Episode Summary
After language, the scientific method is probably humanity’s greatest achievement; it’s a veritable engine of invention that has allowed us to bend rivers to our will, split the atom and cure many diseases. But while scientific progress has given us the tools to reshape the world and even change our bodies, we haven’t yet figured out how to rewire our mental hardware. The same cognitive instincts that helped our ancestors survive in the wild are now making many of us vulnerable.
Although we think of them as separate today, science and superstition were one and the same. For the vast majority of human history, astronomy and astrology were together. Alchemy and chemistry were coeval.
Over the centuries, however, science separated itself from pseudoscience, but the old beliefs never went away; they just went underground. As science became increasingly specialized and isolated from the general public, however, these “undead sciences” began gathering political power, a development that far too many advocates of progress did not perceive.
In the second Trump administration, superstition has seized control of America’s executive branch in the person of Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist extremist who has been manically destroying as much of America’s scientific achievements as he possibly can, assisted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a deranged lawyer who has been slashing and burning medical research and treatment.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. There are a lot of terrible things happening in science today. But there are also a lot of courageous people standing up to tell the world what’s happening, and standing up for the reality that science and democracy depend upon each other.
I have two guests joining me in this episode to discuss: Jenna Norton is a program director at the National Institutes of Health, where she studies the disparities in urology and kidney health, and Mark Histed. He also works at NIH, where he is a senior investigator studying neural computation and behavior. Each is here in their personal capacity, and as members of the Science and Freedom Alliance.
The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
12:16 — The importance of science communication and community-participation science
23:01 — Politics as the master science
27:54 — Jay Bhattacharya and the weaponization of objectivity
32:51 — Scientific truth and the Great Barrington Declaration
42:30 — Open versus closed epistemologies
47:53 — The destruction of American scientific leadership
52:59 — The value of curiosity-driven research
57:00 — The false promise of AI replacing human scientists
01:00:41 — Organizing scientists and the Bethesda Declaration
01:03:59 — Science and Freedom Alliance mission
01:07:12 — Building institutions for public engagement
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for joining me guys. Mark, why don’t you get started just very briefly, tell us who you are and what you do. And then Jenna, we’ll have you do the same.
MARK HISTED: Great. Yeah, thanks. Very happy to be here. My name’s Mark Histed. I am a currently a scientist who runs a group at NIH. I’m a neuroscientist and we study effectively how the many trillion, the many billions to trillions of connections in your brain create the way the brain works, how the brain is wired.
And I used to say we would, we worked between sort of math and biology these days, I would say we work between AI and biology, right? [00:04:00] We have these large AI systems that are connected in complex ways that do things that are difficult to understand. And in many ways, that’s the way that’s, from my perspective, that’s what’s going on in the brain.
And a lot of this work is directed at understanding what we have, what people have called diseases of wiring, right? What goes wrong in diseases like dementia. Why memory loss happens, what goes wrong in schizophrenia. And this is the kind of like basic neuroscience work that is leading or pointing towards understanding those diseases so we can develop cures in the future.
SHEFFIELD: Cool. All right. Well, Jenna, how about you?
JENNA NORTON: So, also very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I am a program officer at the National Institutes of Health, but I’m here in my personal capacity. And my role involves health disparities research. So I collaborate with academic universities. I oversee external research and I look for gaps in the field and try to create opportunities for new areas of science addressing health disparities in kidney disease.
And so some of the things that we think about in. I field is, what are the opportunities or resources that you have or do not have in your community that enable you to be healthy? When you interact with people and experience the stressors of not being certain that you’re going to be able to feed your family.
How does that affect your health and increase or decrease the risk of progressing to kidney disease? So those are the types of questions that we try to answer in my field.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. And absolutely very important because a lot of people have different health needs in, in many times and might not know that.
All right, so just as we’re, getting into the introductory segment here, so Mark, why did you decide to become a scientist and how did that happen for you?
HISTED: Yeah, that’s a great question. I will also add, as Jenna said, that I am here in my personal capacity and not representing NIH or the agency. And I’ll also add that I’ve done work in the past on sort of policy and how agencies can be structured [00:06:00] to fund public goods, like, scientific research.
So, so you asked how I got to be a scientist. I grew up outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, and my dad was a, a history teacher and so I was exposed to a lot of different kind of things growing up. And I had the I was always interested in science and understanding how the world works. I remember when I was young, I had a bicycle that I took apart to understand how it worked and was surprised to hear that, or, surprised to figure out that I didn’t really know how to put it back together.
And I remember thinking at the time, this is something I wanna, understand how do these things work and how can you construct them? How can you put them back together?
And, I was lucky to have the opportunity to go. I was an undergrad at MITI was lucky to have the opportunity to do that. And I think throughout my life I’ve just kind of, science is a difficult career. You can, it’s very hard to, to plan ahead.
It’s a super competitive thing and I’ve always had sort of a five year plan of what I would do if, like I failed out of science and, but lucky. But I’m, I’m pretty lucky I’ve had the chance to continue, continue doing the work that I have. I’ve always been excited about, right, understanding these big questions.
These it feels like right now there are huge open questions about how does the brain work at a network level? What’s going on with these AI systems, how do they work internally? And I just feel very lucky to be in a place in America where we have this amazing scientific, we have built, maybe up until this year, this amazing scientific research system that extends across all states and happens at universities and is funded by the federal government.
And I’m, I’m just lucky to be, a part of that and be able to kind of do the work for for really the, for the, the people and the public. Right? The public makes an investment in science because we have decided that this is something that we really want. That is, has societal benefits that cures come from this that understanding is important so that we can understand what goes wrong in diseases and that helps people. And I just feel very [00:08:00] lucky to be in a position where I can contribute that in to some extent.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. And how about you, Jenna? How did you get into this and why did you decide to do it?
NORTON: Yeah, so I came to science, I think from a little bit of a more winding path. I knew I was always interested in health and I actually after getting my undergraduate degree in nutrition I did AmeriCorps for a year and I worked in an elementary school that was kind of on the quote unquote other side of the tracks.
And had kids who had two parents in jail and just had very, different lived experiences and different opportunities for succeeding in life. After that, I went and got my master’s in public health and I worked in house communication for several years and began to. Work on more system changed projects that thought about like, how do we get people to be healthy?
How do we get people to change their behavior and ended up working in the kidney disease space where there are huge disparities in outcomes. Black Americans have something like four times the risk of white Americans of progressing from early stages of kidney disease to kidney failure when they need dialysis or a transplant to survive.
And I became very interested in those patterns and with my public health background, which tends to look at health from a community perspective in terms of the access to resources that we have. I also had this very influential opportunity where I was a health communications intern with the president’s cancer panel at the National Cancer Institute.
And the report that we worked on, the year I was there was about the demographics of cancer. And I heard from sociologists about race and how race is a social construct and became very fascinated with that area and started learning more about the ways in which the social construct. This concept of race that we’ve created as human beings, how that influences the way we navigate the world, the opportunities that we have, and [00:10:00] ultimately our health outcomes.
