Ep 134: #SaveNSF (with Bill Zamer and Sam Scheiner)
Why is the National Science Foundation important? What is the potential impact of the proposed budget cut to the NSF? How can we stand up for federally-funded science in the US?
In this episode, we talk with Bill Zamer and Sam Scheiner, two former BIO program officers at the NSF. Much of the conversation focuses on the recently proposed 56% budget cut to the NSF and what the impacts of such a spending cut would be on science in the US. We discuss how the NSF came to be, the proposal selection process, and some of the scientific breakthroughs came out of the NSF-supported basic research. The episode also has suggestions of how to show your support for the NSF including calling your representatives, talking about the importance of the NSF and sharing this episode widely, and taking action suggested by the coalition SaveNSF.
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Marty Martin 0:08
Today's episode is another public service announcement. So it won't be behind a paywall, please share it with everyone you know. As our message today is particularly important. To be brutally honest, it's a desperate cry to our representatives in Congress to save our National Science Foundation, the example that most of the world follows. Without the NSF, science in the US will become a shadow of what it is right now.
Cameron Ghalambor 0:32
A few weeks back, the Trump administration proposed a 56% budget cut to the NSF, and that is not a typo. I'll say it again 56%. This magnitude of a cut means entire NSF programs are now in limbo, and the operational infrastructure of the agency will be torn down. Hundreds of grants have already been canceled, some in midstream, leaving researchers scrambling data loss and students unable to complete their degrees
Marty Martin 1:04
To understand what's at stake, it's useful to spell out just how big the NSF is relative to our other governmental investments. NSF annual budget is about $9 billion dollars which sounds like a lot of money, until you realize that the total US federal budget is over $6 trillion. Most of our budget is directed to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, interest on our debt, and, of course, defense, which alone nears $1 trillion dollars. The key thing, NSF funding accounts for less than point two percent of federal spending, peanuts in the grand scheme.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:38
But a fair question to ask is, is even point 2% worth it. $9 billion is still a huge amount of money, and that money could go to all sorts of other things, including Social Security, Medicare and the like. So what does the taxpayer get for the money directed to the National Science Foundation?
Marty Martin 1:57
Let's start with a general observation. A recent article in the Ohio capital Journal reports that, according to the Federal Reserve, for every $1 NSF invests in science, the US economy sees an average of two to $4 in return through new technologies, startups, patents and workforce development.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:14
Those gains are also spread all over the country. So whereas some cities and regions where universities are concentrated do exceptionally well, NSF funds about a quarter of all basic research at all US colleges and universities nationwide. Every year, it supports about 12,000 new awards, many of which are at smaller universities and smaller towns and cities, which translate into positive economic impacts, including lots of jobs.
Marty Martin 2:44
But what specific things come from NSF-supported research? Is science the best way to spread good impacts across the US? Yes. And it's truly hard to overstate how much of a positive effect this fairly small amount of money has had on our country. For instance, you know that algorithm that became Google? That was funded by an NSF digital libraries grant back in the 90s.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:06
And the science behind ozempic, the widely popular diabetes and weight loss drug, NSF funded research on the molecular biology of gut hormones in Gila monsters paved the Way for this drug's commercialization.
Marty Martin 3:21
And how about GIS, the mapping technology used in everything from flood response to species distribution modeling to navigating that unfamiliar location with your phone while on vacation? Yeah, that got an early boost from NSF too.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:36
All these innovative discoveries, things we didn't know we needed till we worked hard, thought creatively and searched broadly to get them well, that's exactly what the NSF was created to do.
Marty Martin 3:46
After World War Two, the US faced a choice, should science just be practical? Be about designing better drugs or refining the ways we obtained or used our natural resources for energy production?
Cameron Ghalambor 3:56
Or should the government also support basic exploratory or curiosity driven research, the kind that doesn't necessarily have an immediate application, but might change the world 10 years later?
Marty Martin 4:09
Fortunately, the answer was the latter support basic science and the discovery that comes with it. In 1950 when Congress created the National Science Foundation, its mandate was to fund science as a public good. Industry was only going to do science that mapped clearly to economic gain. After all, there's only so much risk a business can take.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:31
In other words, NSF charge was never to support science that is useful right now. It was created to support the science that could change the world eventually, and that's work that few companies could or would do. But what America needed to remain a leader in the world economically and defensively.
