Kamehota
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, but I would just want to clarify for the people listening here that it wasn't just grants 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 WIC is gone? What about Head Start? What about Meals on Wheels? I mean, there are...
Behind the Bastards
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tons of federal assistance programs out there and they had only made an exception for social security and medicare yeah in the memo but not medicaid and what happened the next day but the medicaid portal went down right yeah it is 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 and right and it's still not
Behind the Bastards
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Right. Yeah. We just have a, we have, we found one judge with a backbone in the entire country so far. And, and he said, no, you cannot.
Behind the Bastards
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for sure out of spite 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're not laws in the book. Congress did not pass anything. It's like this elderly man woke up and said, hey, let's get rid of DEI and DEIA.
Behind the Bastards
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For example, those are the terms they use exactly without saying what DEI is or what DEIA is. I feel that we need to pause for a moment on the A. DEIA, and they spell out A as for 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...
Behind the Bastards
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Like legally, it makes no kind of sense unless they are going to go after the ADA, which I am 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 from. completely.
Behind the Bastards
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And that there's really, they're 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, thereby erasing trans folks, intersex people, non-binary folks, et cetera, gender, queer, gender fluid, all of those people.
Behind the Bastards
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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 what's happening, but I'm assuming that that's what they're doing, taking,
Behind the Bastards
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any sex that's not male or female out of there and then removing gender as a variable 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 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 swaths of information
Behind the Bastards
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off of the internet so people can no longer, researchers, physicians, 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.
Behind the Bastards
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So they have thrown the entire government into chaos and the lives of millions of people into chaos, all to remove the T in LGBT.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so the first sign that something was materially going to change after these executive orders, as I recall, I'm living along with everyone else in what is time. But the first thing that I recall is the study section being canceled. The study sections are meetings where scientists come together.
Behind the Bastards
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They each will have read various grant proposals and scored them on a number of different dimensions. And then they come together and discuss. They don't discuss all of them, by the way. They only discuss the ones 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...
Behind the Bastards
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critical part of the process by which the government gives out funds for research. If these meetings do not happen, people's grants are not getting evaluated, assessed, 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 or lay off people they already had in their lab.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And as of yesterday, I saw Dr. Megan Ray said that her, or 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 freeze of those activities ending on February 1st. Today that we're recording is February 3rd. And those study sections for today were canceled.
Behind the Bastards
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On the other hand, NSF, which is obviously a separate organization, has informally, I've heard, decided that they're going to resume some study sections, although they haven't resumed just yet.
Behind the Bastards
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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 NSF and the NIH. And I will just say, as an academic, these are certainly the kind of premier funding opportunities that we have. Like, it also is really critical in the careers of
Behind the Bastards
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researchers to be able to show that their work is worthy of this kind of funding. And that's part of why I was saying people's jobs, yes, 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.
Behind the Bastards
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Right. And also who would want to go into science if it's going to be like this?
Behind the Bastards
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If there's just going to be like some random person who goes into the White House and says, never mind, we're not doing that anymore. Who wants to be exposed to those kinds of winds?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And I just want to highlight that postdocs, I think, are particularly vulnerable because they are often, like the NSF freeze actually demonstrated this very well, they aren't, as Pat said, they're definitely often moving paycheck to paycheck. And what the NSF freeze did was that it made it so folks could not get their next paycheck because this was happening at the end of the month, right?
Behind the Bastards
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So it was delaying people getting their next paycheck. And in particular, I'm talking about postdocs. Yes, it can affect graduate students as well, but a lot of postdoc funding, like one of the grants that I have actually, we work directly with postdoctoral and some predoctoral, but many postdoctoral training programs that fund postdocs.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I was just looking up. I 100 percent agree. And to your point about how much of the science and even other amazing things that are done in this country 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.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And I wanted to highlight, I think that's one of the 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. So one is just that review process and not actually reviewing grants, right? So like I personally submitted a proposal in the fall.
Behind the Bastards
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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 a unanticipated barrier.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And there are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who are doing work that's related to health disparities, health 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 knowing that I may lose funds in five months, or do I just try to make do without? And then that's a job that no one gets.
Behind the Bastards
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And if you play that out over the 300,000 people who are funded in various ways by the NIH, you start to understand the scope of damage that's being done here.
Behind the Bastards
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Yes, yes. Yes, you're right. Okay, so my grant is called Ending Sexual Harassment. Teaching of Principal Investigators has a cute acronym, ESTOP. So our goal is to try to help people intervene when there is sexual harassment with the ultimate goal of decreasing the amount of sexual harassment that's happening in biomedical research.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And to your point, like everyone is at risk for experiencing sexual harassment. It's just that the majority of folks who experience it are women or sexual and gender minorities. And so, yeah, it's, I've really, obviously, as you can imagine, been thinking a lot about,
Behind the Bastards
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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? Probably.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 research, I should say, that they've done, that they are in the process of publishing.
Behind the Bastards
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They have been asked to rescind that work so that they can remove these god-awful words 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 manuscripts be without these words? I mean, it's, yeah, it's terrible.
Behind the Bastards
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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 and, it will harm people.
Behind the Bastards
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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 $1,000 or $5,000 and grants as large as multimillion dollars. And the processes actually are, I mean, they're analogous, but they can be pretty different.
Behind the Bastards
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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 R01. These are like kind of their fanciest grants that go to individual researchers with their team, but it's led by an individual researcher often.
Behind the Bastards
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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 grant submission.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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And the way the process starts is often you will send what's called a 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 NOFOs that are like, here's what we're actually asking people to submit for at this point in time.
Behind the Bastards
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And then people will send a letter of interest to the program officer. Each grant mechanism will have its own 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.
Behind the Bastards
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And so it's a huge amount of work. The R01 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.
Behind the Bastards
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You may have done all the rest of the work and they may only read that yeah and then you have a 12 page these are single-space pages single-space pages half-inch margins 12 page research strategy i don't know how many thousand words thousands of words on it but i'm just telling you 12 single-space pages is a lot of text about your research
Behind the Bastards
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And it's like one of these puzzles where it has to be exactly right and you have these figures and you have to get them exactly the right size and the exact right place on the page with the legend and everything so that it all magically fits in these 12 pages. Because if you don't do it right, they will literally reject your grant for formatting problems.
Behind the Bastards
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And so you may have spent months writing this grant and because you had...
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. I wish I could just write woke ideology on these 12 pages and then get a grant. But yes, to your point, part of what's in those 12 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 the whole section called preliminary studies. And what's in there varies depending on what kind of research you're doing.
Behind the Bastards
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If you're doing animal research, it might be various animal models that you've tested to
Behind the Bastards
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things on that demonstrate, 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, say, 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 pages, like often a page, two, three pages about what you have done to prepare for,
Behind the Bastards
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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 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.
Behind the Bastards
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And then, in addition to this full-page thing, there are a bunch of additional documents that 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 who are women and minorities? There's like an age document. There's a page about resources and facilities.
Behind the Bastards
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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 backwards. But anyway, the point is all these additional pages, it's not just the specific aims and just the research strategy.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 at getting funded.
Behind the Bastards
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And for people who run labs, 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 or support another graduate student? Can you afford to support another postdoc? These are all long-term decisions.
Behind the Bastards
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These aren't just like, okay, I'm going to hire someone for two months until I find out the next thing. It's like, you want to convince the 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.
Behind the Bastards
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And so I think the kind of intuitive and natural consequences that people will bring in fewer people. Yeah. 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 what is the plan here? And what is the support for the folks at their institutions?
Behind the Bastards
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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. We remain committed to supporting the work of our faculty, our graduate students, our postdocs, et cetera.
Behind the Bastards
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And we will and we will fund anyone whose funding is withdrawn or withheld, let's just say.
Behind the Bastards
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Okay, two, I want to highlight two. 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, right?
Behind the Bastards
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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 Princeton actually put out their annual report on DEI at Princeton. And I forget the exact wording and I don't have it in front of me, but their president talked about how important it is to...
Behind the Bastards
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support people from different backgrounds, et cetera, et cetera. So that's two that are trying to do something. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. But even the NFL came out today and said that they're not going to end their DEI programs anytime soon. NFL known for being strong supporters of DEI.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 reject it, hopefully they give you feedback. By the way, sometimes you don't even get feedback because if you weren't one of the top Grant applications, you don't even get discussed, so you may not get feedback.
Behind the Bastards
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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 once. And to Kaveh's point about efficiency, I mean, if you think about it that way, it's an extremely inefficient system.
Behind the Bastards
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But the point I just wanted to make is that people work really, really hard. Yeah. to get these grants. And for some of the folks right now who are kind of in limbo waiting for study section to resume, this might be their third or fourth submission of something.
Behind the Bastards
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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
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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It was not a federal grant. It was a foundation grant. 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. So he went to industry. And so that work never got done to this day.
Behind the Bastards
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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 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 change the course of not just individual lives, but of science.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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We do not have a National Institute of Women's Health. We have an office for research on women's health.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it gets worse. So the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and 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.
Behind the Bastards
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And they shared that from 2013 to 2023, research for women's health was like 8.8% of the entire NIH budget. As a reminder, women are half of the population. And... Just as a reminder, and they called for almost $16 billion 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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 their funding and opportunities page is gone. Their bios about their staff are gone. Their updates on advances in medicine for women over the last 25 years, gone. Their pages on maternal morbidity and mortality, gone.
Behind the Bastards
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The importance of including women and minorities in clinical trials, 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 a link to the office of, I forget the official name of the office, but that's an office that works on autoimmune diseases. Like everything else is gone. And so I did create a script.
Behind the Bastards
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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.
Behind the Bastards
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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 and 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.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, you might just want to put them on speed dial and make it on your drive. If you go into work, maybe every day on the drive, you're just calling. Here's the issue of the day because there is no shortage of issues that we need to be communicating about.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, I'm on all the things, even the terrible things.
Behind the Bastards
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which is most of them are terrible but i'm on tiktok if you just put my first name usually i'll come up tiktok instagram twitter i know i know and uh blue sky and uh i'm not the only one i don't really do is facebook you're too cool for that oh i have a sub stack that's where the script is on my sub stack now i'm not too cool for facebook i'm just too lazy for facebook
Behind the Bastards
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Thank you. Well, if I don't get my funding renewed this summer, I will let you know. Maybe we can talk about it.