Another memo from the UM president

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.

Microbiologists, hang your head in shame (or fight back!)

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.

When an idiot is in charge of science’s purse strings…

Here’s a fantasy for you: a rich man uses his immense wealth to alleviate poverty, fund science that benefits all, or decides to distribute all of his money to worthy institutions. It never happens. Instead, we get the world’s richest man using his clout to get a job he isn’t qualified to do, who then uses his unwarranted power to do the opposite, and kill the research enterprise of the United States with one stupid stroke of his pen.

I’m not being dramatic. US research is the product of years of investment. There was a conscious decision to build up a more effective program of research and development after WWII, built upon the existing foundation of expertise in our universities (thanks, Vannevar Bush!). The government knew it would take long-term training and money and resources to create, and part of that was a system of federal grants to researchers with additional funds to the research institutions to build and maintain their infrastructure, which are called indirect costs. You don’t get anything for free! You want to encourage biologists to study the genome, well, you’re going to have to ask a university to maintain a large animal care facility, and hire people to keep an eye on the ethics of such research, and hire accountants to manage the expenses, and veterinarians to keep the animals healthy, and secretaries to help write up the work, and you’re going to have to pay publishers to disseminate it. It’s not cheap.

It’s true that there is some administrative bloat — Harvard is filthy rich, and I think they’ve been gaming the system to inflate those indirect costs — and the article at the link points out that there are a lot of regulations that could be streamlined, but to do that streamlining in a way that retains the useful necessities requires detailed analysis and careful pruning. Only an idiot would think you can just slash all indirect costs to the bone in one crude, extreme cut without totally disrupting all research at American universities.

Enter the idiot.

Musk doesn’t have the slightest clue what he is doing.

Yes, he is cutting funding for cancer research. He’s imposing a blanket, indiscriminate cut for all research. He’s going to gut a whole generation of scientists, a wound it would take decades to recover from, if there was any recovery possible. I suspect that instead of repair what’s going to happen is we’re going to replace universities with bible colleges, pandering to the populist idea that we can pray cancer away.

It required a coward to be this petty

A scene in an FBI building: the walls that were covered with words reflecting virtuous concepts were painted gray.

What I find depressing is picturing the thought that went on behind this action. Someone somewhere in the hierarchy thought it was a good idea to pass down an order to erase words like “fairness,” “leadership,” “compassion,” “integrity,” etc., all in order to wipe out the word “diversity.” No one stood up and said that this was silly and pointless and a waste of time and offensive.

Maybe no one at the FBI has a spine.

Perhaps it was appropriate that they erased the words “leadership” and “integrity.”

The argument for god from consistent anatomy

Aron Ra asked me to address a novel proof for the existence of god. You see, the only way you can get a nose in the middle of your face every time, or any kind of symmetry, is if a designer made it so. If you leave it to biology, you’ll get noses in random places on your body!

He really didn’t need a developmental biologist to explain this — the problem isn’t that the old goober in the picture doesn’t understand the developmental cascade that leads to a predictable morphology, it’s that he has a gross misconception that physics and chemistry and biology lack any process that can produce predictable outcomes absent a god skewing the results.

By the way, I was doing my best to keep it simple. I know that asymmetries are common. I can see, for instance, that my right forefinger is slightly longer than my left by about a millimeter; I know that my left ear is noticeably higher than my right (I had my peers loudly pointing that out in grade school.) Are those facts evidence that a god must not exist, or at least, that the god we have is terribly sloppy?

Zizians?

What the hell? I just learned about the Zizian death cult from Rebecca Watson. Why? What did I do to deserve this knowledge?

Short version: Zizians are trans vegan tech nerds who splintered away from the Less Wrong rationalist cult. Now they’re murdering people, and especially each other, to further some weird vision of a beautiful rational future where no one kills animals, putting Effective Altruism to work. I trace the problem not to veganism or trans or tech nerdiness, but to getting tangled up in the twisted arcane “philosophies” that are flourishing in Silicon Valley…and also generally to any obsessive extremism.

You’ll have to let Rebecca explain it all to you, because I don’t want to think about them anymore.

We don’t allow our cat outside…and she’s bitter about it

We have good reasons to forbid her. She’s a hateful little beast who sits in the window and hisses and snarls at anything that walks by. The few times she has escaped she charges off to stalk birds and squirrels. She’s just plain mean.

Now we have another reason: she might come back with a disease to kill us.

Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.

In one household, an infected cat might have spread the virus to another cat and to a human adolescent, according to a copy of the data table obtained by The New York Times. The cat died four days after symptoms began. In a second household, an infected dairy farmworker appears to have been the first to show symptoms, and a cat then became ill two days later and died on the third day.

She’d probably savor the idea of bringing us down a notch, but it looks like she’d be the one most likely to succumb. She’d probably want to do it anyway.

Scientists have long known that cats are highly susceptible to the virus. At least 85 domestic cats have been infected since late 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But there had not previously been any documented cases of cats passing the virus to people.