Tying back to my public health background and as I was working in health communication, I actually had a mentor who was a program officer at the National Institutes of Health who oversaw something called the National Kidney Disease Education Program that I worked on, and he and I just connected and he became.
He became a mentor for me. He encouraged me to go back and get my PhD, which I did when my first son, who’s now eight, was four months old. And then I had my daughter when I was about halfway through getting my PhD. I took a semester partially off. I stayed in journal clubs so that I could graduate sort of on schedule.
I did my research in my PhD on disparities looking in the military health data repository at disparities within the military health system where everybody has universal access to care. So it was kind of a unique system, yet still we saw these disparities. And so, that is sort of what launched me back.
And then I came back to NIH or actually technically I had been working there as a contractor while I was getting my PhD. And ultimately became a program officer and brought in sort of these very unique perspectives, I think to NIH. I remember being in. Meetings at IH where somebody was like, what do you mean race is not a biological construct?
Like, what do you mean race is a social construct And having to explain that to my colleagues and, not that, not, that many years ago pre 2020, but you know, 20 15, 20 16. And so, that all really drove me to see that there was this, I think, need in science to take this different perspective, to think from a community perspective.
And then to actually engage with communities in doing research, which I think was fairly novel. And NIH at the time. And so, really. If you’re thinking about the way health is shaped by your community, you also think have to think about the wisdom that communities have and the understanding of their community that they bring to the table, and then they become essential partners in research.
So that is sort of the, the [00:12:00] foundation that I have when I think about doing science. And it’s, it’s a very different end of the spectrum, which I think is great that, you have Mark sort of at the very foundational end of research and me sort of at the very implementation side of research. So it’s a, it’s a cool perspective that we have around the table today.
The importance of science communication and community-participation science
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. And then you have me, the former religious fundamentalist who got out of that. And re. But yeah, for a lot of my life I thought that evolution was a lie. And that it was made up by Satan.
NORTON: Me
SHEFFIELD: and a lot of people unfortunately do oh, you said you too.
NORTON: yes. Yeah. I remember distinctly being in my freshman biology class and learning about like micro revolution and how like phish, like you could actually watch Phish. ‘cause they have a much more rapid life cycle, evolve, and we’d studied that and documented that and then being like, well, if there’s micro evolution, then it follows logically that there could be macro evolution as that accumulates over time.
And oh my god, I’ve been lied.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and and that’s a, oh, did you want to jump in there, Mark? Or, I was gonna riff off that. Yeah, so, I, yeah, and I, I, I think that’s, that those types of experiences are key though, because, like the thing about and this is not even just about science generally, it’s just about specialization. That as the cognitive corpus of humanity has con, has continued to grow so much, and that there’s so many things that you can know about , people who don’t have experience with some particular thing, are, are suspicious of it.
Just, because it’s unfamiliar, irrespective of what anyone. Tells you about it. This is just a thing. Like if somebody, if you go to a mechanic and they say, oh, you have a particular prob, problem with your car, and you’re like, well, I’ve never heard of that part.
Is he just lying to me? And maybe he is but on the other hand, maybe he’s not. And so that type of mentality is, it’s a natural mentality for us as humans to be a [00:14:00] little bit suspicious of things that we don’t know about. And. And, and I think that’s increasingly become a, a problem for science as it’s become ever more specialized.
NORTON: Yeah, I mean, I think that science has happened in a silo as a whole for a long time. I think we were not very effective at either kind of doing real community-based participatory research, which is the background that I hail from. I mean, if you think about the history of science, I mean, we’ve been doing science for a long time, but we really only arrived at doing community-based participatory research in like the seventies maybe.
So it’s been a relatively short component of science in terms of the whole history of science. And I think that, in turn, we’ve also not been very good at communicating back out. So science in itself is sort of a silo. And then within silence, I think we also have silos. And I’ve actually done a lot of transdisciplinary research and involved, been involved in transdisciplinary research.
And in particular, one of the things that I got to do at NIH was work on this study that was addressing urologic conditions. So like, urinary incontinence and things like that. And we had surgeons like urologists, surgeons on one end of the spectrum and then like public health people on the other end of the spectrum all coming together to try to understand holistically what goes wrong there.
And there were actually disagreements that happened among the scientists because. They literally didn’t speak the language. In some cases, the same language in some cases, right? And so it almost takes an active intentionality to I think, overcome those barriers of communication and actually get people to take a step back and like clarify what they mean.
‘cause sometimes these shortcuts in the way we speak, don’t translate across disciplines and certainly outside of science. And so I think that is a great point. And Mark, I don’t know if you had anything to add to that.
HISTED: Yeah, this is a great conversation. I [00:16:00] will say just on the prior religious thing, I mean, I, I’ve also had a similar experience and maybe that’s why all of us around the table here are thinking and so. Similar ways. I, I was raised in al as an altar boy, I was an altar boy growing up, and, strongly urged to become a priest.
And so I have a lot of respect for people that come from that perspective. And I, I, I understand how we have a, a wide divergence of views. And I think part, partly, perhaps that’s why Jen and I are both thinking alike here. I would also say what Jenna says about even within science, there is some.
Lack of sharing of information, I think Jen and I, in working to, in working together and talking I remember a few weeks ago we were talking about the different ways that the kind of fundamental or basic science that I do, that is my field and the kind of disparities and direct implementation work that she has done, how those things differ.
And in some cases, like the kind of fundamentals work that we do, you have to have the ability to change on a dime and be able to follow the data where it leads. And often, no one really knows exactly what to do except for you because, or you and your team. ‘cause you’re, you’re the experts.
You’ve been thinking about this a long time, and you wanna have the freedom to chain chase things in the direction you want. And I. I sort of wasn’t fully aware until Jenna was conveying to me that, we have in some of the larger clinical trial spaces, for example, there is a lot of value in creating some structures for direct oversights because they help get the science done more efficiently. And so I think talking across boundaries, both within and across science, is, is super important. I guess I would just also add though, that, there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not scientists have been able to speak to the public and, and are we doing a good job at that? And certainly, we can do better.
There’s, a real need for people to lean into speaking clearly to the public about what we do, and reaching across, different different societal groups in order to convey what, the what is exactly happening with us and US science and public science, and why it’s so important and why it contributes to economy and how it, really [00:18:00] strengthens, strengthens America, really.
The thing I would also add, however, is that there is, what we’re seeing is a moment of attacks on. Social trust and on institutions that, that, that support that social trust. And so when you have really kind of organized and well-funded forces actively trying to destroy trust in expertise or trust in institutions and the institutions actually that like support that expertise.
