and we are currently in year three. Every year you have to submit a status update on your project, and then they determine, based on lots of different things, including what budget they are given from Congress, how much of the funds that they had originally projected they'll be able to give to you.
And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work that's related to health disparities, help equity, women's health, LGBTQ health, et cetera, who now do not know if our work falls under quote unquote DEI or deia or gender ideology or all these vague terms that the administration is using, and so we actually don't know whether, like for me, I don't know if
I'm going to get my next set of funds. In July, so I was in the process of interviewing to hire someone to join my lab, and I genuinely don't know whether I should hire someone at knowing that I may lose funds, and you know, five months or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets. And if you play that out over the three hundred thousand people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that's being done here.
Can you tell people what your current grant is? And because I think that is pertin into this conversation, yes, yes, yes.
You're right. Okay, So my grant is called ending sexual Harassment Teaching of Principal Investigators as a q acronym E STOPS. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment, with the ultimate goal decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research.
Oh they don't, they don't what you do with that?
Like?
Oh no, right, because one of the great terrible ironies of this whole thing is that their argument is that they're doing a lot of this to protect women, the sanctity of women or whatever this is. You know, I'm hopeful that I'm wrong for you. I hope that this is not the case, but I could see them very easily saying that this somehow fits underwoke ideology and even though it's something clearly that is designed to help not just women, but a lot of women could benefit from this, you know.
Yeah, and to your point, like everyone is at risk for hearingcing sexual harassment, it's just that the majority of folks who experience that are women or sexual engender minorities. And so yeah, I've really, obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about how they are interpreting these words that they're using and whether sexual harassment, which by the way, is a form of discrimination, Like is that DEI is stopping discrimination?
DEI? Who? Well, you know, quickly, if I may, I can go over this.
There was this email that was dispersed from the the CDC about terms that were no longer going to be used, that were going to be scrubbed from the CDC's databases. And they include words like gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non binary, non binary.
They use both to one with a hyphen and without the hyphen.
Signed male at birth, assign female at birth, biologically male, or biologically female. So anything that terms like that they're gonna scrub Wait, let me, can I.
Just clarify that, because actually it's even worse, I think, than what you just described, because what they actually said in that email, as I understand it, is that there's all these researchers who work at the CDC. So they said, if you have submitted a manuscript for publication to any scientific or medical journal that has any of these words in it, you must retract that manuscript. So it's even much much broader than just what's on the CDC's website.
It's any work that anyone employed by the CDC has done, any researcher to say that they've done that they're in the process of publishing, they have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these god awful words, right, that are actually words that are used routinely in science, but they can no longer have them in their manuscripts. And how nonsensical would their manuscript be without these words? I mean, it's yeah, it's terrible.
The other thing that blows my mind about this is how incredibly inefficient. Maybe that's the point, is how ridiculous it's going to be. Who's going to be doing this, who's going to be looking over this. To my knowledge, there's only been one political point in regards to this, and that's that the CDC. It's Susan Monerrez is the acting director there at the CDC, and it's all going to go through that one person. All every study is going to go through that one person. It makes no sense.
I don't even understand how it's going to be enforced. It's a ridiculous thing. I'm sure they're going to try to make some examples out of people, but how are they even enforced this. We're gonna find out what your grant, I guess.
Yeah. I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that the study retractions and it's just you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right, is that like the problem for them with medical research about trans people is that everyone who's doing this who isn't a like unbelievably rabid anti trans person from the beginning, you know, looks at everything that they want to you to trans people and goes, this is going to kill
unbelievable numbers of us. And I think like part of what they're doing here is they're trying to before any of this stuff come out, they're trying to stop the scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out. And that's yeah, an unbelievably bleak thing to live through.
I guess, like, yeah, so sorry. I mean, honestly, I wish I could say something more. It's really terrible.
I will say this like Jenny Wineley, because it never happens. Obviously, the best the best thing you can do for trans people is like something that involves the follow of the regime.
