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Welcome back to The Nature Podcast. This week, can US science survive the US presidency? And solving the final mysteries of Mendel's peas. I'm Sharmini Bandel. And I'm Benjamin Thompson.
This week marks the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second presidency. And here at Nature, we have covered and will continue to cover the latest news from the US regarding Donald Trump and how things like his executive orders are impacting science.
This week, though, Nature is publishing a feature really taking a view at the potential long-term impacts for science in the United States and beyond. And one of the authors of the feature is Nature's Jeff Tollefson, who joins me now. Jeff, thank you so much for being here today. Good to be here, Ben. Now, obviously, a lot is happening in the U.S. right now. We're recording this a few days before your feature goes live. But why are you taking a longer-term view?
Well, if you think about the past several weeks since Trump has come into office, it's been undoubtedly the biggest shakeup of science in modern history. There's
just extensive damage going on every day in terms of lost grants, in terms of firings, in terms of restructuring, in terms of threats to universities, academic freedom. So the real question that we're trying to ask is, what is the end impact of all this if it continues? You know, what does it mean for science?
if this is our new reality. And before we get into what that might look like, then maybe we can talk about how we got to here. The US is, of course, a science superpower, and has become so really since the Second World War, with a massive input of federal funds. Yeah, what you have to realize is that the science and innovation system that we live in today is
built rather intentionally after World War II. It represents a long and tried partnership between the federal government and universities, and one that has built up a broader ecosystem that supports business innovation. So then you can look to things like Silicon Valley and
Modern computers and the Internet and GPS and a lot of these technologies have grown out of that ecosystem. And the long understanding of academics is that at the base of this ecosystem really is a massive infusion of investments, federal investments in technology.
basic science of all kinds. And that is what's being hit today. So if you shake up that system, if you reduce those investments, if you break up that partnership between academia and government, what happens? What does it mean? We're starting to get some kind of hints at some of the implications now. And the pot of federal money for science in the US is...
absolutely enormous, or at least it has been. But the numbers involved in some of the cuts have been staggering. Yeah, if we think about grants, the things that a lot of our readers care about, we've got at least 6 billion that have been frozen or cancelled at this point at several of the top research universities. But that's one measure. We've also got tens of thousands of scientists who are under threat at various federal agencies. Thousands have already been fired.
So you can cut this any number of ways. Already we're seeing hiring freezes and we've seen graduate programs being scaled back at universities.
The implications flow from the federal dollars all the way down to the people in labs, and we're seeing the impacts already today. And we've covered a few times this kind of hollowing out of federal funds. Is there an expectation that private companies will pick up the slack? Because presumably a lot of these organizations that are having their funding cut, they provide something that is required. Privatization has long been a goal of conglomerates.
conservatives on the right side of the spectrum. And certainly it is here too. I think the Trump administration would probably like to privatize a lot of activities. There's explicit discussions of this with regard to the National Weather Service. So there are a lot of discussions about that. There are also discussions about whether federal investments in basic research are really needed.
There's long been a sense out there in certain quarters that maybe if the federal government steps back from research, businesses will step forward and cover the gap. Historically, there's always been a fairly broad agreement on the need for
for research funding. And there were always pushbacks against efforts to downsize some of these agencies. We saw that during Trump 1.0. This time around, it feels like a lot of the conservatives in Congress are falling in line behind this agenda. So we don't know where that's going to end.
And where do scientists think that it might end then with the people you've spoken to? What have they said about all this? Well, the big fear is that if you break this system, then it's broke. Some scientists we've talked to say it's basically built on faith and belief. So people believe that the U.S. is a stable place where you can come and build a stable career in science. They believe it's an open country with a certain set of values that
welcome foreigners. And a lot of our researchers come from abroad. So we've been a magnet for researchers from around the world for decades. The fear is that if you take this too far, you can actually kind of break that spell. And then you
Maybe people don't want to come here as much. Maybe people from here want to leave. And we see that in reader polls that Nature has conducted, and it's a major fear across the spectrum. That's one. I mean, the other piece is that if you take away all this research funding, will the private sector, in fact, step in and fill the gap? Universally, it's believed that the private sector is not going to be able to fill the gap whatsoever.
