At least we’re getting words of encouragement from the administration.

Dear Colleagues,

Since our founding in 1851, the University of Minnesota has distinguished itself as a global leader in research, scholarship and creative practice.

From pioneering the first open heart surgery to unlocking the secrets of DNA repair, our students, faculty and staff have always maintained an unwavering commitment to serving the world through discovery and innovation.

Thank you for everything you do.

The federal government’s recent notice calling for a 15 percent indirect cost rate on all new awards from the National Institutes of Health is a direct attack on our ability to advance the University’s public service mission, and it has created fear and uncertainty across our community. This decision would cut reimbursements for research facilities and administrative costs, which cover critical, lifesaving research activities ranging from patient safety to research security. It would no doubt have serious consequences for patients across the state, as well as our students, faculty and staff.

According to Mark Becker, President of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, “NIH slashing the reimbursement of research costs will slow and limit medical breakthroughs that cure cancer and address chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Let there be no mistake: this is a direct and massive cut to lifesaving medical research.”

As a principal investigator on numerous NIH grants throughout my career, I understand how devastating this announcement must be for many members of our community.

University leaders convened over the weekend to chart a path forward, and we are actively partnering with higher education associations and peer institutions across the country to identify ways in which we can effectively address this rapidly evolving situation head on. With guidance and support from our Government and Community Relations Team, we have implemented a broad outreach strategy to ensure that members of our federal and state delegation fully appreciate the profound implications of this notice.

We are also supporting national efforts led by higher education associations to address the legality of this directive, and the University will stand in firm opposition to such drastic cuts that impede on our ability to advance research discoveries and innovations.

My leadership team and I will remain fully engaged on this issue, as well as other federal policy changes that affect our community and impact our operations. I recognize that news of this notice creates a significant level of fear, uncertainty and concern.

Please know that I am committed to ensuring our University’s primary missions of teaching, research and outreach thrive. And I will continue to advocate on your behalf, as the University explores every avenue to aggressively address the challenges posed by this notice.

We are one of America’s leading public research universities, and I will loudly champion the work of our students, faculty and staff so they can continue to advance research, scholarship and creative practice for the betterment of our society.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the latest announcement from NIH, please contact our Research and Innovation Office at rio@umn.edu, or connect with a research administrator in your school, college or unit. I also would encourage you to visit z.umn.edu/fed-impacts for research-related updates and FAQs.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Cunningham
President

Also, note that the University of Minnesota Morris will keep on celebrating Black History Month no matter how nasty the White House gets.

Shame on the American Society for Microbiology.

A prominent US scientific society altered its website to remove references to diversity and equity ― terms targeted by the administration of US President Donald Trump. Articles about scientists who are members of under-represented groups also temporarily vanished from the site, although they have since reappeared.

The editing sparked an outcry among some of the more than 37,000 members of the organization, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) in Washington DC. Some ASM members note that other scientific societies have posted statements in support of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), rather than deleting terms targeted by White House orders.

Their excuse? They were just following the orders of their lawyers.

That sounds familiar, for some reason.

Read about Chemistry in Nazi Germany. The major scientific societies in Nazi Germany were quick to pander to Hitler, and they had the same kinds of arguments: they were patriots supporting their country, they had to fire all those Jewish professors to keep government support, etc., etc., all while they were looting conquered nations and doing secret work on nerve gasses and sieg heiling their way to bigger grants.

“It is one of the most notable phenomena in academia in 1933 that the severest measures of National Socialist policies against science were carried out under a high degree of silence and with the frequent consensus of scientists,” writes Deichmann in a review of chemistry during the Nazi era (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.2002,41, 1310). She has found only a single instance in which a German scientist refused to accept a new position created through the dismissal of a Jewish scientist.

This silence regarding the unfair dismissal of Jewish colleagues was common across most fields of science, and it stemmed from some combination of anti-Semitism, nationalism, cowardice, obedience, or opportunism, Deichmann says. The vacant positions were often taken by young scientists who may not have had comparable academic career opportunities had anti-Jewish policies not cleared the way. Perhaps for this reason, Deichmann notes, 63% of young scientists joined the Nazi Party, a larger percentage than the 53% of chemists and biochemists of all ages who joined.

The article is specifically about chemistry, but to be fair, all the disciplines were doing it. Hans Spemann, the Nobel-prize winning development biologist, was busy coordinating the purge of Jewish scientists from German universities.

What chemists did was mirrored in the rest of Germany’s scientific community. “Chemists received a lot of support for their research” from the Nazi regime, Deichmann says. “But I am not sure we can say they were more opportunistic than other” scientists. Comparable percentages of biologists, psychologists, and chemists joined the Nazi Party, she says. The German Biological Society, for example, had a journal called Der Biologe (The Biologist) that was entirely full of Nazi ideology, and psychologists and biologists participated in terrible human experiments, she adds.