Marty Martin 4:51
And for 75 years, it worked. NSF supported research on everything from the evolution of cooperation in ants to the discovery of CRISPR and bacterial immune systems to climate change, impacts on biodiversity, they have all directly or indirectly, boosted our economy, inspired our kids to become scientists, and generally helped us remain the most influential country in the world.
Cameron Ghalambor 5:12
But now all of that success is under siege. President Trump's proposed budget would slash NSF support to just under 4 billion again, down from 9 billion this past year. That slashing means fewer fellowships for students, fewer excursions to under explored parts of the world to discover new drugs, fewer high risk, high reward projects that could lead to artificial general intelligence, near immortal batteries in your cell phone, novel treatments for cancer or Alzheimer's or other game changers.
Marty Martin 5:46
On this episode of Big Biology, we're talking to two former NSF BIO program directors, Sam Sheiner and Bill Zamer, who know NSF inside and out together. Bill and Sam have more than 40 years of experience at NSF, and as you'll hear, they're extremely worried about the fate of science in the US.
Cameron Ghalambor 6:03
If the President's budget plan goes through, the US could experience a three fold brain drain. First, active scientists might leave for other countries where their research is better supported. Second, students might leave too or change their career paths, leaving science behind. Third, the American public will suffer as the European Union and China will come to fill the void in scientific expertise.
Marty Martin 6:28
Sacrificing NSF will almost certainly have major negative economic and national defense impacts, just when artificial intelligence and other geopolitical challenges are emerging that will make the next deck an incredibly pivotal one for our country.
Cameron Ghalambor 6:42
Losing NSF also isn't just about losing basic science in the US. Losing NSF makes a strong statement about what kind of future we want. Do we want one that invests in discovery, education and inspiration? Or do we want one that abandons our ideals and audacious aspirations just for short term gain?
Marty Martin 7:01
We Americans know that our very foundations are about the former. Our idealism and audacity is what makes the US like no other country in the history of the planet.
Cameron Ghalambor 7:10
So let's help keep the NSF vibrant and supported for the near and far future. Please share this episode with your family, friends, uber driver, dentist, or anyone you know that votes in this country and can do their small part to save the NSF.
Marty Martin 7:26
Ask these folks to share this episode with their own social networks, but especially reach out to their representatives and senators, calling, emailing, texting, and generally appealing to those people to take sensible action on the President's budget when it comes up for a vote in a few months,
Cameron Ghalambor 7:40
When the fiscal year ends on September 30, let's all be able to say that we gave our very best shot to keeping the NSF viable for the long term.
Marty Martin 7:50
Let's hope for the best, but act like the worst is possible.
Cameron Ghalambor 7:55
I'm Cameron Ghalambor
Marty Martin 7:56
And I'm Marty Martin
Cameron Ghalambor 7:58
And this is Big Biology
Marty Martin 8:11
Sam Sheiner and Bill Zamer, welcome to the Big Biology podcast.
Sam Scheiner 8:15
Hi there.
Bill Zamer 8:16
Thanks for having us.
Marty Martin 8:17
Sure so we invited you on to talk about the National Science Foundation, then the agency that funds most basic science research in the US. And in particular, we want to discuss the implications of the President's recent actions. The first one is his proposed budget cut for NSF to 45% of its current budget of $9 billion annually. And the second is the cancellation of lots of existing grants, many of which were claimed to have occurred because of the emphasis on DEI. So you two a particularly great guest for this episode, because you both served prominent roles in the Biology Directorate at NSF for many years, but now both of you are retired, and our hope in inviting you is that you could be a bit more candid about current circumstances than current NSF employees would be. But before we get into all of that, let's hear your origin stories. So Bill, let's start with you. When did you first come to NSF, and what jobs did you hold there?
Bill Zamer 9:06
I first started at NSF as a rotating Program Director in the fall of 2000 and I was assigned initially to the Integrative Animal Biology program in what was then the division of Integrative Biology and neuroscience. IAB, that program was a basic physiology program pretty broad ranging. It included mainly endocrinology, functional morphology, respiratory physiology, all the basic physiology stuff that you would think. What it did not include was evolutionary physiology sorts of things and ecological physiology that was in a separate program.
Sam Scheiner 9:47
Yeah. So I started two years before Bill in the fall of 1998 so I was at NSF for 26 years before I retired-- retired this past September. Where I was in what was then called population biology. It's gone through a couple of name changes since it's now called Evolutionary Processes, and that's in the Division of Environmental Biology. And, as the name implies, you know, it funds work on the dynamics of evolution and the causes of those dynamics.