I think one of the major issues is that science and scientists as a whole have mostly ignored that while it’s been developing. And we saw a lot of that happening during COVID where there were really, I mean, let’s be real, like well-funded, organized efforts to destroy social trust and trust in, and public health and trust in like our communities and trying to do things that support each other even support people that come from more at risk backgrounds, people who have cancer and in more frail health. Like how do we support those people? It’s not just about like our own experience. And I think I think science did not mount a well a very good, well organized, systematic effort. We didn’t work together as scientists to figure out like how to respond to that.
And I think that kind of institutional response is something that we’re gonna have to think about in the future. I think there’s no way to avoid it.
NORTON: I agree with that very much. And I think that there has been a sense in science that we’re supposed to be above politics, right? We’re not supposed to because politics is inherently biased, right? And you take a side and you have like a team and I can understand why we push back against that as scientists because the foundations of sciences, like, objectivity and not drawing conclusions before you’ve actually done the research to inform those conclusions.
And so on the one hand it makes sense, but on the other hand, like science is a publicly funded endeavor. Much of the [00:20:00] science that we do, both on the foundational end where Mark works and on the implementation end where I work, it is not profit driven. It will never be profit driven and it will never translate to industry.
So it is a pure public good and therefore we rely on political infrastructure to support what we’re doing to even exist in the first place. And so I think we’ve actually been very much harmed by this sense that we must be above politics or separate from politics because it has left us completely unprepared for this moment in which science is actually.
Being attacked in a very political context. And so it’s left us, I think, unprepared and maybe even still in some cases unwilling to push back.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s right. You guys make some great points there and and in this context, I think it’s, it’s worth. Remembering a phrase from Aristotle that, who is, many people credit often as one of the first scientists in the world that, you know, one of the things that he said is that politics is the master science.
And because it’s the method by which all other forms of science can be conducted and preserved and promulgated. And I think that insight from him, it was lost. As, as science began, became more, further and further abstracted in all the different directions, which of course it has to do because that’s, knowledge, it is destined to spread as it grows.
And, but the roots of science as a philosophy have to be continued. I think, and it’s something that I would, think should be a requirement for all Bachelor’s of Science and, in every level, every degree program must have a philosophical component, just understanding where science fits into the bigger picture, not just the particular discipline where does it fit? And how does it interrelate? Like these are questions that really should be [00:22:00] asked and need to continue to be asked by science.
HISTED: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think the ques, I mean, politic politics is something that scientists in some ways. Cannot avoid because sort of politics or you might say like political economy, this study of like how power works is something that’s fundamental to the scientific enterprise. Because as Jenna says, fundamental science, much of science is a public good in the economic sense, right?
In the sense that consumer markets don’t support it and governments support that kind of public good. And that’s why the US science system is like almost a world historic superpower, right? Because we have made governments public investment in in our scientific system. And that’s why people from all over the world, amazingly talented people from all over the world wanna come here.
It’s why Google is here. It’s why pharma companies headquarter here. And this is something that we’re, all in danger I think of losing. I will, can I add one other thing?
SHEFFIELD: yeah.
Politics as the master science
HISTED: I was at a conference a few weeks ago, and I think it was a conference on I believe it was Bill Crystal, bill Kristol on the stage interviewing a Bosnian politician, and I believe her name was Sabina Kudi.
And I’m probably murdering the pronunciation. Apologies. But she’s, she was talking about defending institutions and defending pluralism and democracy and freedom in, in, in her country, and how she as a member of the parliament there was thinking about that. And she was saying that one of the biggest obstacles that she faced, and this resonated very strongly with what you both have just said, is that a many people, you might call them liberals, are, are uncomfortable with the practice of politics that people are saying, well, that’s been, it’s kind of beneath me or I have better things to do, that’s for other people to handle. I’m gonna concentrate on my own valuable work. And I think that’s an important and overcoming that she was saying was a very important step.
And I think that’s something that scientists and science and [00:24:00] all of us here and lots of the things that you’ve, lots of the other guests on your show have discussed. Overcoming that is really important. I mean, politics is about people’s lives and about how our society is structured.
And that’s something that it’s kind of incumbent on all of us to engage.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing also is that one of the the other things about the pursuit of objectivity is. It’s not possible. We can never obtain absolute objectivity and that’s, so, but, and, and of course within science, people understand that, but they don’t.
But a lot of people, I think, are not extrapolating further from there, which is. If objectivity is not possible to reach, then that also means you need to help other people or reach, you know, pursue it with you because you, you won’t be able to do it unless that you have their support and you know, like that’s something that’s been lost.
And, and, and, and, and it’s relevant in the context of the, religion was the science of humanity. Like when you look at the history of humanity. It was religions that really were the first systematizer of how does the world work? How you know, do these things, how do these phenomena that we perceive, like lightning or, fermentation or, you know, decay, and like how, or, or insanity, like what is psychopathology?
What is, what are the causes of it? And so religion was in for a lot of ways, it was a useful organizing you know, epistemic codex if you will. And you know, it over time and, you know, science gradually was, sort of did re-emerged from it. ‘cause I mean, if you think about it, you know, astrology is the parent of astronomy.
And psychology is, kind of the descendant of demonology in a sense, right? There’s just, you know, there’s so many different disciplines that we can tie directly to religious [00:26:00] experience and even, so, Isaac Newton, I think is probably, the best example of, of this transition as it happened that, so during the latter part of his life, almost everything that he wrote was about the bible.
Bible codes actually, and things like that. And, you know, trying to transmute gold you know, like that’s in his middle age. That’s when he was doing his physics and his math. But then, later in his life, he became more interested in, in religious topics and so be, because that was, you know, these, these two were so entangled for so long.
And I think over time as science became more advanced and more abstracted away from its origins. People kind of forgot, oh, we have to help the other people make sure they come along with us. And, and we’re seeing the unfortunate I, you know, like the weaponization of that, almost undead science, if I can call it that.
NORTON: Speaking of the weaponization of that idea of objectivity. I’m glad you brought that up. ‘cause I, when you acknowledged, and I agree that there is no like perfect objectivity. Everybody comes with their worldview even in science. And I think we have systems and processes and often team science that helps us be careful of our own biases and try not to fall in to them and be aware of them.
And, and so I think there are processes that try to mitigate that built into science and they’re like any other process, imperfect, but they’re the best thing we have. But what I wanted to say is I think this idea about the inability to be truly objective has been weaponized against certain fields in ways that I think are very problematic.
And one of the examples that I’ll give is Jay, so he’s been going around saying that structural racism isn’t real science and it doesn’t
SHEFFIELD: do you mind, I’m sorry for people who don’t know who that is, can
Jay Bhattacharya and the weaponization of objectivity
SHEFFIELD: you
NORTON: Yes, sorry.
SHEFFIELD: him first?
I’m sorry.
NORTON: of course. Jay Aria is the director [00:28:00] of the National Institutes of Health. He is a former Stanford professor who became famous for issuing something called the Great Barrington Declaration, which was a sort of trius or letter, I don’t know, that was critical of COVID policies and that’s sort of what he’s known for.