After the war, these same scientists were quick to say “I knew nothing!” and pretend to have been oppressed by the Nazis.

After the war ended and international scientists began asking pointed questions about the activities of their German colleagues, Maier says, German researchers increasingly adopted a false narrative that they had suffered under Hitler, despite their flush funding under the Third Reich. “They would say the Nazis were anti-intellectual, antiscientific, and anti-basic research,” he says. “This is absolutely false.” The Third Reich “was a paradise for these scientists, compared to the situation up to 1933, when there were many cutbacks” because of financial constraints imposed by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.

Many chemists claimed they didn’t know what had been happening at Ausch­witz’ Monowitz-Buna factory and at other concentration camps. “But how can you get such a large chemical factory established and running smoothly without any chemists present?” Maier asks. Kuhn, for instance, may not have personally visited any concentration camps, but as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research and president of DChG throughout the war, he was certainly privy to some aspects of Hitler’s human experimentation, Deichmann notes.

I wish I could say that Richard Kuhn received his comeuppance after the war, but no. He had been an active supporter of the Nazis, ratting out his Jewish colleagues and promoting Nazi dogma.

From the beginning of the Third Reich, Kuhn also began to pepper his speeches at home and abroad with “Sieg Heil,” even at non-Nazi functions. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1938 for his natural product research, Kuhn rejected the prize with a letter punctuated with his handwritten addendum: “The Führer’s will is our belief.” During the war, Kuhn also did extensive research on the toxic nerve gases tabun and sarin and invented a poison gas called soman.

Once the war was over, he happily accepted his deferred Nobel prize (I guess the Füher’s will was inoperative after he blew out his brains) and got a bland, boring writeup on the Nobel foundation site. Perhaps the only recognition of his heinous behavior was that a scientific prize in his name, the Richard Kuhn Medal, was discontinued in 2005, long after his death in 1967.

In 2005, the Society of German Chemists (Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, GDCh) declared their intention to no longer award the Richard Kuhn Medal: “The board of the GDCh intends to discontinue awarding the Medal named after the organic chemist, Nobel Prize laureate of the year 1938 and President of the GDCh in 1964–65, Richard Kuhn. The board thereby draws the consequences out of research on Richard Kuhn’s behaviour during National Socialism. Even though the question of whether Kuhn was a convinced National Socialist or just a career-oriented camp follower is not fully answered, he undisputably supported the Nazi-regime in administrative and organizational ways, especially by his scientific work. Despite his scientific achievements, Kuhn is not suitable to serve as a role model, and eponym for an important award, mainly due to his unreflected research on poison gas, but also due to his conduct towards Jewish colleagues.”

We can’t even threaten the chickenshit administrators at ASM with posthumous ignominy, I guess. Even Richard Kuhn gets the benefit of the doubt about whether he was actually a Nazi, so I guess even minor functionaries who bow down before Trump are safe from public shaming.

All we can do is suggest that maybe they should consider doing what is right.

Like the Minnesota State High School League, which has shown more courage than the well-educated chickenshits at the ASM.

The Minnesota State High School League will continue its policy of letting student-athletes “participate consistent with their gender identity,” according to a memo sent to MSHSL member schools on Thursday.

The MSHSL’s message came a day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.

“The Minnesota State High School League, similar to other youth sports organizations, is subject to state anti-discrimination laws, which prohibit discrimination based on gender identity,” the MSHSL said. “Therefore, students in Minnesota are allowed to participate consistent with their gender identity.”

In 2023, the state Legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act to include gender identity as a protected class shielded from discrimination in areas such as employment, housing and education.

Resist in every little way you can.

Trump, Musk, and RFK jr are a horrific combo that has discovered how fragile the institution of science can be — all it takes is handing the keys to funding to a small number of incompetents and ideologs. It’s such a simple thing: decree that a few words are verboten and will get your grant application pulled. Take a look at the complete list of words that will flag a grant for being held. They include “gender,” “disability,” and “race”. They include “female” and “women,” but not “male” or “man”. They include “socioeconomic,” “socio economic,” and “sociocultural”…they really wanted to make sure that they got that one covered.

The NSF has sent out this ridiculous decision tree:

Seriously. You want to know how these bad decisions are sailing through? It’s because there is a petty bureaucracy running the NSF that designs redundant, pointless, stupid diagrams like that. It’s Kafkaesque.

The USC professor who is reporting this says:

These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you’re going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you’re going to control for socioeconomic status – totally standard practice – you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.

The word “systemic” is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran’s Administration, but we can’t study trauma now?

If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word “biased” gets me flagged. You can’t design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA

And then, all the Republicans in congress have predictably caved and are going to approve a manifest madman, “Bobby” as they call him, to control health and human services, while a narcissistic boob, Elon Musk, is running rampant through the country’s finances.