Marty Martin 10:24
So maybe let's zoom all the way out then. And, you know, NSF is 75 years old. Its original charter from Congress was to promote the progress of science, to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare and to secure the national defense. But really tell us its origin story. Whose idea was it? What were the sort of initial motivations? What was it intended to do? How is it supposed to be different than the USDA and the National Institutes of Health and the EPA? Bill, do you want to give us that history lesson?
Bill Zamer 10:56
So this is, this is post World War Two history, in some ways. The science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, and then Harry Truman was a guy by the name of Vannevar Bush, and he wrote what is considered the organic document for NSF. It was called Science the Endless Frontier. And at one point, I can't remember which regime it was, but I think it was when Jim Collins was the AG, this became required reading for the program directors at NSF at BIO. It's a wonderful document, and it basically connects the scientific effort that was involved in winning World War Two, which was mainly university researchers, to what science funding ought to look like after the war. And instead, I think that the decision was made by Truman to actually create the National Science Foundation, in part because they did not want to take the collaboration between government and university researchers and toss it out the window. That had been established during the war. And they felt that that was an easy thing to keep, to keep pushing the science forward for the best, you know, motives for the nation and national security. So they created the National Science Foundation, and created a National Science Board. Truman is famous for having supposedly said, I'm not going to put this agency in the charge of a bunch of scientists. He wanted a National Science Board as part of the governing structure to be able to have input into the workings of the foundation that was not just from scientists per se. There's industry and business involvement, perhaps, in thinking about how the foundation works and in part, what the emphases ought to be. So it came into being from that scientific collaboration between university researchers and government funding during the war, and that model of having an agency that supplies the dollars to support the research, given to the university researchers, was viewed as a way to keep science moving forward. It's one of the most successful models ever.
Sam Scheiner 13:24
NSF is an incredibly bottom up organization, more so than any other federal agency. It's really sort of a very interesting hybrid between government and academia, where the academic community, the PI community, actually has a huge amount of input into how we operate. The individual program officers do, and, I'll just mention, half of the program officers are what we refer to as rotators, meaning that they are scientists from academia, from private industry, maybe government labs, who come to NSF for one to three years to act as a program officer, and then go back into academia, and they have huge amounts of input into how we operate and so forth. And just to add a couple of things to that, there was actually quite a bit of debate in Congress about exactly what NSF would be. NIH was created at the same time. It was decided that biomedical research would have its own funding institution. One of the debates was whether we were going to be the National Science Foundation or the National Research Foundation. That is, would this agency only focus on research, or would it also have an educational mission? And that's why we're the NSF, is because we have a mission for education, and not only within academia, but education broadly. That educational mission, that's one of the things which is really unique to NSF that the other science funding agencies do not have. And then, of course, the other part of it is that the mission of NSF is to fund basic research. You know, research can be both applied and basic at the same time, but it is NSF's mission to fund that basic research in a way that is not true for any of the other agencies, what we call the mission agencies, where they have more narrow focus. So NSF, we cover all of STEM and that's one of the strengths.
Marty Martin 15:43
So can we define or maybe sort of contrast basic and applied? I mean, one way to do this is to sort of talk about the kinds of things that NSF has supported. And in doing background research, I knew some of these things, and I totally planned to put them in here, because they're so cool. But then I learned there's an unbelievable amount of things that's come from NSF funding. So great big example is that, you know, as part of a four and a half million dollar NSF award, we ended up with Google, right? The sort of the search algorithms that became Google. We ended up with wireless communications. We ended up with MRI. We ended up with GPS, Doppler radar, ways to detect explosives, supercomputers. In the biology space, we found green fluorescent protein, which is integral to biomedicine, in a jellyfish. We found Taq polymerase in a bacterium that lives in a Yellowstone hot spring. What's your favorite examples and sort of how is this kind of basic science different than what the EPA and USDA and NIH would typically support?
Sam Scheiner 16:45
So what I like to say is NSF funds the research which is going to be important 20 years from now, right? That I would say that is the essence of the distinction between basic and applied right, basic is the stuff that may not have an immediate payoff, but will have a payoff down the road.