So he basically put out this letter saying that, masking and isolating isn’t what we should do. We should just let COVID run through the population. We should, you know, protect the people who are most susceptible and then just otherwise let it go and kind of get herd immunity That way is more or less what the Gray Barrington Declaration argued for as I understand it.
Um, and I think science, you know, most scientists felt that wasn’t a great idea because you can’t really pro just protect marginalized people who are at risk people, right? Unless you cut them off from society completely. Um, because. They will get infected if other people around them are infected. Um, and so that was sort of one, I think, huge problem with that theory.
And so I think the public health and science communities largely rejected his idea and he took that as a personal attack and said he was, anyway, so then he, that is basically. Brought him into this NIH director role. He was given the directorship because he was critical of the prevailing COVID policies.
And so he was a, he was a dissenter. And so he came into power at NIH and there, in that role of power, he’s been walking around saying that structural racism isn’t part of real science because it doesn’t pass the falsifiability premise, which is something Carl Popper came up with that basically says that, um, you can’t get, you can’t disprove structural racism, which is not true.
And the idea behind it, I think comes down to this idea that you can’t measure structural racism. And he has actually said like, oh, you can measure housing discrimination. You can measure redlining, which are examples of structural racism, and you can study those things, but you can’t study structural racism as a whole which is.
Kind of like saying you can’t [00:30:00] study behavior. And if you have science that uses the words behavior in it, we’re gonna, we’re gonna terminate it. ‘cause you only can study physical activity ‘cause that’s specific enough to be measured. So that’s it. It doesn’t really flow logically. ‘cause you need, you need language for the, the system of things that come together to create the barriers for people who are exposed to structural racism and the structural racism that’s across our society.
And so structural racism is basically just saying like, you have redlining and you have housing discrimination and you have disparities in the justice system. And all of those things come together to create advantages and disadvantages and stressors that can affect your health. And so I think it, you could argue that it’s from a lack of understanding of the science, but what I actually think is happening is weaponization of saying that.
Applying this lack of objectivity or inability to measure things to this field. But really every measure that we use in science has error built into it. No measure is a perfect measure of anything. And so like even kidney function, the way we measure it is an estimate that has some error in it, but it’s the best measure we have.
And so they will point that out for areas of science that they don’t like, but not point it out for areas of science that they’re okay with. And so I think it’s like this uneven application of that acknowledgement that is kind of something I would take issue with.
SHEFFIELD: Go ahead, mark.
HISTED: No that’s a hundred percent right. And to, to some of the, both of you were talking about weaponization and there was a, a discussion about truth as well and what’s true. And what is, what is scientific truth and how that can be weaponized. And, and Jenna brought up, the Trump’s n IH director, Jay Bot.
I talking about, we’re talking here about matters that have been publicly reported. Nothing that, is something that we would know from inside the agency and therefore we are protected here by the First Amendment. As we talk about this, I would say that [00:32:00] there’s a really super important thing here to, to notice, and that is that Bach talks a lot about how, about scientific truth in some way.
He talks about how he was censored during COVID, and he says that he had, important ideas about that, that were, for example, written in the ga, the Great Barrington Declaration about how we should just get a lot of people infected and other scientists censored. But that is not the way scientific truth works.
Not at all. What happens is, as a scientist, I come up with some ideas. I do some experiments. I, come up with a theory. I write a paper. My job is to convince other scientists that that is true. I go out and give talks. I talk to people one-on-one. I write papers. If the first paper doesn’t, create the idea I want, I will try to write se, follow up work.
Scientific truth and the Great Barrington Declaration
HISTED: If I think the idea is really important, I’ll do everything I can to persuade other scientists that these things are true. And the only measure and the measure of scientific truth really is have you been able to eventually persuade a large number of the scientific community, a large fraction of the scientific community that you’re rights?
What Jay Baha did was different. He had this idea that, people should get infected. And he told other scientists about it and they said, no, that’s a bad idea. And then what he did was he went on to a. Bunch of different media platforms, podcasts, Fox News he was boosted, from his platform at the Hoover Institution.
And he, in, in, in effect, tried to hack this process of scientific truth by taking advantage of these platforms that were being provided to him by people with a lot of money that wanted to advance his views. And that I think it’s really important for scientists to understand that is a lot of what happened during COVID.
He was not censored, he just had bad ideas.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that is, yeah, very good point. And regarding Bachar and the great Barrington Declaration I [00:34:00] actually reported on it at the time when it was coming out. The group that organized it is a creationist group. Like, and the people who are Bachar as former employers at the Hoover Institution.
They regularly promote creationism. They have a guy there named Peter Robinson, who is a podcast host who has produced, I think probably at least 20 hour long episodes multi-hour episodes, usually pushing creationist propaganda. So the idea that Bachar is saying that he’s in favor of sound science and, and sound methods, well, look in the mirror, buddy.
That’s what I would say. That mentality though, it is absolutely rife in, in all of these, self-proclaimed heterodox, scientific thinkers. Like we see with this, this guy named Eric Weinstein, who is a podcaster. Who claims that he has invented this brand new magical theory called Geometric Unity which is going to completely overhaul quantum physics.
And he published a paper on it that he, it was like half written almost. And he had a, he, he, one of his key variables in there. He said he didn’t know what it meant. Because the notes that he had made when he was sketching, those equations were from several decades ago, and he couldn’t remember what it was.
And then he has the gall to go and say, well, gosh, these astrophysicists, they’re so mean to me. They’re trying to censor my ideas. And it’s like you don’t even know what’s in your own paper. And much less, and much less the fact that it’s not that it’s nothing, cognizable by anybody who is a specialist.
And, and it, it is just absolutely hilarious watching him go on some of these right-wing platforms. ‘Cause he, he and we’ll play a clip for it, for the audience, but he did a a, an appearance on Pi Morgan’s podcast with Sean Carroll, who is a astrophysicist an actual one. Unlike Eric [00:36:00] Weinstein.
And, and, and he just he had no idea how to respond to him the things that Carol was saying. And, he just started spouting random, mathematical terms to Piers Morgan. And, PI Morgan was like, oh gosh, I don’t understand what any of this means. I guess it’s right.
HISTED: And that is something that, that you’re pointing out something that is sort of a weakness of science. And, and this has been, people have called this the Merchants of Doubt strategy, that if you can get someone one-on-one on a, on a platform, you can often argue and make it, make listeners kind of get the impression that there’s some debate about what’s going on.
But the key thing is that you’ve gotta be able to persuade the scientific community. We saw this with climate, right? When you’re at a point where 99% of scientists believe that climate change is human caused, that is scientific consensus, that is a form maybe I would argue the form of scientific truth.
And so if your ideas are so great, go out and persuade other scientists, other, other experts, build consensus for, for your views. That’s, I think what we need to see.