Like the second best thing is like hire us, because no one does it and we can't no one can get jobs, right and but like like that, the third minimum thing after like money or like housing, is like like check in on the trans people in your life because nobody actually ever does it, and it means a lot and it's not going to like stop the wrath of the state. But like, I don't know, a lot of people feel us alone. This This has been to be a trans public service announcement. It's now over.
I think that's great advice. In other friend of the show, Margaret Kiljoy that she also said, you know when you hire people, you hire trans people, put them front of house, make it visible, and then when you go and you frequent these places, let them know that's part of why you do it. Like, I like that you guys are
doing this. I'm here to support that. I mean, because we're talking about money, talking with people's livelihoods or at stake, and we have to show that these are people that are not only employable but could benefit your business.
Yeah, honestly, I don't know what to say about it either, aside from everything that they're doing is atrocious. It is a scientific it is inhumane. It will it will harm people.
Yeah, people are going to die. People probably have already died. If you're transit you're listening to this, fucking don't die. Think about how good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's graves in like eight years.
It's gonna but it is.
It is.
I agree, it is in dad to Argawan's point, it is dumb on every metric. I can't think of a single metric and that these actions are not hurtful and going to harm us in the long run.
To close this out, this is a thing that I think is very important because no one in the US apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the grant process actually work and what is it? Because you know, this process is the difference between you, like having clean water to drink and like that study that was going to determine if your water is clean or not not happening.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, first thing I will say is that the word grant applies to lots and lots of different opportunities, and there are grants as small as like one thousand or five thousand dollars in grants as large as multimillion dollars, and the processes actually are I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different because, as you can imagine, for a smaller grant, the amount of work that you have to do to earn that
grant generally is a little bit less. But I can speak in the most detail to the NIH review process and specifically to these grants that they call R one because are like kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individ researcher often. And the way this works is, first of all, I want folks to understand it takes a year from the time that you apply until the
time that you get money. Can take up to a full calendar year, and so you put in an immense amount of effort. So I'll use myself as an example. I apply for a grant in October, huge amount of effort I don't know how many hours leading up to that brand submission, and then I just sit and wait for months, months and months before there's even a study section. If study section happens, and then after that, it's still a couple more months before I might get information. It depends.
Of course, there's some variability there, but it's a long, long process, is what I'm trying to say. And the way the process starts is often you will send with called the letter of interest to the agency that you're applying to. So, as you said earlier, it's the National Institutes of Health. So every institute has its own notice of funding opportunities or no fos that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time, and then people will send a letter
of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own grant off the program officer, and you will send a letter of interest, maybe you get some feedback, and then you move forward to the actual grant itself. And I just want to say that it is more work than probably anything else I've ever done, except maybe my dissertation, and so it's a huge amount of work.
The R one includes, for example, a one page specific aims page, which is you have the entirety of the study somehow magically summarized in one page with your three aims. And if that doesn't get the reviewer's attention, and if they don't think it's compelling and interesting and important, that may be the end. You may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that, and then you have a twelve page These are single space pages. Single space page is happing toward twelve page
research strategy. I don't know how many thousand words, thousands of words that it's been, so I'm just telling you twelve single space pages. There's a lot of effect about your research. And it's like one of these puzzles where it has to be exactly right and you have like these figures and you have to get them exactly the right size in the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything, so that all magically sits
in these tall pages. Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problems, and so you may have spent months writing this grant and because you had the wrong size or the wrong margins that they can literally choose not to even read it, and then you're then having to wait till either six months later if there's another opportunity, or sometimes a full year later before you can try again.
Also, it's worth noting you also have to like do a bunch of science. Like if it was just you must do twelve you must write twelve pages of stuff at formatta, it would probably be okay, But like you also have to do science, like both for it and also while you're doing it.
It's incredibly hard to get these. When someone gets a grant, we all celebrate it for them because they're also excited because you know, it's not easy. So what's funny about that is the Republicans make it seem like all you have to do is put in a couple of terms, like you know, non binary, and you automatically get a grant. They're like, no, idea, how like challenging it is?