Bill Zamer 17:06
One of the first proposals that was handed to me when I walked in the door as a newly minted rotating program director was about muscle physiology. I think it was an SGER- small grant for exploratory research. And she had this idea that the sliding filament model of muscle contraction was not quite right. And that the evidence for that was that the sliding filament model did not quite account for some of the characteristics of force production. And so she had this idea that there was another protein involved, and so I ended up on that basis, recommending that for an award, because it was novel, it could fundamentally change what we thought about the theory of muscle contraction. Years later, I was at a meeting in Virginia Beach, and she showed me an animated model of how contraction would work. And it blew my mind. I think this was a American Physiological Society meeting, an APS meeting at Virginia Beach years ago. And I said, you know, this is compelling. If this is what you've been working on, you know, in part, on the basis of that SGER are send me another SGER proposal. I'll take a look at it. Well, she did, and I funded that near the end of that award, she sent me an update, you know, an annual update, about the progress of the award, and indicated that she was collaborating with an engineering firm that made prostheses. So you have this example all roll into one of an investment in basic research that could further the understanding, the basic understanding of how muscle cells work and how contraction works in any animal, and a newly minted collaboration on the basis of that basic research to improve the quality of prosthetic limbs. And at the time, there were a lot of walking wounded coming back from Middle Eastern wars that needed new limbs. So this was an example of that combination between basic research and applied research that I thought was fabulous.
Cameron Ghalambor 19:15
So let's talk a little bit about this, about the actual process of a grant getting reviewed and recommended for funding. I really like this idea of thinking about basic research is what will be sort of applied in the future, and as opposed to what we know that can be applied today. But it also kind of building off of the tech startup analogy, of like many of these projects will not amount to anything more. It makes it, you know, hard to predict what will be. I think the term that at NSF that was being used for a while was transformative. And not every proposal can be transformative, and so not everything can get funded. So can you talk a little bit about the sort of criteria that's used for judging and how these difficult decisions are made of you know, what gets funding and what doesn't get funding?
Bill Zamer 20:17
So for individual proposals, one of the things that I always looked for was was there a clear way that the PI pointed towards progress, significant progress, in a field that was the subject of that proposal? Otherwise, why bother with an award? So the PI had to make the case: Here's the status of the research in this field now, and back that up by citing the relevant literature. Here's what this proposal proposes to do to advance the field, and here's how I'm going to do it. So in all those ways, they have to articulate what it is that they propose to do that will make the field go forward in a significant way, and not necessarily just incremental. And they need to have a compelling case as to how they're going to make that happen. What's the plan for field for collection, field data, for example, that they're going to use to get that research to move forward. So we're looking for something that's compelling, that will significantly move the field forward in a number of ways. That's the main charge of making an award recommendation.
Sam Scheiner 21:42
Yeah the decision process at NSF is multi-layered, right? So we start with the peer review, right? So the individual reviewers, the panel that's the outside people, and they are providing their expertise- how exciting is this proposal? And you know, are there any flaws in the experimental design and so forth. And then afterwards, there's, in essence, a whole second round of review, which is this discussion among the program officers, right? So the programs in BIO, in the biological sciences directorate any way, have multiple program officers, and we have these discussions about, okay, here are the ones that the panel has identified as potentially being fundable, but they've recommended way more than we have money for so now we have to sort through those. We go through this process, as Bill says, of what is called portfolio balance. And I'll also say that occasionally we will reach down and fund the stuff that they say is not competitive because we decide that they made a mistake. For example, you know, we're bringing our own expertise to that review process, as much as the panel's expertise. And then, you know, and then, of course, we have to justify that to our superiors. Technically, on a technical level, program officers actually have no decision authority. All we do is make recommendations to our division director, who actually has the authority to sign off on proposals. But, that said, in 26 years at NSF and handling 1000s of proposals, I never had a recommendation overruled. So a lot of faith is given to the program officers.
Marty Martin 23:56
So we want to be really clear about what's happening in NSF right now, or what could happen giving the pending budget idea, but, but to be honest, our prime directive today is not to complain. The purpose is to share with listeners what Cam and I know NSF to be about, what we've learned during our times as professors funded by the NSF. And in my opinion, to be sort of blunt about it, NSF has been fantastic. And I think this is not really just our personal opinion. Lots of agencies across the world emulate NSF's process of deliberation about what to fund. The process is really transparent, it's really fair. It's all about merit, and critically, too, NSF sees itself as a facilitator of science, as opposed to sort of a top down kind of control. Just in terms of how its budgets allocated, really speaks strongly to that. So I want to come back to those kinds of things in just a minute. But first, I think I want to just give you guys an open floor to talk about what you think listeners should know about the current situation in NSF, what's going on and what do we need to know? Bill, do you want to take that?
