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America is abandoning science

I came of age near the end of the golden age of science. Stampeded by Sputnik, America revised its science curriculum in the early 1960s and I was a beneficiary. As a PhD student, I was supported for three years on an NIH training grant, and as a postdoc, I was supported for three years on an NIH fellowship. I got my first NIH grant in my second year as an assistant professor. But by then, federal funding had already declined in real terms. By 1989, a Nobel Laureate molecular biologist at MIT wrote in a major journal that NIH funding criteria had taken on a “mask of madness.” In his 2026 budget proposal, Trump proposed major cuts to federal science funding which were mostly ignored by Congress. Now, Trump is proposing to slash American science again, while meanwhile attacking the immigrant labor force that has been fueling science in America. “ In recent years, various metrics have called into question America’s supremacy in science and technology. For example, the Australian Strategic...
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Will Iran go nuclear?

Until now, Iran has eschewed the manufacture of nuclear weapons, ostensibly based on a fatwa by Ayatollah Ali Khameni. Since Khameni’s assassination by Israel and his replacement by his son, it’s not clear that Iran will continue to observe that fatwa. “ What gives Khamenei’s death a particular doctrinal significance is that he had, over more than two decades,   publicly   framed weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear and chemical weapons—as contrary to Islam. If that position represented a genuine religious constraint rather than mere diplomatic rhetoric, then his death may have removed more than a leader: it may have weakened the doctrinal restraint that helped keep Iran a threshold nuclear state.”  The elective war on Iran by the US and Israel has underscored the importance of the North Korean nuclear breakout. I’d be very surprised if Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon in the next couple of years. Trump, Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia and the UAW would be to blame. ht...
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Fluoridated water doesn’t make you stupid

When I was growing up in East Tennessee, there were some who claimed that water fluoridation was a communist plot. If that’s the case, then God is a communist because in many parts of the world, water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, it was the recognition that natural fluoridation was associated with fewer dental caries that helped drive artificial fluoridation. The anti-fluoridation fear mongers never said exactly what the commies intended by fluoridating the water supply, but if they were trying to dumb us down, that was a fail. “ A massive 40-year study in the US has concluded that adding fluoride to drinking water does not reduce people's cognitive ability. In fact, kids who grew up with fluoridated tap water performed slightly better in mathematics and reading in later life compared to those who didn’t.” Seems to me that the anti-fluoridation folks were the subversives. By attacking sound science, they were not only undermining dental health, they were undermining Americans’...
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Déjà vu

My dad would stop by the airport LaRouche booths and argue with the nutjobs. Not sure why he found it amusing. He knew they were nuts, but he did it anyway. “It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation political aberration, a shooting-star buffoon. But when you tear him down to his studs, LaRouche was a white supremacist: a man high on his own supply who positioned himself as the sole savior of the planet; a man to whom no founding American ideal was sacred; a wealthy white man preying on both the insecurity and the credulity of others to enrich himself, while claiming to fight for the everyman; a bully who flipped on his loyalists whenever they ceased to be useful to him; a man who trafficked in myths of nonwhite savagery and conspiracies of absurdist proportions in which he was either the scapegoat or the savior. He was also a convicted felon running for office. He seemed so fringe to many that he co...
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Stable genius and dealmaker

In his low-energy April Fools Day speech last night, Trump showed he hasn’t a clue how the world supply chains work: “In Wednesday night’s address to the nation, President Trump declared, “We're now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet, we are there to help.” “We don't have to be there — we don't need their oil, we don't need anything they have.”   Uh, no. “ Trump is . . . overlooking that while the US is a net exporter of crude oil, it remains an importer of refined gasoline in many regions. “The president is also factually wrong on other key goods that pass through the strait and whose absence has been felt directly in the US. “Helium and fertilizer are two notable products made in high quantities in the region and relied on by an array of American industries. “Helium is key in the production of semiconductors. Economist Andreas Steno Larsen, founder of Steno Research, recently told Yahoo Finance that the stoppage "could potentially turn into a bottlen...
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Trump as Chance the gardener

In  the film “Being There,” Chance the gardener is a simple-minded gardener who had never left the confines of his employer’s Washington D.C. townhouse. When the elderly man he worked for dies, Chance is forced to leave the house for the first time in his life.  He encounters Eve Rand, who brings him home to meet her husband, Benjamin Rand, powerful and ailing industrialist who immediately believes Chance is a man of depth and insight. Chance’s vague gardening metaphors are mistaken for deep political commentary. The President of the United States seeks his advice and Chance’s slow, measured speech and simple observations about growth, seasons, and patience are interpreted as revolutionary political philosophy. He is soon being discussed as a future presidential candidate. Well, OK, where Chance is taciturn, Trump is bellicose. But both are clearly bubbleheads and both enthrall people who ought to know better.  Sadly, the GOP and the Trumpenproletariat who they proport to...
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The National Science Foundation and me

I was a principal investigator on three NSF grants. I served on six NSF grant review panels.   During this period, the NSF applications had a section called “Broader Impact.” Included under this rubric was how the applicant would disseminate the research results to the rest of the world. But a critical part of success was explaining how your project would impact and advance communities underrepresented in science: women and ethnic minorities.  I was fine with that, but in the age of Trump, the acceptable DEI appointments are mostly blondes and alcoholics.  I interviewed to be a program officer at the NSF because I believed that the NSF reflected my inclusive views about how fundamental science should be pursued and supported. I made it to the penultimate stage but didn’t get the offer. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m glad they turned me down. My career and my pocketbook are better off. In the Trump era, being politically correct is paramount. That’s not how this homie ...
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