NORTON: Yeah. And I, I think the pattern, it’s, it extends even beyond that. Like even think back to cigarette smoking, right? Like that was one of the first, and I think there’s this pattern of people who have a lot to lose in terms of money and power and privilege, weaponizing, disinformation and creating doubt.
The merchants of Doubt theory, like doubt is doubt is their product is a, is a book by actually one of my former professors at GW when I got my master’s in public health. And they. Even though the science was clear that smoking is incredibly harmful, and now we, we all know that’s a well accepted fact.
At the time they tried to make it seem like they’re, oh, is secondhand smoke really a thing? And like it was a big battle and they, they sewed doubt in the population and eventually we got there, but we could have saved a lot of lives as if we hadn’t had to fight and not even public opinion, right?
It was fighting essentially the [00:38:00] oligarchs who were, had this disproportionate amount of power and wealth and privilege using that to sow disinformation and create public distrust. And we saw it again with climate. And now I think we’re seeing it sort of at scale across the scientific enterprise.
Like COVID was another sort of example of it. But I think, with COVID it became so big that somehow now it’s like zoned out in science as a whole and scientists as a whole, that we, aren’t acting in good faith or that they’re, they’re, that we lack objectivity, that we’re all woke and, and have been infiltrated by this left-leaning bias.
And that we are manufactured at academic institutions whose mission it is, is to pump out these like left thinking people and, and scientists and whatnot. And so I think that it’s become this sort of large conspiracy theory, but it all really does come back to science oftentimes identifies truths that are inconvenient for people with money and power and privilege who wanna keep doing the things that they’ve been doing that turn out to be, harmful for health or harmful for the planet, or, what have you.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that is, that’s their motivation for it. And then, is in terms. Of the people who believe it though obviously the motive of the, wealthy corporations and whatnot, that that’s not what they believe. They don’t even know about it in many cases or don’t infer it.
But what they, what’s what’s happened for them is, again, I’m drawing my own experience in research here is that, it, it’s essentially that. So science and democracy are both the same kind of larger epistemology. Which is an extrinsic epistemology. It’s, it’s based on, how do, what are my ideas?
Do they relate to how the world is? And what observations of other people make, are they, is that, are, are my ideas correct? It’s [00:40:00] an open epistemology. Whereas, a more reactionary or fundamentalist epistemology says no. Everything that I can know, everything about the world that’s knowable is in my sacred book, or it’s whatever my religious leader tells me.
And and so it’s natural for somebody who has that epistemology to have a hatred or science and to have a hatred for democracy because, again, like if we all have our bespoke little private. Religious epistemologies that we refuse to open up and, and make flexible because, I have, it’s, we have to say in fairness, there’s a lot of religions that have no problem with evolution.
There’s a lot of religions that have no problem with, L-G-D-B-T-Q people and talking about racism and things like that. So it’s not even necessarily a, this is not a problem of religion, it’s just a matter of open. System, epistemology versus closed system where like it’s about like, that’s the, the great and or the horrible irony of these fake skeptics is that they say that they’re skeptics.
But in fact, that, that they, they’re incredibly arrogant. They think that they know everything and when in fact a proper scientific pose is to suggest, well, we don’t know for sure about, anything including the things that we say.
NORTON: So I wanted like, I was glad you kind of drew a parallel there between science and democracy, and I wanted to draw this connection because we sort of started the conversation about science being siloed and not being effective communicators with the public and thus sort of like disconnecting ourselves with the public.
And then that being this sort of weakness that I think the disinformation machine saw and used to their advantage. And I think a similar thing happened with democracy as well, where there have been groups of people who have been [00:42:00] excluded from the democratic process to a large extent as well. And so there, there neither, science wasn’t perfect and democracy hasn’t been perfect.
It’s been better, I think, than the authoritarian alternative that’s being offered to us at the moment. But there is a real weakness there that I think we do need to grapple with and acknowledge and overcome and address as we move forward. And on the side of democracy, I think where that weakness was is that, certain groups have been cut out of the voting process.
Open versus closed epistemologies
NORTON: Some of that has been very much intentional, right? With like fewer polling sites and, with the allowance of money to sway politics and override, I think public sentiment. And so a lot of people feel very, I see this in my family, they feel very hopeless. And I actually had a conversation with my mother who’s a Trump supporter, and I’ve been actually talking to her almost daily trying to pull her out of what I now see as sort of a cult in some ways.
And at the conclusion of one of our conversations, she was basically like, yes, I hear these concerns. I see what you’re saying, but it’s always been this way. It’s always been that the wealthy have power and privilege and so there’s nothing to do about it. Like, we can’t fix it. And at first I was like, watch me.
And then I was like, no, no, no, don’t watch me, watch us, because that is actually how we fight back against all of this is with. With coming together. And that is how we equalize, I think, the power. And then I made the point to her that, that Trump knows that, that this administration knows that. Right? And that is why everything they do is set to divide people, right?
They divide people across racial lines, across gender lines, across documentation, status lines, because they know that where true strength comes from and where, true opportunity to equalize power is from, from people getting organized. And I do feel like my mother had this aha moment [00:44:00] and was like, I really appreciate these conversations, which coming from my mother was like a, a really big one because she and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things.
And so, anyway, I, the point I wanted to make there is really that there has been, I think. Some weaknesses in our scientific approaches and some weaknesses in our democratic approaches that have been preyed upon or leveraged or blown out of proportion or maybe not blown out of proportion, but used to disenfranchise people or push them away or make them hopeless in ways that have not served us.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Mark, you were gonna add something there.
HISTED: Yeah I think you, You brought up earlier something about the sort of egos and the kind of lust for power, perhaps you might say, of the people involved. And I think we do see that and you see some resentment really towards science and, and the scientific, industry or scientific world in the US as a whole.
And I think you do see that a bit with like Russell V and what he’s doing. You know, we know that he’s um, religious extremist and he is, from the messages we have seen, he’s, he seems to be on a mission to destroy not just NIH but you know, all of us science. And that will be absolutely devastating.
It’s just very hard to it’s very hard to sort of describe just how amazing the US scientific establishment has been. The US scientific world has been we have amazing universities that draw people here from all over the world. The, you know, I was at a conference abroad. I was at a conference in the UK a few months ago, and people would come up to me and say, mark, what is going on?
Do people not understand the value of, what is being destroyed in the us? You know, other countries have been trying to move the World Scientific center from the US to other places. You know, that involves the uk, [00:46:00] it involves Germany, involves China. Everyone’s putting, Belgium is building things like people are putting money into scientific establishment and an effort.
To compete with what the US has done. But it’s very sticky because once you build something, as we did in the US after World War ii, it is very hard due to network effects to move things elsewhere. But we are currently like just lighting that on fire and it will have effects on cancer cures, it will have effects on Alzheimer’s cures and dementia cures.