Bill Zamer 24:59
Yeah, so I at the outset, I'll say that I've been retired for almost eight years. I retired at the end of 2017 and so I'm somewhat distant from the day to day at NSF. And Sam is very likely to be able to fill you in a little bit more accurately about existing things at the foundation right now. But from what I read in the newspapers, a substantial cut in the budget at NSF will cause a generational impact on training of students, in particular, of all the things that will be impacted, that is the one that gives me the most grief. So if you think about the budgets of NSF grant proposals, a substantial chunk is personnel costs associated with the training of undergraduates, and in particular, graduate students. So I think a 45% cut to the budget, that's the number that I've become aware of by reading in the newspaper.
Sam Scheiner 25:58
56. I think is somewhere in that, yeah.
Bill Zamer 26:02
That means that number one, far fewer grants will be issued from the foundation. And of the grants that are issued, I suspect that the research dollars are going to be so precious that this will directly and negatively impact the training aspect of individual NSF grants, there will be fewer graduate students and postdocs, for example, supported as well as undergraduates. So the lifeblood of doing science is the people infrastructure that NSF supports so well and is so significant to its mission. Part of the mission of NSF is to ensure the scientific health of the nation. And ever since its founding, this was thought to be a national security sort of issue, to ensure the health of the nation. So my main complaint about the budget cuts is the negative impact on the training aspect of NSF's mission.
Sam Scheiner 26:59
Yeah yeah yeah. So just to first of all amplify what Bill was just saying about training, one of the very first programs that NSF created when it was founded 75 years ago were the graduate fellowships program. So that program goes back to the origins of the foundation, and it is slated to be cut by half. So right there, you're talking about a huge hit on graduate training, and that's separate from what Bill was talking about, which is the funding of graduate students that takes place through individual grant proposals and graduate fellowships, of course, allow students to go to the institutions that they want and pursue their own research projects in ways that they may not if they're tied to to their advisor's project. Beyond that, this is just going to decimate science as a whole. A healthy funding rate for us science is somewhere between 20% to about 33% so somewhere between one and five to one in three proposals that are getting submitted should be getting funded to keep things healthy. That's not on a per person basis. It's a proposal basis. But even before all of this, funding rates have been declining this last year, they were somewhere in the mid teens for the programs in BIO, which meant that it was already unhealthy. And you know, cuts of this magnitude are just going to be basically large swaths of the research enterprise are going to shut down.
Bill Zamer 28:51
As the funding success rates or frequencies decline, PIs get the message. And if they begin to think that it's a coin flip, or worse, with respect to whether I get a grant funded or not, then the other side of the coin is they're going to figure out that, you know, why should I even bother to apply to the NSF for funding? And so that idea that NSF gets the best ideas from the PIs in the broader communities that NSF serves, that undermines the scientific infrastructure as well, there will be a reluctance taking place among the PI communities to even submit a proposal to the NSF, and that will compound things.
Marty Martin 29:37
Yeah, let me. Can I just overlay some statistics, but I want you guys to sort of correct me if I'm wrong here, the budget of NSF right now is about $9 billion right? The percentage of that that goes directly back out into the universities and the research groups, and you know, the people generating the science, is about 94% of that total budget. So it's a relatively small amount that keeps the NSF going, and the majority is just sort of redirected back out into the world. So that is going to go from 9 billion to something like four, four and a half billion, which is going to have all sorts of consequences for the amount of money that's going to go to the science and then the training of the students to generate those data.
Bill Zamer 30:19
NSF is in some ways a model for the federal government. It has one of the lowest, if not the lowest, overhead rates in terms of operating the agency of any agency in the government.
Sam Scheiner 30:29
Yeah, and I just want to emphasize something else about what happens as those funding rates go down is that it's not just the total number of grants that get hurt, but also the diversity of people who get funded. What will happen is there'll be a higher concentration of grants given to people at elite institutions, both public and private. But the, you know, the top research institutions because they have the infrastructure to help support their faculty in ways that people at comprehensive universities, primarily undergraduate institutions, do not. And the flip side of that often those are institutions in which research is not a requirement for getting tenure. But in fact, the individual scientists really wants to do research, and not because they have to, but because they desire to do that, but also because it then exposes their students to active research, allows them to participate in research. And so through that diversity of funding, that makes science as a whole very strong, and so this will simply just weaken the scientific infrastructure.
Bill Zamer 32:03
And just to follow up on what Sam described, I was at Lake Forest College, a small liberal arts college, before coming to NSF. And I had an NSF grant, and supported undergraduate research students on that grant. So it this, this is going to be devastating.