“Given the number of cats in the U.S. and the close contact with people, there is definitely a need to understand the potential risk,” said Dr. Diego Diel, a veterinarian and virologist at Cornell University.

Although cats may be infected when they prey on infected wild birds, cases among domestic cats in the United States began rising last year as the virus spread through dairy farms. On many farms, dead cats were the first signal that cows had been infected. Several recent cases in pet cats have also been linked to contaminated raw pet food or raw milk.

H5N1 is often fatal in cats, which may develop severe neurological symptoms.

By the way, notice the mention that this was on the CDC website until it was abruptly removed. We can’t trust any of our major health institutions any more, I guess.

Who is the disgrace now?

I have been told that I’m merely a “social justice” dishonest whackjob and that There are only two sexes, therefore only two “genders”. For a biology professor to insist otherwise is a disgrace, so I have to say just how right that is. I’m a wackjob, totally out of tune with contemporary scientific thinking, unlike Richard Dawkins.

Oh, wait. The American Society of Naturalists just sent out a letter about the White House’s policy.

Dear members of the American Society of Naturalists:
Recent actions by the Executive branch of the United States Government threaten to freeze scientific funding, disable public and scientific resources, inhibit academic freedom and free speech, and dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the United States. These actions will harm science, the people who contribute to science, and humanity as a whole which benefits from science. The Executive Council of the American Society of Naturalists wishes to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the core principles that have long guided our organization. Our mission as a society is to advance understanding of biological sciences, advocate for education and the environment, and foster an inclusive and equitable community. Political changes within the United States only serve to highlight the importance of our mission and strengthen our resolve to pursue our mission.
The pursuit of scientific knowledge requires adequate and reliable funding free from political pressures. We remain steadfast in our advocacy for both governmental and private scientific funding that allows researchers to follow evidence wherever it leads. Inquiry must not be curtailed, or data hidden, simply because the conclusion is unpopular with political leaders. Our organization will increase efforts to engage with policymakers to advocate for continued scientific funding, scientific free speech and inquiry, and rigorous application of scientific discoveries to guide policy. We will emphasize the crucial role of science in addressing society’s most pressing challenges, including the reality of global climate change, importance of conservation, or the complex nature of sex and gender. Our core disciplines of evolution and ecology are pertinent to many applied topics including public health, epidemiology, medicine, agriculture, and conservation, yielding benefits to human well-being and to nature. To suppress inquiry and ignore established knowledge is to forgo these benefits and cause active harm.
Equally important is our dedication to protecting and promoting free speech within scientific discourse. The scientific method thrives on open debate, challenging established ideas, and rigorous peer review. Efforts to police use of particular words instill fear, mistrust, and wall off important areas of research from discovery. As a society we have long supported open inquiry: funding student research grants, supporting scientific conferences, and holding debates on controversial topics. In the current state of politicized (and perhaps curtailed) federal funding, these initiatives are more important than ever, and the ASN Council will be looking into ways to expand such support to help our members (especially students) through the next few years.
Our society has always understood that recruiting, supporting and promoting our diverse membership is not just a goal, but a fundamental value. Fair treatment and equitable opportunity for our members, and for all people, are moral imperatives. Also, diverse perspectives, experiences, and approaches lead to more innovative solutions and more robust scientific outcomes. We will continue to actively support and expand opportunities for historically underrepresented groups in science. Everyone should be welcomed and able to contribute to scientific progress. These commitments—to reliable support for science, free scientific discourse, and inclusive opportunities to ensure that diverse people can participate in science —are not separate from our scientific mission but essential to its success. We want our members to know that the American Society of Naturalists will not shy away from our principles and will not self-censor. Our principles will continue to guide our actions and decisions. The Society will work to help our members through this difficult time (both within the United States and our international members affected by events in the US). We also encourage our members to advocate strongly for scientific funding, the use of sound science in guiding policy, and for diversity and equity within science. The ASN council will be discussing avenues to help our membership do so. Together, we will advance scientific knowledge while building a stronger, more inclusive scientific community that serves the interests of all humanity.

Ooops. Who is out of alignment with contemporary scientific thought, again?

In addition, here’s an older letter a 2018 letter to the HHS secretary from Hopi Hoekstra that is even stronger.

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the attempt by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth.

Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum. Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity.

Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. Our scientific societies represent over 3000 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. If you wish to speak to one of our experts or receive peer-reviewed papers that explain why there is a continuum of sexual expression, please contact us at president@evolutionsociety.org.

Damn. I know I try to keep what I teach consonant with what the scientific literature says, for the benefit of my teaching. I can think of a few biologists who are so far behind the times that we shouldn’t be paying any attention to their ideas about biology.

You know, I could do this all day, producing position statements from major scientific societies that actively reject what Dawkins and Coyne say, but I fear that would get boring fast. But it’s OK, I’m amused by all the know-nothings calling me names.