if we create this gaping hole in federal research investments. We'll have to see. Maybe they do in certain areas, but there are certain places where the federal government puts investments in things that are for the public good that might not necessarily pay off in a profitable way on a five-year or a 10-year timescale, the scales at which private companies make investments. And much of this base
Basic research, of course, takes place at universities and higher education institutions, which are under threat from funding literally right now. Yeah, I mean, this is an explicit threat. The administration, it started out with them going after Columbia University, which is, of course, one of the elite Ivy League schools in New York City. And then it moved on from there. And
Basically, what we've seen there is the administration come in and freeze or cancel or threaten to freeze massive quantities of grants and contracts that the federal government has extended to these universities and the researchers there.
And alongside these cuts come a laundry list of political demands, most of which are not related to science. And yet it's the science funding that's being held hostage. So all of a sudden, universities that used to be kind of separate from the political fray, science that used to be separate from the political fray, is now front and centre in this polarised political debate. But of course, as you alluded to, people are being impacted by this debate.
tug of war in many cases between institutions and the administration. Yeah, we've heard a lot of stories from scientists who are in the dark about why they lost grants or they lost grants for unclear reasons, where their grants have been frozen and they don't know whether they'll be unfrozen or whether they'll be permanently terminated. In some cases, this really has gone on long enough, you know, six weeks before
to where entire labs are being shut down. People are starting to lose jobs, people on soft money especially, you know, where the grants pay for salaries. Young scientists, postdocs, master's students, these are the ones who get hit the hardest in situations like this because they don't have faculty tenured positions where the university is directly paying their salary.
So these kinds of impacts are, of course, widespread within academia. Within government, the impacts are even more direct. Thousands of government scientists have already been laid off, and there are indications that there could be many, many, many thousands more, maybe tens of thousands. And so we have this situation then where funding is under threat, where people are losing their jobs, and others are saying they might want to leave or not come. Your feature really is looking at what happens down the track in response to all this, what
What's your research thrown up and what have people said to you? The fear is that the system is going to collapse in one way or another. The belief among scholars who study this and scientists who participate in it
is that this ecosystem is going to be much smaller in the future if this process continues. The federal investments are going to get smaller. The private sector is not going to pick that up. What we wind up with is less of everything. That's clear. What we don't really understand is the time frame. We don't understand the process, how we get from here to there.
But the endpoint is clearly going to be a smaller and less innovative ecosystem, both in terms of research at the academic level and probably in terms of the U.S. economy. And of course, you are based in the U.S. and this is looking at U.S. science, but science is a global enterprise. Has there been any research or any investigation as to what might happen more broadly? Well, that's the big question. The U.S. has been a science behemoth, as you said, for decades.
And one of the reasons for that is quite simply that the U.S. has pumped a lot of money in. Not necessarily more money than other countries as a percentage of our economy, but just in terms of sheer volume. You know, it's a lot of money that goes into science in this country. If you cut that back, what does it mean? Well, there again, we don't know. A lot of countries in Europe and beyond are already starting to think, well, maybe we can help them to fill this gap.
Maybe we can create programs to attract U.S. scientists that are losing their jobs here. Maybe some of this research and innovation will indeed move abroad. Undoubtedly, that's probably true to some extent. The question is whether the overall size of the global science system will
or whether other countries can expand and fill the gap. There again, we just don't know the answers to these questions. But of course, there will be people saying probablys, maybes, perhapss there, and these things might not come to pass. Donald Trump himself, he said that his administration was going to unleash scientific breakthroughs and ensure America's technological dominance. So, in
It seems like he's saying the right words there. Yeah, absolutely. And it's true. The future is a very difficult thing to predict. It is not an easy thing to try and piece all these things together and understand the precise implications. So there's no doubt about that. There's also little doubt that people who study innovation, people who study the history of science,
that the risks are very real and that the potential implications of what is happening now are very bad. So we'll have to see how it plays out. One scholar I spoke to put it this way. It's a risky experiment. There's going to be a lot of roadkill. I
And finally, then, Jeff, here we are then 100 days in to the second Trump administration. Of course, in time, there will be a shift to a new administration from whichever party who may have a very different view of Trump.