Cameron Ghalambor 32:19
So we mentioned the sort of previous budget of about $9 billion, and for those people who may be not familiar with the total federal budget, that's actually a fairly small amount of the total budget. But also I was kind of curious whether there were other federal agencies that operate on the goodwill of the community. So in the case of NSF, you have other researchers who review proposals, who serve on panels, who do a lot of work that's not paid. And again, I think there's perhaps a misconception by politicians and the general public that, you know, there's some group of, you know, people in a room that decide who gets paid and who doesn't, and rather than seeing it as a more transparent community process that's done, you know, without having to pay for it.
Sam Scheiner 33:25
Yeah, peer review at NSF is really part of that whole peer review ecosystem. That's, I mean, it's not just for grant proposals, it's for manuscripts in which, right? I mean, it's this reciprocal altruism system that science has developed. It's amazed me over the years, you know, who is willing to just do these reviews for free for NSF? Because obviously, if you're also interested in applying to NSF and getting funding, being a reviewer is what is a great learning experience.
Bill Zamer 34:03
Just, I was just gonna say to riff off of what Sam just said. I think that the people who are at universities or agencies, for example, outside the United States, international reviewers, they do it because they're in it for the forward process, progress of science, and because they trust NSF as an agency to do the right thing. I would be really careful about any recommendations that would end up in having paid reviews, paid panel service you end up driving toward the review process, individuals who have the wrong motives, potentially, if you do that, and the trust between NSF officials and the community, in my experience, has been extremely high. That is the community trusts the program directors to run what is considered to be the gold standard merit review process worldwide, I might say. And on the other hand, the program directors trust the members of the community who review for them, who sit on panels and evaluate proposals for days on end, trust the community members to give the best advice that is, as best as we can make it, unbiased about what is worthy of funding, what proposals need a little bit more time to gestate and should be resubmitted, that kind of thing. So if you end up seeing recommendations that would impose a dollar amount for that service, what you're going to throw out with that is that two way trust between the people at NSF who are administering the review process and the awards process and the community submitting proposals.
Cameron Ghalambor 35:59
Yeah, so this is, this is maybe a bit of an odd question, but it's one that seems to come up as a misconception among the general public in terms of what NSF money actually ends up doing. And I've seen this on like social media as well. There's this perception that people funded by NSF and these grant proposals, are that the PIs are, are somehow personally benefiting and profiting from the grants. And that's not really the case. And I'm not sure if you've, if you've seen these, these claims that have been made about people profiting off of them. But I think Bill and Sam, you mentioned earlier that you know a lot of what this money is going towards is personnel costs in terms of salaries and training. And I'm curious on your thoughts about like this contract between the NSF and academia.
Bill Zamer 37:03
What I'll come back to again and emphasize this is that if you rip the funding out of grants for support of undergraduates and graduate students and postdocs, for that matter, which we've not talked a lot about at this point, I think that that goes to the heart of the people infrastructure, the future scientists who will not be supported. That, I think, is a far more serious kind of equation to remove that funding for training, as opposed to removing funding for salaries and supporting PIs. Now I've not touched on those PIs that need to get their salary from external sources, more or less exclusively. I do think that this is a complicated question in that sense. I don't know. Those are my thoughts on this. Sam, you want to jump in here.
Sam Scheiner 37:56
So first of all, in terms of NSF grants in general, about three quarters of funding of the direct cost of grants go to salaries. And what's been happening recently is we are finally paying graduate students, post docs, reasonable salaries, which has been raising the costs of individual grants faster than total funding has been going up. It's those rising costs that just the just actually paying for science the way it should be paid for, paying postdocs, what they really are worth is one of the things that's again, this slashing of budgets is just going to set all of that back decades, if not more.
Marty Martin 38:59
There's one big item that we haven't touched. So, you know, there's obviously a political dimension to this. We asked you guys to come on because you were at NSF for a while and have seen many different things and maybe sort of understand what's being proposed versus what's possible and what's happening. Maybe we just haven't framed it in a way to say that. But let me, let me sort of talk about or prompt you with this one thing that has been sort of the thing that's pointed out by some folks as why something on the order of a thousand NSF grants at this point have been canceled, and some of that rolls back to these broader impacts. So we've talked generally about the value of basic science and sort of the utility of NSF, but, but in a while ago, Congress sort of hardwired this into NSF efforts right by requiring broader impacts in every proposal. So maybe say what those are, and then if you want to sort of broaden from that out to you know how you want. Understand this to be happening and its implications and all of those things. Sam, do you want to start?
