Hello friends,
I’m home again after a week of travel that included three ENGAGE workshops in Philadelphia and Boston. I am so grateful for these opportunities to pause the mad scramble of our daily workloads, and focus on the work we need to do together, even if it’s just for a few intense hours. I got to catch up with a few alumni from previous faculty workshops, see some Unbreaking friends, and even stroll through a movie-perfect Pennsylvania pumpkin festival.

I was grateful for the time away and am grateful to be back.
This was Year 2, Week 43, let’s get into it.

What’s happening in science & higher ed

• As I flew home, I had a few minutes where I wondered how much of the internet would still exist by the time I landed. A massive PHP vulnerability¹ called Black October had teams around the world racing to patch their systems before hackers could exploit them. The issue is severe enough that governments and businesses shut down critical web pages – think banking and government websites – to protect them. This particular threat seems (?) to have moved out of the acute phase,² but the AI tools in the mix now means that cybersecurity has irrevocably changed.
• More leadership exits have been announced at the NSF: Acting Chief of Staff Rebecca Keiser is leaving on October 31, and Acting Director Brian Stone will retire on December 31. Under this administration, NSF has lost more than one-third of its staff,³ and in April, all 22 members of the National Science Board were abruptly fired. Former NSF Director Neal Lane (1998-2001) is on the record saying, “NSF has lost any semblance of independence and… any policy statement coming out of NSF is directed by the White House, presumably OSTP, in consultation with OMB.” One example of this loss of independence might be what now looks to be the failure of the Major Research Instrumentation grants program, for the second year in a row.
• After a stunt ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 5, in which a decades-old vaccine evaluation center was spun as a new Vaccine Injury Center,⁴ the NIH Hospital Board unanimously accused HHS Secretary Kennedy of doing a disservice to patients and the hospital alike. It’s well worth watching board chair Jack Leslie deviate from the agenda⁵ to insist on the board’s duty to protect the integrity of the institution. “Trust is slow to build and quick to lose. If people come to believe that research at this hospital can be steered toward a politically desired answer, the damage will not stop at vaccines.”
• A judge has blocked the administration’s attempt to dismiss an NAACP lawsuit suing SpaceXAI over air pollution from the power station needed to run the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. The suit is part of a national backlash against data centers. It seeks daily penalties against unpermitted mobile turbines on site in Southaven, Mississippi, as well as the installation of pollution control technologies to protect the local, predominantly Black, community. The federal government had argued that because the EPA is the primary enforcer of the Clean Air Act, the EPA itself should be able to dismiss the case. While unilateral executive veto over lawsuits and fines for pollution has been thankfully avoided for now, Judge Debra Brown has not forbidden the government from joining the suit in support of Elon Musk’s company. This case is one I’ll be keeping an eye on, especially considering a recent ruling requiring greater emphasis on economic feasibility in the EPA’s risk evaluation framework.
• In other bad EPA news, the administration is set to wipe the agency’s web archive at the end of December. That’s decades of documents – tens of thousands all told – we might permanently lose. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is one good place to start if you’re asking whether anyone is doing anything about this. I just can’t stop thinking about how much, for example, we rely on the Internet Archive for preserving this kind of history… and it was one of the sites that had to go offline in this week’s Black October event.
• And a few other updates on things I’ve written about in past issues:
  • NASA administrators are worrying safety advisors as they continue the rush to launch the Artemis III mission. I first wrote about this in February.
  • MAHA advocate Calley Means has resigned from his role at HHS. Means was a senior advisor to Secretary Kennedy and the brother of former Surgeon General nominee Casey Means.⁶
  • KFF has just released its fall 2026 data on public attitudes toward vaccines. This is an incredible resource for understanding where people stand. The topline is that confidence in most childhood vaccines remains high across the board, especially longstanding ones like polio and MMR, but there are partisan differences around some specific instances (e.g. COVID vaccines for pregnant people) and questions about the timing of immunizations.
• I want to end with a hopeful headline: Breakthrough vaccine for the deadliest skin cancer cut risk by almost half. As STAT reports, “Moderna-Merck personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, intismeran, when added to Merck’s Keytruda, reduced the risk of disease recurrence in patients with melanoma by 42% compared to Keytruda with a placebo.” Clinical trials are still in progress, and this is science, not magic, but I hope I’m never so jaded that I can’t celebrate progress in life-changing therapeutics.

And what’s next

Just caught myself humming. “These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry baby don’t cry, don’t cry.” Evidently, Paul Simon told Rolling Stone that his lyrics to this song can be “devolved down to hope and dread. That's the way I see the world, a balance between the two, but coming down on the side of hope."

I find it easier to come down on the side of hope when I’m surrounded by people who are actively trying to make the world safer, kinder, and more beautiful. It helps me to think about hope as something I need to actively nourish and protect.

Whatever your wellspring is, I hope you can tap into it this weekend.
Liz

As ever, thanks for reading & thinking with me!

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