science and science funding. So is there the chance that this ultimately could all be reversed? Well, yes. I mean, there is a chance and I would presume that if you give it enough time, it will ultimately be reversed. The question is how long that takes and how much damage is done in the meantime. But I think the other fear here that many
of the academics and kind of science policy specialists that we've spoken to has, is that it may not quite be so simple as the U.S. electing another president. The real fear here is that the U.S. system was backed by this fundamental aura and belief of stability. If you lose that belief, if you lose that faith, then it might not automatically snap back after one election.
people might start to wonder, is the funding going to come back? And even if it does come back, will it then disappear in another four years?
So that's the long-term fear is that even if you do kind of shift back, will people believe that it's a permanent shift? And will they be willing to take another chance to enter government, to take a soft money position, to come here and work knowing that there's another election four years away? Geoff Tollefson, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Ben. Nature's Geoff Tollefson there. Look out for a link to his feature over in the show notes.
And for all the latest updates on the state of US science, head over to nature.com slash news. Coming up, we've got gladiatorial combat and pea genetics. Right now, though, it's the research highlights with Dan Fox. Astronomers have found a Star Wars-like planet orbiting a binary star system. But evidence suggests this planet circles its twin suns at an angle close to 90 degrees.
Researchers conducted long-term observations on the two brown dwarf stars using the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Anomalies in the stars' spectra revealed that their trajectories were affected by the orbit of a third massive object. But the data didn't fit a planet orbiting in the same plane as the stars circle each other. Instead, the observations suggest a polar orbit, with the planet travelling at 90 degrees to the plane the stars move in.
Astronomers have seen many planets in multistar systems before, including 16 other circumbinary planets that have an orbit wider than the ones their two stars trace around each other. But those 16 planets share the same orbital plane as their stars, presumably having formed from the same cloud of gas and dust. That research isn't far, far away. It's in science advances.
Fringe-lipped bats eavesdrop on their prey of frogs and toads, using croaks to distinguish their preferred meals. A team of researchers played the sounds of 15 species of frogs and toads to adult and baby bats.
Adult bats tended to show interest in the sounds of palatable species by wiggling their ears or flying towards the speaker. But they tended to ignore the calls of species that are toxic or too large to handle.
By contrast, juveniles were less discerning, swooping forth to the sounds of toxic toads but hesitating to attack when hearing the croak of some palatable species. The authors say these results offer the first evidence of developmental changes refining the decision-making process of an eavesdropping predator in the wild. You don't need to eavesdrop to find that research. It's in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Finally on the show, it's time for the Briefing Chat, where we discuss some articles we've been reading about in the Nature Briefing. And I have been reading a BBC News article today about a Roman gladiator in the northern English city of York who was found with lion bite marks on his bones. Oh, this is sounding great. So I'm from a different place in the UK, Colchester, which was a Roman town, so I love Colchester.
all things Roman related. And so we've got gladiatorial combat, shall we? Tell me about this one. So gladiatorial combat, I've also been reading, like really, really popular throughout the Roman period. And obviously, the Roman Empire spread a long way, reaching all the way to York, for example, which was apparently quite a big deal. It was the second most popular centre in Britain after Londinium, as it was called then, now London. And
And archaeological excavations have been going on in York and they found this particular collection of bones, a sort of graveyard. And because of the type of bones, we're talking sort of young men, signs of injuries, signs of a lot of musculature. They were very sort of
well muscled, they think that this could have been a gladiator graveyard. And this particular bone had these particular injuries, bite marks on the pelvis. And they were like, what could it have been? And they were struggling slightly. So they actually got some help from London Zoo, which has a collection of big cats, to try and find out which bite marks from the modern big cats best matched the
the marks on this pelvis bone. And they think, yeah, this was a lion that had bitten into this person's pelvis. Well, two things. One, ouch. And secondly, is this an exciting finding? Because I assumed that you look at all the pictures and you look at the hit Hollywood movies, that gladiators are fighting wild animals all the time, right? So is this an exciting finding? Yeah, it was definitely known from writing, from art,
that you had these huge spectacles, you had gladiators mostly fighting each other, but occasionally fighting different kinds of beasts. And we also knew that very wealthy Romans who had often put on these spectacles were bringing in these animals. And, you know, to think even to bring an animal like a lion into the centre of Rome would be a pretty impressive display of wealth and, you know, potentially a lot of people who'd never seen a lion before. And
But there was never any actual evidence from bones before. We've never actually found bones with lion tooth marks in. And the fact that this is in York as well, which again, we know that there were wealthy Romans in York and we know that these games and events were so popular that in a way it's not surprising. But...