Sam Scheiner 40:04
Yeah, so broader impacts are all of the things that come out of funding a particular project, beyond the science itself, right, the manuscripts that are going to come out, the databases that are going to be produced, and so forth. The most common broader impact are the training right? Because almost invariably, these are done in academic settings, so invariably there will be undergraduates, graduate students, post docs, involved in the projects. They get trained to be scientists as part of what's going on. But in addition to that, there may be outreach to the general public education in some ways. If it's research being done, for example, on a species that's endangered, the there may be implications for the conservation of that endangered species. There may be implications for like managing forest fires or, I mean, so you know, these are the kinds of examples right in the ecology and evolution that may come from that. Part of those broader impacts is to also broaden participation in science in general, right? It's critical to science to make that, to make science as successful as it is, that you get as many different viewpoints applied to a given scientific question as possible. It's been shown that you actually get better outcomes, we have more trust in science as a whole, when you have a variety of viewpoints. And so one of the important broader impacts for decades has been this broadening of the scientific enterprise. And that is now what's directly under attack. From what I've heard from colleagues at NSF, the decisions that are being made in cutting these grants are being made with absolutely no regard to the value of the science themselves that they are using, potentially using just an AI bot going through grant proposals, looking for words having to do with diversity. Sometimes what they're flagging are projects dealing with biodiversity. It doesn't matter the word diversity is in there. And it doesn't matter what you know, if you're talking about, you know, recruiting diverse students into your lab that are going to participate in the science. It doesn't matter how you're doing that. It doesn't matter if it's, you know, this is part of the mission of your institution. These are getting flagged and then and they're cutting entire projects if you want to talk about waste- what's happening is you are canceling projects midway through, which means that hundreds of millions of dollars of grant, you know, grant dollars are now being wasted because you're holding the projects halfway through, and those projects will not come to completion, the science will not happen. When you shotgun blast these kinds of effects, you're just going to hit everybody.
Cameron Ghalambor 43:27
Well and I guess another, another consequence of these types of cuts is that US scientists will start to go elsewhere. I know here in Europe, the EU has put forward proposals for attracting some of the best scientists. So just like many European scientists fled and came to the US, you know, in the run up to World War Two, we have now this situation where we may start to see a brain drain scientists moving, moving away and and I'm just kind of curious about what, then, again, the long term impacts are for our position, as in the US as a, you know, a global leader. And what would that even mean? What does that actually mean, to give up the mantle of being a global leader in science, you know, to let other countries kind of take the lead on that? Like some people might say, well, there's still good science being done all around the world, but I think we were talking about, like, uh, in, in absolute numbers, just less research occurring, and that's just that much less that's being added to our knowledge base.
Bill Zamer 44:48
The potential for US scientists to leave the country, to be able to conduct their science elsewhere, if that becomes a real a real pattern, if that is a real trend. It then is part of the trend to defund us science generally, you know, fewer grants going out, fewer students trained, the result of all that is increasingly a society that is less well educated in terms of how science is conducted, and the scientific knowledge base in individuals across the country generally writ. That's a society that becomes a little bit more dangerous with respect to the individual personal behavior during the next pandemic, for example. You know the scientific understanding in a good chunk of the population begins to decline over time, and therefore, the quality of scientific understanding and the behavior the society will be negatively affected in a lot of different dimensions. It will be negatively affected in how people understand or not climate change, how they understand things such as AI, you know, the power of AI, what it's supposed to do, how AI even is supposed to work, and on and on and on. Medical issues, we have an aging society to begin with, and if we sort of defund science generally writ the way this administration is doing, we end up with less scientific literacy overall in this country, which is a really bad thing.
Sam Scheiner 46:34
Yes, just to amplify on that, remember, part of the basic mission of NSF is education, is increasing the scientific literacy of the public as a whole. You know, scientists, we can increase the value of knowledge, but the usage of that, that's a social decision, right? That's part of policy, and we want the entire population to be educated enough that they can all participate in making decisions about how the science will be used, and that can only happen if the scientific enterprise itself is robust, and that scientific enterprise has been empowered to share their knowledge with society as a whole.
Marty Martin 47:24
So I guess I'd like to hear from you guys what you think the people listening to us could do personally. You know, an obvious thing to do is forward this episode to your uncles and aunts and family and friends in general, to your congresspeople. We have been told, and it's my understanding as well, that, I mean, congresspeople have a lot on in their on their minds, and everybody is sort of going to experience different things when the budget comes through. So just making the case that NSF is valuable, as we've tried to do here, it'd just be good to share this episode, or anything else that you might want to do there. But what other ideas? Is there anything else that you guys could think of, that the listeners could go try?