It will have effects on the economy. It will have effects on young people who are now, you know, they’re everyone who’s studying STEM and studying science. You know, the jobs in those fields are funded, are there because of government funding in the us. You know, and, and I’m, we’re watching young students.
We’re watching students lose opportunities to get ahead and leave the field. We’re watching training programs blow up or, jobs in science are going away and there will move abroad. I mean, it’s, it’s really absolutely kind of shocking the degree of the destruction that is happening right now and really just hard to convey.
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s, the, the terrible irony is that something like this has already happened in, in the memory of some people who are currently alive. And that is during Nazi Germany. So, before World War ii. The United States was not the scientific center of the world.
Germany was. Germany was, and it was at the top of so many fields, pretty much almost every field that, that there was was, it was either the number one country or number two, basically for everything. And certainly, I mean, and you can see that of course, if people doubt me, look at when you watch the movie, Oppenheimer, notice how everybody, how so many people in that were running the programs and were giving the ideas were Germans former Germans.
The destruction of American scientific leadership
SHEFFIELD: So, and, and that that was an achievement that took, them centuries to build. [00:48:00] And the Nazis basically. And it wasn’t even, the bombing that on the occupation that that really did it. It was their governmental approach that tore down the scientific jewel that they had created and shattered it.
And and they’ve never recovered their status.
HISTED: There’s often this discussion about, oh, we are going to, I, I don’t know, maybe the mask has fallen off at this point, but for a long time there’s a discussion of, we like high skilled immigration. We wanna bring high skilled immigrants here, but we don’t, we want to.
To Why do we need low skilled immigrants? They’re competing for other people with jobs. I mean, first of all, from an economics point of view, we know that’s not true. As we’re seeing it now effects on the economy. But I also think that what makes high, what makes quote unquote high skilled immigrants, people like scientists who have the ability to go to different countries, want to come here and work and stay and start companies is that we have a multicultural society that respects, you know, lots of the principles that we talk about in the us that have come from sort of the, the founding you might say, at least the stated principles.
Things like, you know, we have separation of church and states we respect lots of different religions, we are tolerant of people from different backgrounds. Like that is also a very important national strength that has sustained American science and, and we destroy that sort of at our peril.
It will have ma major downstream effects on. Not just individuals, not just cancer cures, but, and, and dementia cures, but also the economy.
SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. And I was gonna jump in here, Jenna, unless you had a point you wanted to add. No. Okay. Yeah, so I, it, it, it, it’s also, the case that I think a lot of people, it’s, it, a, a very common talking point that I often hear from anti-government and anti-science people is that they will go and highlight.
Studies about something that seems like it’s absurd. Like they’ll [00:50:00] say, oh, well look at this. There’s a scientist who’s studying slugs on a treadmill. What a waste of money. How stupid is that? And so I wanted to give you guys the chance to respond to that argument because I, it’s, it is a very common one, I think.
NORTON: I think, um, I think I’m gonna let Mark cover the foundational science side of this, because that’s his, his realm, although I. I do think we should cover it. So I will start by saying, you know, in, in my end of the realm, it often comes out with like, you know, science that is being done on populations that aren’t perceived to be valued.
So, um, by certain subgroups, right? And so like why are we studying transgender people? And you know, why should it matter if, you know, one of the issues that comes up, comes up in my field is um, with where I do bladder health is that right now transgender people can’t, always access a bathroom where they feel comfortable and safe.
And that can actually have impacts on your bladder health because you’re actually not able to use the restroom. And so there’s been research into that and how do we overcome that and how do we address that? And does, what are the actual health outcomes that result from that in terms of your bladder functioning?
And so I think a lot of the ethos of like, why is the government spending money on this comes with this assumption that certain populations don’t have value or don’t deserve to be studied, or as if they’re not taxpayers themselves who are contributing to the public resources that fund our science.
Right? And so I think the point that I would wanna make in this space is that we should do research that benefits everybody in our country and everybody in some cases across the globe. And so I think, cutting off certain populations from, from research and the benefits of research is actually the unfair stance.
And I think it’s often [00:52:00] positioned that it is unfair that resources are being, or there’s this attempt to, create this picture like a disproportionate amount of resources are being spent on these populations when in reality the opposite is true. For a long time, many marginalized communities have been entirely excluded from research, and so the focus on them has been to catch them up with everybody else and have their issues addressed along with everybody else’s.
And so it’s almost sort of twisted inappropriately. Um, and then Mark, I think you should cover the foundational science piece since that’s more in your realm, but I think there’s some really interesting examples there as well.
HISTED: Yeah, thanks Jenna. I think you could probably list many of the, you would list many of the things that I would, but I think the obvious, the thing that’s gotten some coverage on this. So, so Matt, you asked look, there’s some research projects that are somewhat ridiculous, right? I mean, I think like democracy in some ways, science, foundational, basic science works best if you take advantage of lots and lots of.
The value of curiosity-driven research
HISTED: Different people’s ideas. And so you just kind of spread the money around to lots of different people and let them study what they think is most important. You know, people have called this curiosity driven at NIH. A lot of this is called termed investigator driven research. And you know, an example of the success of that is the studies of I think kilo monster saliva that turned into the, into ozempic and the GLP one drugs.
I mean, that’s the kind of, there’s many kinds of, kind of, of discoveries like that arise from people following what they think is important and interesting. And another, I think. Example that I like to cite is that in the early seventies, Richard Nixon launched a war on cancer, and so that involved giving more money to NIH to do cancer research.
And a lot of the, the scientists there at NIH were like, well. We’re years or decades away from major advances and we don’t wanna just like put a bunch of money into elaborating the current treatments. So let’s put money into basic [00:54:00] cell biology and we’re gonna study like the details of how cells work.
And that was the early seventies. And I think it’s, it’s possible now to look back and point directly at that work. As underpinning the cures that came in the eighties and nineties and more recently, the immunotherapies, you know, immunotherapies for cancer arose directly from investment in basic science work.
And so I think allowing that stuff to happen is really beneficial for all of us in society. And really only governments have the ability to take these, like long-term investment time horizons. The private sector won’t. The other thing I would add, I, I don’t know if you’re I’ll just mention there’s also this kind of AI view of why we don’t need NIH from like the tech world and from Silicon Valley.
Is that something you’d like to touch on?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. That’s worth talking about.
HISTED: So I think we hear a lot of, or if you listen to people like Sam Altman carefully, he will say things like soon a AI is going to replace scientists effect. In effect, that’s what he says. And I the view, if you, if you, and I talk to a reasonable number of people in the AI world people, there’s a view that soon enough AI systems will be smarter than scientists and it will take over science.
It doesn’t matter if we destroy US science because AI will take over and robots will do the experiments. And I just wanna say that is just folly. I think the more that we look at how, there’s a lot of benefits that are coming from ai. We see, there are some, there are people using it to.