well, for one thing, there's a question of how they got a lion to York. And also, this would suggest if these people are gladiators that there is somewhere under the current city of York, a Roman amphitheatre that we haven't found yet. Oh, wow. So like a Colosseum-like space for these spectacles to take place. Goodness me. And if we
If we talk about the individual who was bitten by this lion, of course, research has come such a long way in post-mortem examination, I suppose, of very, very old remains. Do we know if this is the bite that did for this person? Presumably it wasn't too good for their health, but what do we know about it? So, yeah, interestingly, they did show that the bite did happen around the time of death, not after death. They can tell that. But
But interestingly, the fact that the bite marks are on the pelvis suggests that this wasn't a lion who was necessarily leaping to attack because it would usually tend to go for somewhere like the neck. There are different areas of the body where a lion would be likely to attack you if it was kind of going for it. So actually, the researchers who've been writing the paper about this say,
They suggest that maybe the gladiator was incapacitated in some other way and then the lion went in and maybe dragged him away by the hip. Goodness, what a finding. And as I say, I'm so surprised that this is the first one of these. Is this revealing anything that we didn't previously know about Rome and the Roman Empire? Well, the finds of these gladiatorial skeletons broadly are telling us about their short and somewhat brutal life, as one of the people quoted in this article comments.
In fact, this particular person, male between 26 and 35, had already different injuries, shoulder and spine injuries, which may have been from combat, may have been from some sort of hard physical work. So in general, we're kind of starting to build an image of what life was like for gladiators in Roman times. And in this particular case, yeah, kind of...
kind of figuring out what Roman life was like in York, so far away from, you mentioned the Colosseum in Rome. One of the researchers quoted in this article likens the Colosseum to the classical world's Wembley Stadium of combat. And he says it's remarkable that they found this first bone-based evidence for this gladiatorial combat so far away from the Colosseum of Rome. Well, I can say I am entertained. Ha!
Charmony, by that story. But let's go on to a second story, a story that I've got. Also a historical story, I will say. Couldn't be more different. It's the conclusion to a genetic mystery about working out which plant genes do what. But to begin with, I'd like to sort of paint a picture. Charmony, if you'd like to close your eyes, listeners. Okay.
If it's safe to do so, maybe you'd like to do the same, not if you're driving, obviously. So let's head back to the mid-19th century. Just picture yourself standing in the garden of an Augustinian abbey in what is now the Czech Republic. Maybe the sun's on your face, maybe you can feel a gentle breeze just through your hair, and you can see a friar. He's working alone. He's growing peas. His garden is full of peas. He seems very methodical, though. He's taking a lot of notes. Now,
This friar, of course, is none other than Gregor Mendel, who is such an important figure in the history of genetics. His early experiments involved breeding thousands of pea plants to understand how their traits were inherited by future generations. Now, of course, the concept of genes, as we know it now, didn't exist at the time, right? He concluded that hereditary factors were passed on from generations.
parent to offspring. So I think I remember probably GCSE biology, where even to start introducing the idea of genes, you talk about like recessive traits and dominant traits. And that might be like two parents have brown eyes and what colour eyes could their children's eyes be? And that's the kind of
simple thing that he was doing with pea plant characteristics, right? So like, what colour are the flowers that are the offspring of these colour flowers? That's absolutely right. Yes, the Punnett square you made for all of high school, I certainly did. And what turned out to be dominant or recessive versions of genes, which are known as alleles. Now, you're right, scientists still study Mendelian traits, and they've identified thousands in humans. You mentioned one there, you know, eye colour, that sort of thing.