No, It's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say, say whatever, you're doing is cancer research, Like that's the actual thing, right, Like so sometimes you could like defraud the DoD by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflaged, like it's not. It's even that is like it makes it like one percent more likely that you're endless hours of work.
Yeah, I wish I could just by woke Ideology the Future bulk pages and they're like ghetagras us. But yeah, to your point, you have to part of what's in those twelve pages is what is the work that you've done that builds up to the work that you're proposing to do, And that's stuff whole section called preliminary studies.
And what's in there very is depending on like what
kind of research you're doing. If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested different things on that straight for example, that you are able to work with the specific animal model that you're proposing to use in this study, and that you have the specific methodological skills for whichever type of sace cellular analysis or whatever it is that you're doing, that you have those skills, that you have the equipment that you're able
to actually carry out that research because part of what they're evaluating is can the person who's proposing to do this work actually do the work. Last thing they want to do is give you millions of dollars and have you fall flat on your face because you don't have the skills that are needed. So you have these pages.
Part of those cull pages like often a page two three pages about what you have done to prepare for the work that you're proposing, and a lot of times to your point that work may or may not be funded. You may have to if you're like at an academic institution, you might be using your startup funds, you might be trying to get smaller foundation grants or something to be able to do that work, so that you can prove to the funding agency that you're able to do it.
And then in addition to this culltation thing, there are a bunch of additional documents that are are required, Like there's currently this will probably change, but currently there's like a diversity plan, there is a how are you going to treat participants to our women and minorities. There's like an age document, there's a page about resources and facilities. There's all these additional documents which again all have their
own specific formatting requirements. There's a project narrative which is shorter, and then a project summary, which is longer. I think I could have those backward way way way. It's all these additional pages. It's not just the specific games and
just the reach of strategy. It's all of this plus the budget and the budget justification, and like you could just go on, but I think you start to understand that there are many many files that go into a single grant application, and it represents often months of work
for an individual and their collaborators. And if you have, for example, another institution you're collaborating with, they all have to do a bunch of this paperwork as well, and there's a contract between the two and all this is done just to have a chance of getting conded.
Yeah, and you know, the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that like all of this work that you're doing, you know, you have no idea whether whether like again, all of this in some cases unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months like
could just not happen. Yes, And also like it's worth noting too, Like you also have to like when you're figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like working out whether or not your grant even has a
chance of getting approved. Like that like is something that is that is that is a long term decision that determines like what like you know, what colleges you go to, like what institutions you end up at, like all of that kind of stuff, and like that thing being all the stuffing up in the air.
And for people who run lab, yeah, trying to figure out like can you so I don't personally work with graduate students, but a lot of people do, So can you afford to bring in and sponsor another support another graduate student? Can you afford the support of another postdoc? These are all long term decisions. These aren't just like oh, Okay, I'm going to hire some for two months until I find out the next thing. It's like you would you
want tom to people, especially trainees. So it makes it very difficult for people who run labs to make those decisions to bring people in because we don't want to let people down. And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequence is that people will bring in fewer people, because that's less risky than bringing in more people and then having to either cut their funding or let them go or whatever later on when you don't
get the resources that you need. And I want to just point out that institutions here have a major role to play. And not all institutions, and by that I mean higher education institutions, and not all of them are equally resourced, obviously, but we all know that there are quite a few in this country that have massive endowments, and so are what is the plan there and what is the support for the folks at their institutions. And I'm not trying to be I'm not trying to oversimplify
what is in fact a very challenging issue. But it would be nice, it would be fantastic if some of these institutions came out and said, we understand that this is a very challenging time, wereming committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postoc et cetera, and we will and we will fund anyone who's funding is withdrawn or withheld.
Let's just say it'd be nice if some of these very important, prestigious academic institutions showed maybe at least the same backbone as Costco. Yeah, it's all I ask.