Do software developments, vibe, coding can be very productive. It can do, the, let’s not undersell the benefits and advances that come from LLMs, but I think like it, like many technological revolutions, what we find is that these thing, these kind of technologies do transform societies in some ways, but they end up, benefit working with humans in some ways.
And I think as a scientist, I can tell you we are very far from the kind of creativity, a lot of what, a [00:56:00] lot of what we do in science is kind of creatively coming up with new ideas and chasing them down. And LLMs don’t may help with that, but they’re not gonna replace it. And so this idea from ai, from, some parts of the AI world that it doesn’t matter if we tear down N IH because it’ll be replaced by AI soon, I think I think that is at best, an extremely high risk strategy is what I’d say.
NORTON: I agree with that fully, and the case in point that I like to give is like the recent make America healthy again. Maha report from HHS where, you know, I don’t know that we’ve. All out proved that they used AI to generate the report and the references in particular. But what ended up happening with that, if you recall, is that there were a bunch of references cited in the Maha report that included real scientists names with papers they’d never written that were some like amalgamation of, of another paper or some, some hallucination from the ai.
AI limitations and biases in science
NORTON: And so I, I like to point out to people that like, that is the quality of what you get with AI right now. And it can give you a starting point. Sometimes that’s useful or it can help you process things like I, I think it’s a tool that has uses, but it is certainly not yet in a place where it is going to get things accurately and not make, very problematic mistakes.
Um, and the other important thing about AI is it’s based on the data that are available and that it has access to. And there’s also been a lot of research to show that AI can be biased by the information that it pulls in. And for instance, in science, when AI is used on existing data sets, since existing data sets, disproportionately tend to include people from countries that don’t have as much scientific research going on.
And it disproportionately excludes people from marginalized communities that the conclusions that it can come to can [00:58:00] be biased just based on the data that it was trained on in the first place. And so I think that’s also something we need to be very careful with, um, when we’re, when we’re looking at using AI really in any space, but certainly as a replacement for science itself.
SHEFFIELD: That’s a great point, Jenna. Yeah, and so, so, so you guys are, are part of a, a group of scientists who are trying to push back on some of these into. Tell the public more about what you’re doing and what’s, and what the bad things are happening within the administration to science.
You want to tell, tell us a bit about that. Why don’t you go first on that one, Jen, and then we’ll go to you.
NORTON: So I think back in the beginning, I feel like I have to take us back to like that moment in time when we started organizing. I think there was a lot of chaos and confusion. For me and I, I know a lot of other people. We felt some amount of personal responsibility for mitigating the very real harms we were seeing happen through the policies that were coming down through NIH.
You know, things where studies were being terminated and people were pulled off treatments halfway through and like left without access to whatever medication regimen they were on. And you know, studies being terminated, you know, when they were four years in and they had one year left.
And when you, when you cut off a five year study, you know, at year four you don’t save the million dollars that you haven’t invested yet, you waste the $4 million that you already put in. Right. So I think there were concerns from that perspective as well. And so we started kind of coming together initially, I think to share information and to sort of strategize, like how do we, how do we actually deal with this on a day-to-day basis?
Like, we get illegal orders, like how do we respond to that? I think in these settings there were these conversations of like, well, why isn’t academia speaking up and why isn’t our leadership speaking up and why, you know, like, and I think eventually there was this realization that like, we need to speak up.
Somebody needs to speak up, and if it’s if not us, then who? [01:00:00] Right? And so we started getting organized and trying to bring together people who were concerned about the issues that they were seeing and not sure how to deal with them and coming together. And so one of the, one of the early things that we did was a rogue Take Your Family To Work event at NIH.
Um, and so NIH had canceled it’s, you know, annual Take Your Kid to Workday. And so we were like, you know what? We’re gonna host one on our own. And so we got a bunch of NIH fellows and people to come and hold booths and we invited people in from the community and it was a real moment where we got a lot of people who are now part of our key organizing movement to kind of come in and, and it was like a.
Organizing scientists and the Bethesda Declaration
NORTON: Friendly resistance, if you will. Um, and then from there, um, we also had a moment of, of, you know, when we realized we needed to speak up, where we came up with this idea of the Bethesda Declaration. And so what we did is we emulated in some ways what Jay Aria had done with the Great Barrington Declaration.
Um, we even similarly named it after the location in where we were Bethesda. And we wrote a, basically a letter to Jay Badari himself to oversight committees in Congress to RFK, who was, you know, Jay bad, Atari’s boss, RFK, junior and. Sent this letter listing out our concerns with what we were seeing, and we also released it publicly simultaneously.
Um, and so that was a moment where we kind of stood up and tried to say like, this can’t continue. This must stop. And I think we, we knew at the moment that we not only needed to bring together NIH folks, but we needed to draw attention publicly to these issues so that we could, so that the public could understand sort of what, how bad things had gotten inside the government.
I think still even today, a lot of people don’t understand how bad things are. And so these, these, each of these actions I think makes a little bit of a dent in the public awareness. Um, but I still think we have a lot of work to do. So, anyway, mark, please add or [01:02:00] enhance that.
HISTED: No, it’s great. I, Jenna has been a real leader and lots of other people have been involved and she deserves a lot of credit for speaking out clearly. And her ability to organize and, and. Pull people in and sort of, include lots of different people. I think she’s had a real she’s done a, a really great job at that and deserves credit along with lots of other people that, that she has been working with and people at NIH.
And I guess I would just add that part of the reason for doing this is, is that there’s been a real information gap. I feel like as Jenna said, there’s, people have not understood, even in science there, there’s lots of information gaps. So I think like your average scientist sort of does not really fully, has not had to really worry about how Congress works has not had to worry about how the political system works, has not had to worry about how the executive branch works, has not had to worry about how administrative law works and what the Supreme Court does.
And so some of what we do, some of what I think is important and what we have been trying to do is share information about that across communities so that people can be up to speed and sort of, I think that once people are informed and as people learn more about, I think there are lots of people with good values who want to act, but have not had the tools or information necessary to do that.
And I think lots of what has been happening at NIH and across science, at universities across the country, we see lots of people getting involved at science agencies. And I think that has empowered people at, to to do things and try to stand up against these kind of ongoing attacks.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And so, and the Science and Freedom Alliance, like where does that fit into all this as well? Oh, you can go Jenna, or,
Science and Freedom Alliance mission
NORTON: You want me to [01:04:00] answer? Well, I feel like, yeah. So Science and Freedom Alliance is basically just a grassroots group of, folks who either are NIH or working at NIH or who recently left NIH or academics in the community who depend on NIH for funding. Kind of coming together and trying to be intentional about, bringing awareness to the science community. I wanna acknowledge Mark here because I think he’s been a key driver behind the Science and Freedom Alliance. I, he invited me into the group. So I am a, I’m a relative newbie in this space, but really grateful to be there. And, and, really just, I think the, the broader mission as I see it, and Mark can add or modify this is to help the broader scientific community be aware of some of those things that he just talked about and fill this information gap.