So what next? All political norms have been shredded. Democracy doesn’t matter. Anarchy reigns. The law is irrelevant — do you think the Supreme Court can bring reason back? We’re all helpless, and are reduced to spectators to our rapid, catastrophic destruction. It’s going to get much worse.

Is the only solution a violent overthrow of the Trump regime, a complete dissolution of all of the Trump precedents, and a rewriting of the US Constitution? We have to recognize that the US is broken.

It has long been a desire by the Republicans to meddle in science — let’s filter out the results we don’t like. Nature reports that their desire has been made manifest: US health agency seeks to cut gender-related terms from scientific papers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has mandated that all scientific manuscripts produced by its researchers that are under review at a journal be withdrawn so that certain language relating to gender can be stripped from them.

The directive, sent by the agency’s chief science officer to some staff members on 31 January, is meant to bring the CDC into compliance with an executive order issued last month by US President Donald Trump seeking to restore “biological truth” to the federal government by recognizing only two sexes: male and female. Executive orders can direct agencies inside the federal government but cannot change existing laws.

According to a copy of the e-mail, shared in the newsletter Inside Medicine, manuscripts must not include any mention of terms including ‘gender’, ‘transgender’, ‘pregnant person’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘non-binary’, among others. CDC scientists who co-author papers originating from outside the agency that include these terms are also expected to rescind their authorship.

It’s all very Orwellian. They will dictate what words we’re allowed to use, because they believe that they can bend reality to conform. It doesn’t work that way, though. They’re just going to silence scientists who know better.

The CDC mandate, however, erases mention of queer, intersex and transgender individuals from future literature and seems to legitimize “scientific sexism”, says James Mungin, a biomedical scientist at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who identifies as transgender. Under the new rules, CDC researchers would be unable to share basic demographic data, such as gender identity or sexual orientation, about study participants — omissions that could lead to inaccuracies or ethical breaches if scientists are barred from disclosing why certain participants were removed from a study, Mungin says. Furthermore, gender identity and sexual orientation are nearly impossible to exclude when it comes to the study and treatment of conditions such as HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, potentially causing harm to patients.

“If you’re working in basic science, you might get away with just references to sex, but gender is everywhere in public health,” says Ayden Scheim, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who identifies as trans and studies the health care of marginalized communities. “Unfortunately, I see two things happening: a lot of these withdrawn papers will never be published” because collaborators outside the CDC aren’t going to agree to omit data, Scheim says, “and in the long term, a lot of research that focuses on health inequities for women or LGBTQ+ people will disappear”.

There were a lot of scientists and lay people who threw around terms like “cancel culture” and “censorship” before Trump took office. Where are they now? They were so touchy about criticism or a refusal to platform bad ideas, but I don’t see them even acknowledging that these are actions well beyond anything that has gone before.

If we let them get away with censoring “gay” and “transgender,” what will we do when “climate change” is forbidden, or “evolution”?

Or “Jew”?

Here’s one way to convert America to a tyranny: give up on all those ineffective checks and balances in the Constitution by giving immense power to an unelected person with a novel title and no oversight at all. I’m talking about this fucking guy.

Elon Musk has gleefully accepted the job of wrecking the country.

We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.

In an obscenely capitalist country like ours, the power of the purse is absolute. He’s already trampling over privacy concerns to steal everything else.

An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.

I wouldn’t expect Trump to care, or even be aware of the problem, but where is AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Ford, Boeing, Bank of America, etc., all those giant companies whose data is being stolen by a jumped-up South African immigrant and competitor? I don’t want my data handed over to Musk, but I’m small potatoes. Some billionaires ought to get on his case.

Unless, of course, they like this part, which involves diminishing the power of the government.

But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government’s own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they’re used. Congress’s authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.

In case you’re wondering how Musk is going to disembowel government, he’s just blatantly firing people and confiscating rights, even when he has no recognized authority to do so. People are just accepting it.

Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications that they’re receiving, as well as the unusual dictats transforming their workplaces in the name of DOGE, are happening late at night and on weekends.

On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” option where they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent out on January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)

Before Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”

Who needs knives in the night when you’re armed with authoritarian memos? He’s just doing it. No one is stopping him. We need more people to rise up and resist.

So much of what he is doing is ridiculously petty.

Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says that unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to DEI, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, which read, “Be kind to everyone.”

OK. No more kindness. These monsters, and the people who appointed them, and the citizens who voted those people in, need to be treated in kind. Do not accept their officious nonsense. Like this one, from the new secretary of transportation:

Rosa Parks might have a few words to say about that. Shut up and sit in the back of the bus, says Secretary Duffy. You’re a distraction. He’s got air traffic controllers to fire.

Many newspapers around the country have refused to publish this Doonesbury cartoon. Why? Because they are owned by chickenshit rich people.

Don’t surrender without putting up a fight. That’s how the adjudicated rapist wins.