Now, lots have been found in humans, but it's been really hard in a lot of cases to link those traits to the genes responsible. OK. Now, this is also true for the peas. Now, Mendel studied seven traits, as you say, things like seed shape, flower colour, height and the genetics underlying traits.
All but three of these have been figured out. But it seems like that has now changed. Researchers have figured out what's going on with the final three. So he was there saying, oh, clearly there's some simple hereditary factors, but we just couldn't figure out, OK, well, which specific gene and alleles is it?
And that's exactly right. And so that's what's happened now. Now, the way they did it is by a lot of cutting edge genetics, it has to be said. A couple of weeks ago, Nick was talking about the potato genome and how difficult it is to sequence the genomes of plants. They can be really, really big and quite unusual in many cases. Now, the garden pea genome was completed back in 2019. And of course, technology has got a lot better and sequencing costs have gone down. And so the team behind the work said, right,
I think we can figure this out. I think now's the time that we've got the tools. We can figure this out. And I will say it took them six years to do this. A long time, right? Yeah. And so they did a lot of sequencing and they combined various resources. They deep sequenced nearly 700 P genomes.
and found a lot of tiny differences between genomes, single base pair differences in individual genes, right? So just a single DNA letter pair differences. And so they had this catalogue of these differences. They then used this to do some more genomic studies and some more plant breedings.
breeding and they've used all of these things to work out the genes responsible for these last three traits. And which were the three that were the tricky three that they had to do all this work to actually figure out? Good question. And things on the face of it, they seem pretty straightforward, right? Why is a peapod a certain colour? Why is it yellow or why is it green? It turns out that underlying that is a gene that disrupts chlorophyll biosynthesis, which leads to one colour or the other. Another one was peapod
and it seems that there are two genes here that probably control the shape of a peapod by inducing the disruption of cell wall thickening in the plants. So depending on how thick a cell wall is, it depends on the shape of the peapod. And the final one was whether flowers branched
off or clustered on the plant and it seems like a small deletion in another gene causes this change so a herculean amount of work they're carrying on the roman theme from your story and so they've figured it out and so there's now genetic evidence about what's underlying mendel's seven traits i can see from what you said there it's not as simple as they're just being like aha the gene for this it's like
understanding that this gene, which maybe influences a particular protein, which maybe influences a particular process like chlorophyll or cell wall thickening, it's all complicated stuff going on there, even in a pea plant. It seems very, very complicated. But it's not just about solving this historical puzzle, right? The team have created a wealth of
data from all these plants and they further analyze 72 agriculturally relevant traits and they say there's likely loads more fun stuff to discover and their data is publicly available and it's hoped that this could be really really useful because the garden pea is of great interest right now pea based protein is a pretty big area in terms of alternative protein so
sources and so there is more to this the team hope they could maybe use this knowledge or other people could take it and run with it to increase pod size or protein yield disease resistance that sort of thing so the humble pea and this work that kind of started with gregor mendel all those years ago could open up avenues for feeding a lot of people for example i do love a pea i'm gonna add a
controversial tip in there frozen peas straight out the freezer delicious very very nice don't even need to cake them not an official endorsed recommendation but I like it well welcome to the first episode of the nature cooking show maybe we should leave it there Sharmini for this week's briefing chat listeners for more on both of those stories and where you can sign up for the nature briefing to have even more stories like that delivered directly to your inbox head over to the show notes as usual
Well, that is all for this week. So if you want to keep in touch with us, don't forget you could follow us on social media, for example, X or Blue Sky, or you could send an email to podcast at nature.com. I'm Sharmini Bandel. And I'm Benjamin Thompson. See you next time. Take control of the numbers and supercharge your small business with Xero. That's X-E-R-O.
With our easy-to-use accounting software with automation and reporting features, you'll spend less time on manual tasks and more time understanding how your business is doing. 87% of surveyed U.S. customers agree Xero helps improve financial visibility. Search Xero with an X or visit xero.com slash ACAST to start your 30-day free trial. Conditions apply.
And now, a next-level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows, and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Day. You've got AT&T 5G, so you're fully confident. But, but, the vendor isn't responding, and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. Coverage not available everywhere. Learn more at att.com slash 5G network.