Okay too, I want to highlight too. It's very early yet in this game. But Brown did come out I think it was yesterday or sometime over the weekend, stating clearly that they remain committed to their values of academic freedom. Right. So that's the way to say it, right, like, we support our staff and employees and students faculty doing whatever work they think is important. I think that that was their roundabout way of saying, we're not abandoning the principles
of DEI. But who knows, but that's what they said. But the Princeton Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton, and I forget the exact worrying and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to support people from different backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So that those two that are trying to do something, Yeah.
I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful.
Yeah. Also, I got I got to put in my word at Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions.
So I thought they resolved it. I thought they actually gave them. No, they didn't. They did in the page increase.
Yeah, it's not resolved yet.
I thought the hot Dog was still win fifty though, So that's important for me.
Read Jamie Loftus's book, Raw DOGG.
I'm a doctor. I can't do that by law.
Yeah, but even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their d programs any Typetube. NFL known for being all right.
I mean that is the thing though, right if if if you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, like look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and like who they're past heads for the last like decade have been, and that will give you an indication of like why it's like that.
So yeah, Mia follows football pretty closely. I can tell it.
Unfortunately, if you're coming from feed Also. Also, I kind of owe the NFL Players Association because they did they they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive.
So yeah, it was very sweet.
That's nice. Well, I do want to say one more thing about the grant process, which is that often people are submitting the same grant over and over and over because the funding rates are so low, and so often they will submit it the first time, get feedback, make changes, resubmit later and again. As I pointed out, it's not like this is a rolling submission process where any day
of the week you can submit. I think for most mechanism. Again, there's going to be some variability from institute to institute, but it's at most twice a year, so like if they're if they reject it, hopefully they give you feedback. By the way, sometimes you don't even get feed because if you weren't one of the top grant applications, you don't even get discussed. So you may not get feedback. But let's say you get feedback, then you try again, and then maybe you try again, and then maybe you
try again. So sometimes it can take many cycles of this entire terrible process before you get funded one. And to coveys point about efficiency or clear like, I mean, if you think about it that way, that it's extremely inefficient system. But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really really hard to get these grants, and for some of the folks right now who are
kind of in limbo waiting for study section Jerusalem. This might be their third or fourth submission of something, and they were really hoping this was going to be the chance. Because at some point you can't keep pursuing unless you have some other independent income, like often, at some point
you cannot keep pursuing a specific line of research. So you have to think about what breakthrough is being put on hold or will never be identified because of all of this, Because someone might have been waiting and maybe they can't wait for however long it takes to resolve this freeze, and maybe they end up switching their career
path into something completely different. And I'll just say, like even on a smaller scale, I had a grant that a colleague and I submitted several years back that got funded. That was a very competitive grant. It was not a federal grant, It was a foundation, very competitive and we were delighted. We were I mean just thrilled to get funded. And then we could not in the end take the grant.
We did not do the work of the grant because he ended up not being able to find an appointment that was going to work for him in academia, and so he went to industry, and so that work never got done. To this day, that work has not been done. Yeah, I would love for it to be done. But those are the types of consequences that we're talking about when we're looking at like what's happening with these funds and the delay of distributing the funds and the chances that
funds will be revoked from people. They really changed the course of not just individual lives, but of science. Yeah.
And I mean, like the most visual example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in twenty nineteen and couldn't do it because they didn't their PI didn't have funding for We're got a coronavirus thing. It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they if they got that grant. So I think this is a decent enough
place to wrap up. I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is putting, which is these institutions like coming out and backing their scientists right, And that's that's the thing that you can do. You can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing. And so it might be over by by by now, but like literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital. Yeah, because they've cut off care to transuse.
They cut off.
Yeah, And so you know, you can do this the people who actually run these systems, and you know, and
the entire federal government. Right while the people running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing, and you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators at these places, and you can confront them and you could be like, Okay, you're either right here right now, you're going to be a coward and you're going to go along with this, or you're going to.
Go back your own people. Yeah.
Yeah, And that's something that you could do right now.
