Category: science

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is going to try to destroy higher education. Or, rather, transform it in the model of what Christopher Rufo did to the New College in Florida. By “destroy,” I mean that they will try to establish rigid ideological guidelines and force out any faculty that hold alternative views. They will try to replace “education” with “indoctrination.” In a well publicized incident, the new administration shut down the Gender and Diversity Center and threw out all of their books, describing it as “taking out the garbage.”

It’s not clear what the universities themselves can do. Some will be protected by the states they’re in. But much of what public research universities do is supported by federal funding. As that funding is withdrawn, universities will find it difficult to maintain their research programs. Or, indeed, to even pay for the capital investments they made prospectively to support research programs. In anticipation of these coming changes, universities are already withdrawing acceptances of graduate students, since the funding to support them is uncertain.

These changes will be catastrophic for science in the United States. We’re going to lose a whole generation of scientists and cripple the research programs that have kept the United States competitive globally.

It will be catastrophic, also, for the scientists doing this work. If your research lab experiences a gap in funding, you very quickly lose your ability to stay current and maintain competitiveness for future grants. Research is expensive. Without funding, you lose your trained staff and the resources you need to stay active: your whole enterprise loses momentum. And once you fall behind, it’s difficult to ever catch up.

What faculty mostly don’t have to worry about is their own salary. So I have a suggestion for my colleagues: Every minute that you are unable to conduct your research, you should devote to public advocacy in support of higher education. Join your union. Lobby your legislators. Write letters and articles. If thousands of faculty begin to devote themselves to writing op eds, publishing books, and holding public lectures about the importance of science and why the government’s grievous errors have endangered us all, it might make them wish they’d never unleashed these forces.

This semester, my writing students are studying lichens. Mostly not by choice, but because every semester I try to pick a different theme for my students to study and this semester seemed like a lichen kind of semester. To be fair, the students have been good sports, gamely looking at lichens and thinking deeply about how to study them.

On campus, there are lichens pretty much everywhere: on trees, rocks, buildings, light poles, benches, etc. But mostly not on the ground. Lichens get excluded anyplace where plants can grow well, so you generally only see them on very poor soil. But there are a few places in the region like that. One of them is the Montague Plains.

The Montague Plains are a delta where water from the glaciers flowed into glacial Lake Hitchcock during the last ice age. When a stream flows into a body of water, it creates a triangular (delta) shaped structure with sorted sediments: the gravel drops out first and then the sand. The silt stays suspended, but settles out on lake bed during the winter, producing varved clays. So most of the the delta is just sandy. Very sandy soil is tough for plants to grow on. It tends to be very well drained (i.e. dry) and there’s little organic matter, so few nutrients. And nothing for fungi to grow on, so few mycorrhizal relationships to help plants.

Few plants grow there. Some sparse grasses and trees, mostly pitch pine and scrub oak. Moreover, there tend be frequent fires, which end up burning off most of the organic material that might otherwise accumulate in the soil. So this is a recipe for lichens to grow. You have to look under the grass, leaves, and pine needles to find them, but they’re there.

It’s probably too far for any of the students groups to study there this semester. But I thought I’d stop by to take a few pictures to share with them anyway. Moreover, I always like visiting places with interesting geomorphology and botany to help me write fiction.

Almost everyone has now heard of CRISPR — the miraculous new technique for editing DNA. But few people are aware of where it came from. It’s a story that everyone should know, because it speaks to the importance of basic research.

Before I tell the story, you should be aware that the United States basically doesn’t fund basic research anymore. Only about 10% of grants are funded, so scientists waste 90% of their time writing proposal after proposal hoping to get funded. In order to get funded, most scientists are forced to twist their research interests into some kind of applied-science pretzel to make it seem like their research is about some hideous disease that affects orphans in order to get funding.

So, CRISPR… there was this guy in Spain who got little trickles of funding now and again to study a weird bacterium that lives in salt marshes. In studying this bacterium, he eventually got it sequenced and discovered it had these weird sequences that didn’t make sense. He showed them to people and nobody could explain what they were doing there. Eventually, he discovered that the bacteria could snip out sequences from viruses and include them in its own DNA as a kind of primitive immune system to recognize if it had seen a virus before. But it was this ability to copy-and-paste these sequences of DNA that led directly to the development of CRISPR.

Nobody could ever have predicted that funding a guy to tromp around in waders in a salt marsh would lead to the most transformative genetic engineering technique thus far discovered. That’s the magic of basic research. But you can say goodbye to these kinds of discoveries because, as I say, the US basically doesn’t fund basic research anymore.