Sam Scheiner 48:08
So you know congress people, unlike NSF, which thinks in terms of decades, congresspeople think about the next election cycle and what's happening in their districts right now. The thing to emphasize with them, as much as anything else, is how much of NSF funding provides jobs and boosts the economy of their congressional district. Right? Almost every district in the nation has some university or college in it. You, in fact, can go to the NSF website, and you can search by congressional district in terms of funding and see what's been funded in your district. As I said, three quarters of the funding goes to salaries, which means that's providing jobs. And so that's one of the things to emphasize with your congressperson is how much NSF funding actually improves the local economy of their district.
Bill Zamer 49:12
On top of that, I would suggest that people who have the opportunity to go to a town hall by their congressional representative in the house, or either of their US senators. If they attend those town halls, if they can do that, they should emphasize the impact that NSF has had since its inception on the health and security of the United States. I mean, the scientific enterprise sponsored by NSF can be viewed as venture capital from the federal government, specifically designed to take risks, to invest in future prosperity and continued prosperity of the nation. And ask their representatives in the Congress, what are they going to do to support the continued success of that effort? Put them on the spot. Ask them explicitly, are you or are you not going to support the budget cut proposed by this administration, and if you intend to support it, how is that a rational thing to do? Put them on the spot. Yeah.
Cameron Ghalambor 50:21
So I'm also curious, are there any efforts to communicate to the general public what NSF funds and the impact of the research that's funded by NSF. I mean, for practicing scientists, you know, we know who's getting funded, and we read the scientific literature. But I also, I'm not aware of, like, any kind of efforts to communicate to the general public, like commercials on TV that, you know, announce things things like, you know, new discoveries that might be of general, general interest is, Has that ever been a discussion about kind of promoting the the NSF mission?
Sam Scheiner 51:13
So I think this is a change since Bill has left. NSF Office of Legislative and Public Affairs has had extremely robust outreach effort, mostly focused on, you know, social media, other kinds of outreach. They produce their own sort of short videos and podcasts. And so there has been a lot of effort to try to educate the general public in the value of NSF. And this is the 75th anniversary of NSF. There had been a plan for a huge public campaign, a publicity campaign, about the value of NSF tied to that 75th anniversary. All of that has now been shut down by the current administration. So, in fact, program officers are not currently permitted to do any outreach of any sort. They're not even allowed to do virtual outreach events. So the NSF staff, in fact, has been muzzled in terms of talking about, even non controversially, the stuff that we've done well in the past.
Bill Zamer 52:28
I've heard a lot of news reports, both in the newspaper and on TV, about cuts to NIH funding and the reorganization of NIH. I've heard scant information on the public airwaves and in newspapers about what's taking place at NSF. In the Washington Post, there have been one or two articles about NSF specifically. I have not seen any reporting specifically about NSF on the NewsHour on PBS. I've not seen any reporting on CNN specifically about the National Science Foundation, and on and on and on. So in what you might think of as somewhat traditional news outlets, I've not seen a lot about what NSF value has been to the country.
Marty Martin 53:18
And I think you know one last one last thing to mention, there are several weeks left for, you know, those of us that are interested to talk to Congress and to interact with our colleagues and family and friends and things and get help them to try to understand the value of NSF. So the budget won't come up for a little while yet, it's just a proposal at this point, so time to take action.
Cameron Ghalambor 53:42
Yeah, well, thanks for to both of you for taking the time to talk to us. This is going to be a topic that is first and foremost on the minds of all practicing researchers in the US and globally, because of the global impact. So we'll see how this all plays out.
Bill Zamer 54:01
So guys, thanks for the opportunity for do this. I really appreciate your efforts in doing this. So thanks a lot you.
Marty Martin 54:24
If you like what you hear. Let us know via X, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, Bluesky, wherever, or leave a review where you get your podcasts. And if you don't, we'd love to know that too. Write to us at info at Big biology.org
Cameron Ghalambor 54:35
Thanks to Steve Lane, who manages the website, and Molly Maggid for producing this episode.
Marty Martin 54:36
Thanks to Dayna de la Cruz and Carolyn Merriman for their social media work. Keating Shahmehri produces our cover art.
Cameron Ghalambor 54:47
Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, our patrons and donors and the National Science Foundation for support.
Marty Martin 54:55
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello.