US science in chaos

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Hello, lovely, curious-minded people.

Welcome to your weekly dose of the scientific stories and surprises that are shaping our world.

Today, we are diving straight into arguably the biggest science story in the world right now.

What is happening in the US?

The United States is the world's science superpower, but right now, much of its research community is in a state of confusion and panic.

It's all to do with a dizzying number of announcements and orders by the Trump administration, all of which have come in the space of just a few weeks.

There have been funding cuts, legal challenges, and there are questions over the future of a number of US-led international projects.

This has all happened very quickly, and we want to unpick what the implications are for the country's role on the global scientific stage.

So, earlier, I spoke to David Malakoff, who's international news editor from the publication Science.

Can you break all of this down for us?

It's quite a timeline, isn't it?

Where do we start?

Yeah, well, so it's hard to believe, but this just started a few weeks ago, really, the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated.

Within hours of him entering the Oval Office, he unleashed an absolute tsunami of executive orders.

We can start with one that sort of had the broadest impact, which was he immediately froze almost all federal payments.

So agencies were not allowed to disperse money.

And this had an absolutely profound effect on all agencies and all research agencies because they weren't sure, for example, if they could pay out grants that have already been awarded or whether they were allowed to accept applications for new grants, whether they could pay up contracts.

All of these things were disrupted.

That was just all in limbo.

Right.

And the order was so vague because it really said, one of these orders said, you can't spend any money that supports woke gender ideology or the Green New Deal or non-governmental organizations that undermine the national interest.

Well, none of those things are in law.

So agencies were sort of left on their own to figure out, well, what does this mean?

So many agencies took different approaches.

The National Science Foundation, or NSF, which is essentially one of our largest funders of non-biomedical research, they decided basically to put a freeze on everything.

One of the things they put a freeze on was the ability of postdoctoral researchers, early career researchers, to get their monthly payments.

So suddenly on social media, you saw just this explosion of people saying, hey, I can't pay my bills.

I can't pay my rent.

Now, I will say that eventually the administration both backed away from that widespread freeze

and also there were lawsuits filed which resulted in a federal judge telling the government basically, you can't do this.

Where are we now then with that funding freeze?

What situation are we in now?

There's a lot of uncertainty.

So on one hand, the courts have said restart the funding spigot.

On the other hand, we're getting a lot of anecdotal reports that people are still having trouble accessing funds that they believe they should have access to.

Okay, so, I mean, this sounds, the suddenness of this and the kind of broad scope of this sounds very unusual, and it certainly was big news.

How unusual was that announcement?

Unprecedented.

You know, this is a blitzkrieg of the likes that the United States has never, ever seen.

And it is so abrupt that it's actually gotten the administration in trouble because it turns out many of these orders and guidance policy memos are poorly framed and violate the law, basically.

And so that has opened the door door to dozens of lawsuits from states, from research universities, from nonprofit groups who have gone to federal court and said, hey, either this wasn't done correctly or this is just blatantly illegal.

Congress has passed a law that says you can't do this.

So then on just last week, there was possibly the most significant announcement, certainly a very impactful announcement.

The NIH, the National Institutes of Health, had a funding cut.

Talk us through that.

Yeah, so what happened is last week, late on a Friday night, NIH abruptly announced that it was changing the way it reimburses universities for the so-called indirect costs of research, the lighting, the heating, the building.

And in 2023, NIH spent about $9 billion on these indirect costs, compared to about $26 billion

for direct costs of research.

And what they said they wanted to do was by making this technical change, they were going to save about $4 billion.

Right.

To put it lightly, the universities and research community went nuts.

One researcher I spoke with compared it to dropping a nuclear bomb on universities that do biomedical research.

There was an immediate and strong backlash.

And by Monday morning, 22 states and all of the major research universities, essentially, had gone to federal court to say this is blatantly illegal.

And a judge agreed

to their request to suspend the NIH policy.

So that happened on Monday night.

Well, within a few days.

So I think some of the significance of

this shift and this cut has kind of been perhaps lost in translation in terms of international use and how significant and what indirect costs actually are and what they mean for research research and researchers.

And so, we wanted to hear from a researcher who was caught up in this, and we spoke to Dr.

Laura K.

White, who's a biologist researching RNA at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and she receives funding from NIH.

This is what she had to say to us.

If you think about cutting indirects to 15%, it's like if you told an airline that it should run on a budget that only covers jet fuel and pilot salaries plus 15%,

that wouldn't keep planes safe, it wouldn't keep airports open, it wouldn't keep flights on schedule.

And the same thing is true for biomedical research, right?

So the direct costs don't reflect the true cost of keeping science running.

The indirect costs they pay for are infrastructure.

They help pay for the buildings here.

They pay for some of the specialty equipment that we use.

They pay for the people that come and collect the trash, including hazardous waste.

And so for every academic medical center in the United States, research is conducted at a loss.

I mean, people are worried that whether they're going to still have jobs, whether labs are going to have to shut down because of cuts to funding.

And that is the biggest concern.

That was Dr.

Laura K.

White from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

David, I think, you know, the idea of running a biomedical laboratory without having your hazardous waste taken away really put this into perspective.

What's been the reaction from scientists that you've spoken with?

Well, I think it's fair to say that the research community was apoplectic.

Others pointed out that medical research centers, which are attached, often attached to universities, in many states, particularly rural states that voted for Trump, are the single largest employers in those states.

We talked with folks at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

They expect if this policy was upheld, that that university would lose $105 million immediately, which would put jobs at risk, economic development and growth at risk.

And that's why you're seeing bipartisan pushback in Congress against this policy.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers are expressing very deep concerns about this.

So,

what was the justification from the NIH, from the National Institutes of Health, for this decision?

Basically, their view is that these expenses are way too fat.

They note that when universities take money from philanthropic foundations, for example, they're willing to accept much lower overhead costs.

Or they say industry doesn't have such high overhead costs for research.

So that's really a chunk of their motivation.

However, it's also true that generally there are a number of conservative Republicans who, frankly, don't like higher education because they consider it too liberal.

So I think there's also a stripe of that in these actions.

Is there an argument to be made there that if philanthropic organizations that fund research won't accept

as high of a proportion of these indirect costs, as high overheads as the government will.

Does that mean that the government have some money to save here?

Yeah.

Indirect costs in the United States have been controversial and debated for decades and decades and decades.

What is that right number?

How much should it be?

So there has been bipartisan interest in making sure that taxpayer money is spent efficiently.

What I think is notable here is that there seems to be pretty widespread agreement that the number that the Trump administration has picked is probably too low.

So,

to try and sum this up, David, not an easy feat.

Should we see this as part of the White House's general drive to cut spending?

That's been very apparent.

Or is there some kind of, is science being targeted?

Is there some kind of shift in the relationship between government and research institutions that's particular to the administration that's just come into the White House now?

I think the black cloud that hovers over all of this is a question of whether this administration is going to fundamentally rethink the basic assumption that has long driven investments in research and development in the United States, which is that the government is the primary source of funding for research that others will not do.

because there is not enough commercial application or because it's curiosity driven.

So since the end of World War II, the assumption has been that the government will drive the basic research agenda in the United States because there really isn't anyone else to step in and do that kind of research.

And if that is revisited, that has major implications for the leadership of the U.S.

in a very globally competitive field

and for the scientific workforce and for very practical things like will you get new drugs to market.

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That was David Malakoff from Science, and we'll be following that story, or all of those stories, as they develop.

Now, though, back on this side of the pond, we have Caroline Steele joining us in the studio today, back by Popular Demand.

Hi, Caroline.

Hello, thanks for having me back.

I think I'm partly back because a study I shared last week has provoked quite a bit.

You're back because we really like having you here, by the way.

Thank you.

You're very welcome.

And also, a study I shared last week has provoked quite a vigorous reaction.

So, the study was published in The Lancet, and it had a look at how phone bans in schools are affecting well-being and grades.

And basically, to many people's surprise, the scientists found that banning phones had no effect.

It doesn't improve grades or well-being.

And people have been very vocal about how this contradicts their own personal experience.

So we heard from one parent from Barry who wrote in to say a phone ban at his children's school has had a really positive effect.

His children felt relief about not being pestered by social media.

And we also heard from one headteacher about his school's experience with banning phones.

Hi, my name is Damien Macbeth.

I am the principal of the John Wallace Church of England Academy.

The phone policy that we've introduced is lockable pouches that students put their phones inside.

They lock their phones up so from the moment that they enter the school site until the end of the school day, we have confidence that the students cannot access their phones or smart devices.

We're still learning, but what we have noticed is in this first year, students feel happier.

57% of the students that we've asked have said that they are happier, they are learning more.

We've seen a 40% dip in the number of children in detention for disruptive behaviour in lessons.

I think the culture in the school has transformed.

We're seeing children engaging in more conversations with each other, they're playing.

There are games that we hadn't seen played for years, games of tag outside, they're bringing in card games, they're playing chess at break time, they're engaged engaged in the present and engaging in conversations and all the wonderful things that children should be doing in real time, in the real world.

And perhaps one of the biggest changes we've noticed is reports of online bullying, online abuse outside of school as well as inside has reduced by 80%.

So that's representative of what we're hearing from a lot of teachers and parents.

So Vic, we have this sort of tension between the research and people's experience.

How do we resolve it?

You went looking for answers, right?

I did, yeah.

This is a very divisive issue, isn't it?

So I'm glad you're back.

And to dig into this, I spoke to psychologist and digital tech researcher Pete Etchels earlier.

This paper in particular was looking at the impact of different types of phone policies across 30 secondary schools in the UK, in England in particular, and they tested about 1,200 students in that study.

So what they were trying to look at here was if you you take schools that have what are called restrictive phone bans, so basically, where students aren't allowed to use their phones during the day, and compare those to schools where you have more lenient bans, do you see any differences in things like mental health, attainment, things like that?

And the top line results of the study showed that, well, actually, there weren't really any differences between the restrictive phone ban schools and the lenient schools.

There is a big caveat to this, though, which is that the restrictions didn't seem to make much difference in this study because the amount of time that kids are spending on their phones in schools is actually pretty small.

But that doesn't mean that there are not associations between phone use and social media use and things like mental health outcomes more generally.

And they did find this in the study.

So the researchers did find a connection between using phones generally, using social media generally, and poorer self-reported mental health, poorer attainment in some cases, and poorer outcomes in a lot of domains.

So, how did they measure that?

Were they asking the children to self-report how long they were on their phone?

How are they measuring the just overall length of time?

There was a mix of methods.

So, yeah, there's some self-report measures in there.

So, you use something like there's a very well-known measure called the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, which is a questionnaire that you fill out yourself.

There were some teacher reports in there of class attainment and disruptive behaviours and things like that but there aren't that many studies of phone bans and the effects on various things that we're worried about there are not many and they tend to show mixed effects overall that phone bans don't really seem to work in the way that we want them to that is very different from the message that we get from teachers and it's very consistent message.

You talk to any head teacher and we heard from one earlier, you implement a phone ban in schools and you see improvements.

Why do we have that disconnect?

The honest answer is we don't know.

We're playing catch up with the research at the minute.

One of the things that I worry about is that we're measuring the wrong things.

You will get reports like we heard earlier, things like the kids seem happier, they're playing more, they're doing more things in break times.

We are not measuring that in the research at the minute.

You can't measure that.

You can't capture that using a well-being scale.

Well, I was going to say, sort of seeming happier.

That's a really difficult thing to measure quantitatively, isn't it?

And that's where this kind of science is really, really difficult.

Do we have any other studies looking at smartphone use?

You talked about how the research is playing catch-up, but are there other studies that have tried to examine this in a comparative way and drawn different conclusions?

Yeah, it's a really hard thing to measure, which is part of the reason why we've not done much on this so far.

But there was a big study that came out last year that looked at Norwegian schools.

So what happened there was that the researchers contacted about 500 schools in Norway, I think it was, to ask about what sorts of mobile phone policies they had in place.

They were able to match that data against public data and medical data.

So they were able to say, okay, when a phone ban or some sort of phone policy was put in place in this school, what happens one, two, three, four years down the line in terms of cyberbullying, educational attainment, even in terms of things like how many children from those schools are being referred to specialist mental health GPs and things like that.

Now, when that study came out, the top line finding there was that smartphone bans seemed to have an effect.

It was reported that schools had about a 29% decrease in mental health problems and about a 43% reduction in bullying.

If you dig a little deeper into that study, things get a little bit more complicated.

Of course.

So of the 500 schools, more than half of them,

their quote-unquote smartphone ban was that students were allowed phones on them.

They just, they had to be on silent.

They were allowed to disrupt class, which is not what we would consider a smartphone ban.

You know, what I think of a smartphone ban, it's kind of what we heard about earlier.

It's putting a phone in a pouch and away or not being allowed it on premises.

They actually looked in that study at the comparison between lenient smartphone banned schools and strict smartphone banned schools and you find no differences in terms of bullying incidents.

You look at those groups in terms of mental health differences and basically there are no differences.

Can you draw out of that then that the bans that are not showing a difference are just not harsh enough, are not strict enough?

Take the phones away from kids and lock them away for the day and actually you do see a difference.

Is that a fair thing to conclude?

That's one potential possibility here.

And I think we see that in the recent study that came out in the Lancet as well.

If you look at the schools that had restrictive policies, there were 20 schools in that cohort, 16 of them, the restrictive policy was that the phones must be kept off and left in bags through the day.

So we only had four schools in that sample where actually children didn't have physical access to their phone.

The long and short of it is we need more data.

As it stands at the minute, we've got about 22 studies, 23 now, in the area, where there's no convincing evidence that smartphone bans actually work.

That doesn't mean that they don't work.

What it means to me, though, is that if you do enact a smartphone ban in a school, it's not going to be based on evidence, scientific evidence.

So we need to base it on something else that's more concrete.

And for me, the best people to decide whether a smartphone ban should be implemented in a school or not are the people leading those schools who've got the right sort of pedagogical vision?

They understand their communities.

They understand what the needs of those communities are.

Thank you to Pete Etchels there.

He is professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University.

What do you think of that, Caroline?

Does that get us to some sort of resolution with this experience versus evidence tension?

I think it does because the research wasn't necessarily measuring the things teachers are referring to, like play and social interaction.

Yeah, so the changes that have happened as a result of different rules and phone bands might be easier to perceive than to measure.

Yeah, exactly.

It's hard to sort of exactly quantify those things, but that doesn't mean they're not valuable and important.

Absolutely.

Well thank you Caroline.

I think we will definitely be revisiting this story in the future won't we?

Finally, today though, check underneath your garden sheds people because Britain has a new species of snake and apparently it is thriving here.

So what is this reptilian arrival?

Where has it arrived from and should it be allowed to stay?

Joining me is Tom Major, who's an ecologist and herpetologist at Bournemouth University.

Hi, Tom.

Welcome to the programme.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Yeah, you are very welcome.

And first of all, what are these snakes?

So they're called Aescalapian snakes, which is a bit of a mouthful.

They're named for the Greco-Roman god of medicine, Asclepios.

And they look like quite a big rat snake.

So relatively slender, but quite long.

How long?

Well, in their native range, they can get to be up to two meters long.

Wow.

But that is a massive one.

In Wales, the biggest ones we've seen are about a metre and a half long.

And is that where they're sort of setting at home?

They're not native to the UK but where are we finding them now and how did they get here?

Yeah so they're not technically native to the UK.

We did used to have them in the UK about 300,000 or so years ago but they went extinct.

So now in their modern range they're native to central and southern Europe and they've arrived in two locations one in North Wales where they escaped from the Welsh Mountain Zoo and then another location on the banks of the Regents Canal where they got out of an education authority and that was in the 1980s.

And so you've been tracking them.

How have you been doing that?

That's right.

So we use technique called radio telemetry, which is where you put a small transmitter inside the snake that emits a radio signal on a frequency that you have special kit and can hear that frequency.

And you basically just walk around the countryside playing a big game of hotter colder, trying to make your beeps louder until you eventually come across the snake.

And what did you find?

Does that give you insights into how they're behaving and where they're going?

Yeah, so some of the interesting things we learned, I mean, the key one that stands out is that these snakes were entering human dwellings, going into people's loft spaces, going into walls as a sort of safe place to hang out and spend some time where they'd eaten or when they were shedding their skin.

I find that quite unsettling.

So they're coming into human dwellings.

Is there any danger to the humans in those human dwellings?

No, these snakes are very harmless.

They can bite, you know, they have teeth, but it's really inconsequential bite.

And interestingly, most people who had them in their houses either kind of had an inkling that they were there already because they might have found a shed skin in their loft or they had no idea and the snakes really do keep a low profile you know they're not coming into houses to go into people's lounges i did have one time where i was outside somebody's house and he noticed me with my radio kit because you're not exactly subtle you've got a big antenna and he asked me what i was doing and i told him i'm tracking a snake and i think it's in your garden so he very kindly let me into his garden to have a look and it quickly became apparent once i I was in his garden that the snake wasn't in his garden.

It was in his house.

And

he kept it cool, but he was a little bit of a snake phobic.

So he didn't love that news.

But he was really the exception that proves the rule.

Can I ask how they're getting into people's houses then?

They're actually really good climbers.

So in their native range, escalating snakes inhabit kind of rocky outcroppings or hill faces.

And the way they hunt and the way they kind of explore their environment is they'll climb and they'll look into all the nooks and crannies.

And if they find somewhere that's quite nice, quite cozy to put up shop for a bit, I think they'll just do it.

So they can climb up the sides of houses.

If you've got a tree up against the house, I've seen them go across trees and sort of under guttering in that gap.

Right.

What are they eating?

Predominantly small mammals.

So in the area that they are in North Wales, it was lots and lots of wood mice.

Every now and again, they'll eat garden birds, but that's a smaller part of the diet than small mammals.

Do we class these as an invasive species?

Are there any problems associated with them for local wildlife?

So they're classed as a non-native species because they haven't been here in the last, naturally in the last 10,000 years.

But there is no good evidence to suggest that they are doing any particular harm to our native species.

But that's not to say they're not having any effect.

It's really difficult to measure that because we don't have good data for the populations of different species that they prey on before they arrived and after they arrived.

But certainly so far, nothing obvious.

So it sounds like this is just perhaps unusual in its behaviour reptile visitor to this country.

What would you say to people who discover a shed skin and realize that they're sharing their home with a snake?

I'd say you must be living in either Colwyn Bay or near the Regents Canal because these things are only in those two locations.

And yeah, I think really, from my perspective, it's quite exciting to have them in your house.

I appreciate other people might not feel the same, but I would reassure them that they are completely harmless to their pets and they're very unlikely to ever see them because snakes don't want you to see them and they really don't like coming out of cover.

Well, that's fascinating.

Thank you very much indeed, Tom.

And you can hear more about this story on your podcast, can't you?

Herpetological Highlights.

Am I getting your title correct?

That's bang on.

Thank you.

Yes, indeed.

Yeah, we do it every week, and it's herpetological happenings in the world.

Excellent.

Well, thank you so much for coming and telling us about our new reptilian arrival, Tom Major.

Thanks ever so much.

Thanks.

Now, Caroline, I'm not sure how comfortable I feel about snakes climbing up walls into loft spaces.

And I believe you've had some pretty close encounters with another much bigger invasive reptile in the name of science journalism.

Yeah, so I visited the Everglades in Florida to have a look at the Burmese python.

So they originally come from Myanmar and they were brought over to the US as part of the pet trade.

Right.

And then a lot of them escaped or people sort of suddenly realised they had a 16-foot snake and didn't know what to do with it so set it free and now they are completely dominating the Everglades, wiping out loads of small mammals.

They even eat alligators and deer.

Wow, so a very different

sort of ecological disturbance going on in the Everglades.

So what are people doing about them?

What were you finding out in Florida?

So I joined some scientists who were tracking them using trackers like Tom, and we went looking for as many snakes as we possibly can.

And the reason why they're tracking them is to try and learn more about their biology and behavior with the ultimate goal of eliminating them because they are such a problem.

Well, that sounds terrifying.

Yeah.

Did you find any?

We did.

We found three.

So it took us 12 hours to find three, which, I don't know, given that there is literally a tracker inside them,

I don't think that was particularly successful, but it's because they're the enormous size of these snakes.

Yeah, they're so big, but they're so well camouflaged, which is part of the problem, right?

They're so hard to find, so hard to deal with.

And it's part of a much bigger sort of Python elimination program.

You know, there are government-funded Python hunters whose entire job is to go and find and kill as many pythons as possible.

And there's an annual Python hunting competition where locals will spend 10 days trying to catch as many pythons as possible.

And whoever catches the largest number of pythons wins $10,000.

I'm feeling your next Inside Science assignment coming on now, the sort of gonzo journalism reptile hunting.

Although you can't take the $10,000 prize, can you?

Because you're a BBC presenter.

That's true, I'll just donate it to research.

And that is all the disconcerting snake news we have time for today.

So thank you, Caroline Steele, and thank you, lovely listeners.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were were Ilan Goodman, Sophie Ormiston, and Ella Hubber.

Technical production was by Searle Whitney, and the show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk, search for BBC Inside Science, and follow the links to the Open University.

Until next week, thanks for listening, and bye-bye.

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