And I just want to add we didn't talk about this earlier, but when we talked about the CDC and everything that's been removed, one thing that's relevant to that is that there's an Office for Research on Women's Health. It's the only resource dedicated to women's health in the entire National Institutes of Health. We do have a National Institute of Children's Health. We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an author for research on women's health.
Right if we love the US government, Jesus.
Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy the Science is Engineering in Medicine, which is, like I would say, one of the most prestigious kind of academic organizations that existed. A review of funding for women's health research at the NIH,
and they put out a report in December. It's pretty scathing if you read it, and they share that from twenty thirteen to twenty twenty three, research for women's health was like eight point eight percent of the entire NIH budget as a reminder, women are the population and just a reminder, and they called for almost sixteen billion dollars of additional funding to go to women's health research in the coming five years and the creation of an Institute
for Women's Health. So what happened last week with almost everything on the website for the Office of Research for Women's Health was deleted.
Jesus Christ, it's gone.
So they're funding. An opportunities page is gone, their bios about their staff are gone, their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last twenty five years. Gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity, immortality gone, the importance of including women and minorities, and clinical trial gone, their page on health equity gone. You get the picture. So all of that except for just a very bare minimum landing page and kind a link to the office of I
forget the official in the office. So that's an office that works on autoimmune diseases. Like everything else is gone. And so I did create a script. If anybody wants to call their member of Congress, I have a script for that, and the CDC pages that people can use in terms of actions. That's something I think that is about as real as it gets for us at this point.
And I think that the more we are emphatic in our messaging that none of this is okay, that we demand to have these resources back online, that we demand to continue funding research on health disparities for all the different groups affected, I think the better the chance is that that actually happens. So that's out there if anybody wants.
That, Yeah, well we'll put links to that in the description. Also, I'm going to put it a personal plug to call your congress person to yell at them about all of the anti trans stuff, because they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is slipping back and forward between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass a defense bill that like banchanz people from the military, and we're going to stop things from happening, and so this is the thing that can go either way and
getting yelled at by because situents legitimately does help with us.
So yep, absolutely, yeah, do that.
Do that too when you're called while you're calling what the CDC, multiple things, different calls, even Yeah.
You might just want to put them on seed Dell and make it, you know, on your drive if you go into work, maybe every day on the drive you're just calling, Hi, here's the issue of the day, because there's no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating now.
So, speaking of things in bios, where can people find you two for stuff that you want to promote the way you do, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible thing, which is most of them are terrible, but I'm on TikTok. If you just put my first name, usually all come up. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, I know, I know, and Blue Sky and I'm not the only one I don't really do is Facebook.
You're too cool for that.
Oh I have a subset. That's where the script is bum subset. Now not too cool for Facebook. I'm just too lazy for Facebook.
I mean, I mean, listen, if you're on these things, you're not too cool for anything. That's the really cool kids are not in any of these things. You can find me at on Blue Sky, at cave.
Ka V E H M D.
And more importantly, you can listen to my podcast, The House of Pod. It's a relatively fun, informal look at medicine.
We tried to make healthcare more relatable, you know.
Sometimes we'll take an aim at medical quackery or griffs and that sort of thing. I think your listeners will like it. Our guests range from doctors like Peter Hotez or Argavon here to musicians like Portugal the Man, or a lot of the Cool Zone family that you all know and love, Prop and Robert and hopefully me as soon. So find it anywhere you get your podcasts.
The House of Pod.
Yeah, and you can find all of that. We've talked about like a staggering number of the other shows that we do in this one, but yeah you can. You can find our other shows where there are podcasts, And yeah, thank you God, I'm so bad at plugging these things. You think it's my living but now can't do it, so you're out of ten. Absolute failure. But yeah, thank you to both for coming on. And I hope you get your grant arka pod because that, like Jesus Christ.
Thank you. Well. If I if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will, I will let you know. I mean we can talk about it.
Yeah, yeah, I'm dot Yeah, this is this is big. Could happen here? Go go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities, your local police department. I make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things. It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website pool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,