One of the things that I don’t think we’ve really fully covered here today, that. When the Trump administration came in and started reductions in force at NIH and many other agencies, the people who they removed were the offices of Communication, the Freedom of Information Act offices. So those are the people who, you know, you as a public citizen, you can say, I want access to this information from the government, and we have to provide it back to you.
So that’s the Freedom of Information Act. So the people who did that inside NIH, are no longer here. It was the legislative offices, so the people who communicated with Congress. And so really it was all of the people who do more outward facing communication. And that was combined with scientists either on the intramural side like Mark or on the extramural side.
The working with the academic community side. Like me, we were told we weren’t allowed to discuss executive orders with people outside of NIH. So it was very much a clamp down on open communication that happened. And not only did it leave this void for accurate information that I think Safa [01:06:00] in part attempts to help fill.
It also it is really an authoritarian tactic, right? It is an authoritarian tactic to come in and control the information systems because information is power. And so you can see now, a whole community of feds and former feds coming together behind these alt gov accounts to try to make sure that that key information is still getting to the public and that the disinformation that is now coming from our official channels, including like the official NIH accounts, isn’t left unchecked.
And so I think I went a little bit behind Safa there, but I wanted to bring in that point of this larger information gap or this clampdown in information that I think is so critical to address and that Safa is sort of one piece of, and I’m Mark, I feel like you should comment further if you’d like on Safa.
HISTED: Yeah, there’s a team, there’s a team of people working in their personal capacities and in off-duty time to do the things that that Jenna is talking about, which is to, share information about what’s happening. Because I think people, once they’re informed people are often outraged and effective.
Building institutions for public engagement
HISTED: And I will just also shout out, there’s lots of other, we’re seeing a transition now. We talked about institutions and the need to build institutions that can do effective engagement with the public. And, we’re seeing lots of different group. We’re seeing lots of different groups grow up to do that.
There’s current existing groups, places like the Union of Concerned Scientists. There’s some new groups like standup for Science, which has been, very effective at communicating and pulling people together. And there’s a, a group at NIH that has been running a weekly, vigil outside on outside ni h’s property. Talking about the things that are happening and pulling people in from the community. The last time I was there, someone from the community came up to me and said, I really love this. [01:08:00] It’s so amazing that this is happening. I’m learning so much about what NIH does that I didn’t know before.
And it’s just been really amazing to see people, take lean into action, and lean into really into democracy and, and into, organizing people and pulling ‘em together in defense of things that they think are important. It’s been really nice to see.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And I, I hope we can see a lot more of the other government agencies get employees get into, into that as well because certainly they’re on the chopping block, unfortunately. I mean, we just saw yesterday as we’re recording this on the 14th that there was news broke that NASA is laying off more than 550 people.
And there. I’m sure there will be many more where that came from. And, it’s this is, it, it’s a battle that I think a lot of scientists didn’t realize had to be fought. And, there’s a, we, there’s a natural human tendency to think that things you don’t know about or have direct knowledge of, don’t matter as much.
But, we’re finding out very clearly now that, they certainly do matter. And, it matters a lot apparently, what, bizarre religious doctrines some people believe in you may think that they’re harmless to you. But depending on who they are, they, they most certainly might not be.
Yeah. So, all right. Well this has been a great discussion guys. Are there, is there anything you wanna hit on else before we head out?
NORTON: I just wanted to acknowledge quickly since you made the comment about other organ, other agencies organizing that there have been actually a series of Bethesda Declaration style dissent letters from several different agencies, including nasa. They had a Voyager declaration and FEMA had a Katrina declaration.
CDC, slash HHS wrote a letter in the wake of the shooting that happened at CDC a public letter to RFK. And so I think there has been and NSF and I’m, I’m, I’m sure I’m leaving off some folks, but [01:10:00] there, there actually has been some organizing. I do think NIH has been a little bit ahead of some of the other agencies and getting organized, but I do think that there is.
Interest and commitment across the civil service of, coming together. We were actually, Safa was part of a civil servants coalition with a press conference that we held back at the end of September. And so I think there is ongoing action and it is spreading across the government.
And so I just, I do wanna acknowledge that because I think most of us are very passionate about our missions and, our fighting for the ability honestly to continue to serve the American public which is what we all sort of took pay cuts in dedicated our lives to do.
HISTED: Yeah, that’s right. I would and on the topic of, serving the public, I think it’s also important to note that as employees are doing this, as federal employees are talking about what’s happening and trying to reach the American public and say what’s happening, I think it’s Jen and I have both discussed that the, if you go back and look at what the Supreme Court has said about free speech and about public debates, there’s a, there’s a decision that is still valid in which Thurgood Marshall wrote in an, an eight one majority and said that the core value.
Of the First Amendment was the public’s interest and understanding how the government works and that government employees are particularly well positioned to, to understand this and cutting them out from the public debate would be harmful to, the public’s interest. And so this is a core that, government employees talking in their personal capacity about what’s happening in the government is a core free speech principle. And we want to do what we can to inform the public, and that’s why we’re doing this.
SHEFFIELD: Excellent. Yes, absolutely. All right, well, so, let’s just real quick for any social media handles you want people to follow you on or websites when don’t you go first, Janet.
NORTON: [01:12:00] I’ll say, Safa does have is active on several social media platforms, including Blue Sky and Instagram. And probably the easiest way to find us is on our website at science and freedom alliance.org.
And I know actually many of us are individually speaking up on these platforms. So there’s an NIH starter pack on Blue Sky that you can find if you, if you look for that. So that’s a good way to follow people who are speaking up from within NIH or former NIH, folks like Jeremy Berg, who’s a former institute director.
There’s also save health research on Instagram primarily. I think they’re also on Facebook. And that’s another good group to, to follow. And finally, if you Google, there’s also an alt gov starter pack on blue Sky that you can find and follow a bunch of the sort of alternative sources of information that are being maintained by civil servants and not political appointees at this point in their personal capacities.
SHEFFIELD: Yes. Great. Well, mark,
HISTED: Yeah, sign on to that. And I would just say like in terms of the information things we’re talking about we have a blo, a blog that is
On Substack. And we will evaluate moving off that platform in the future. But, subscribing to the blog is one way to stay in touch with some of the things that are going on and we will do everything we can to share information about other groups.
Following stand up for science, following us personally on Blue Sky is something that would be great. Thank you.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Great. All right, well, it’s been great having you here and look, I hope everybody can support you in the ways that they can.
HISTED: Thanks, and thanks for this discussion and thanks for all the discussions you’ve had. I think you’ve shed a lot of light on different aspects of our current moments in society. It’s been very informative. Thanks.
NORTON: Agreed and just very much appreciate the opportunity to be here. So thank you.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah, you’re welcome. All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the [01:14:00] episodes. And if you are a paid subscriber, you have unlimited access to the archives and thank you very much for your support.
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