Greetings. The crumbling of US science has continued since I sent out my last newsletter. Today I thought I’d lighten the mood a wee bit by sharing some other news first. Then I’ll turn to the tougher stuff.

The New York Times sometimes interviews its writers for a series called “Times Insider.” After I wrote about K2-18b— the distant world that might (or might not) harbor alien life—Emmett Lindner gave me a call to talk about writing biology of all sorts (plus a little backstory on how the tapeworm Acanthobothrium zimmeri got its name.) Check it out. And thanks to Victor Kerlow for putting me in space!

SO MANY CONSCIOUSNESS THEORIES, SO LITTLE TIME

Almost two years ago, I went to Manhattan to watch a festive evening of musical performances and presentations of magnetoencephalography recordings. A group of scientists had carried out a large-scale experiment to simultaneously test two theories of consciousness—a very rare thing in a field with dozens of theories on offer. I wrote about the event in this June 2023 story.

The researchers went on to submit their study to the journal Nature, and now it’s finally out. In the interim, they’ve brought out a number of critics who question both the experiment and one of the theories they’re testing. It’s not a theory the critics say; it’s pseudoscience.

So here is Chapter Two of my story on the challenges of testing consciousness.

WUHAN, RACCOON DOGS, AND GAIN-OF-FUNCTION: PANDEMIC DEJA VU

Over five years ago, Covid swept across the world. And so did a conflict over its source. A number of papers published in peer-reviewed journals have pointed to sick wild mammals for sale at a Wuhan market. A number of other scientists I’ve spoken to still consider the matter an open question, in large part because no one has found an infected intermediate host. US intelligence agencies are fairly split, mostly with low levels of confidence. Some agree on a spillover, while others lean towards an escape from a Wuhan lab.

I’m still helping to cover this conflict, which has taken on huge political dimensions in the new Trump administration. Last month, the White House converted government Covid web pages to a single site that blares: “Lab Leak…The True Origin of Covid.” The White House then justified a proposed 40 percent cut to the the National Institutes of Health budget in part with a claim that NIH had a hand in gain of function research in Wuhan that supposedly produced Covid. And this week, the White House invoked the lab leak while rolling out a new executive order calling for new limits on gain of function research.

But the researchers who have presented evidence for a market spillover over the past three years have more evidence to share. They looked at the history of the coronavirus that causes Covid back when it was in bats. They then compared Covid’s history to that of SARS, another coronavirus pandemic that took place 22 years ago. Their histories follow parallel paths. They argue that SARS and Covid originated in the same way: market spillovers of bat coronaviruses from southwestern China. And if the same story has unfolded twice in a quarter century, we may well expect it will unfold for a third time before long.

AIR-BORNE SIGHTINGS

The AIR-BORNE journey continues!

Here’s a picture from the Frenchtown Bookshop, just a few miles from where I grew up near the Delaware River. Happy Independent Bookstore Day, by the way!

I know that print editions of newspapers are getting to be luxury legacy indulgences, but I really enjoyed sitting on my deck last Saturday looking over Robert Sullivan’s lovely review of AIR-BORNE in its ink-on-paper incarnation.

AND LAST, BUT NOT LEAST: WRECKING BALL NEWS

—The Trump administration unveiled a proposed budget last week that includes historic cuts to funding for research on science and medicine. I pitched in on a story about how dire things could become for the National Science Foundation. The agency would lose over half of its budget. “Trump’s mission to destroy U.S. science research continues,” Matthew Green, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Bluesky.

—While Congress started looking over the proposed budget, the Trump administration made more moves to shrink NSF. Jeffrey Mervis at Science reported on Thursday that the agency will abolish its 37 divisions and eliminate an unspecified number of programs.

—Robert F. Kennedy and an assortment of politicians are moving against mRNA vaccines. The vaccines that saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic, earned a Nobel Prize, and could potentially help cure other diseases such as cancer, may get abandoned by the United States. Kate Zernicke has the details in the Times. Elie Dolgin reports on the crisis in Nature.

—The government continues to erase scientific information, whether in the form of conference abstracts or data pipelines.

—Over at the National Institutes of Health, Ben Mueller reports how the Trump administration is terminating active grants supporting research on LGBTQ health.

—NIH will also cut ties with international partners.

—The US government is stumbling in its response to bird flu, while the virus keeps spreading and mutating.

—"The nation’s forecasting agency is in tatters as what could be a destructive hurricane season nears,” Andrew Freedman reports for CNN. Meanwhile, five former National Weather Service directors signed an open letter warning that the cuts “may soon endanger lives.”

—The ongoing cuts to research are so big that economists are warning they could shrink the nation’s economy.

—Actual news, from Wired: “Casey Means isn't currently licensed as a doctor. But that’s not why anti-vaxxers and conspiracists think she’s unsuited to be surgeon general—to them, her anti-vaccine opinions aren’t extreme enough.”

As always, a caveat: this list is far from complete.

Stay safe!

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