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May 21, 2025 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:42:35
Occam’s Sledgehammer: The 277th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
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Time Text
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
Dark Horse.
I know what the podcast is called.
I know it's one word.
I know the H is capitalized.
Welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number, is it 273?
It's 277.
Of course, 277.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
That is not what I meant.
Which is prime.
And I think given the beginning of this, I want to point out to our audience that I was hoping that we could get a mic on the dog.
Snore mic.
Snore mic.
Which you may be able to hear her rumbling in the background.
And then you suggested that perhaps we also do the dream running camera on the dog.
Sleep running cam.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
That would be fascinating.
Yes.
Did I mention that I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein?
You are Dr. Heather Haring, so that's all still true.
And here's the big news.
It is, here in Podcastistan, it is Prostate Week, which is the equivalent of Shark Week on cable television.
So anyway, I know people...
It's Prostate Week on this side of the table.
It's Prostate Week on every side of the table, and I know people, they wait all year.
For Prostate Week, because it makes such good podcasting.
I don't know if we'll get there, but I found a truly remarkable paper this week on the moral imperative to work towards uterine transplants for trans women.
That is to say, men cosplaying as women.
And, you know, so, you know, given that...
Prostate week it is.
Well, it is prostate.
Because if you don't have a prostate, you have no business talking about men or women, apparently.
That is a fair point.
I would also just add, I don't have the graphic here, but remarkably on that subject, there was a gigantic trans flag deployed over El Capitan this week to sow...
In Yosemite?
Yes.
The rock?
Yes, the claim by those who deployed it was that it proved that trans is natural.
A giant synthetic flag in a national park proves that trans is...
If it doesn't prove it, I don't know what would.
I do not know what any of the words they're using mean.
No, I mean, what are words for, really, other than threatening people?
Yeah, political winning.
Yeah, political winning.
That's what words are for, is political winning.
And even when they lose, they claim to be politically winning, because that's part of what political winning is.
Yeah, well, let me just say, as somebody who spent a lot of time in Yosemite as a kid and holds it dear, I mean, I know all Americans.
I've been there too.
I didn't spend as much time there as you did.
Yosemite was a relatively close, amazing, fantastically gorgeous and unbelievable national park that was a four-hour, five-hour drive from L.A. I don't remember.
It was a lot of hours, and I know that we were not halfway there.
But yes, it's a great place.
Eric needs to stay on his side of the car.
Well, that is why.
The law of armrest was invented.
Oh, for sure.
I mean, I think that's the reason for the armrest.
Yes.
Many people think it goes back to Arthurian legend, but it does not.
In any case, I gotta say, I did not need Yosemite politicized.
I really didn't.
I was perfectly comfortable to share it with...
You know, all Americans and other humans, because it is, of course, a global treasure, unique on Earth, and I did not need it to be used to prove a point about transness.
To fail to prove a point about transness.
Right.
To prove a point about transness or else is the way that works.
Or else, indeed.
So today we're going to talk about an experience you had at the doctor this week, or actually at a...
At a medical facility.
A doctor's center.
Yeah.
And then I'm going to share a letter I received from an MD-PhD student at Harvard this week and the commentary that I added to it, which I posted in Natural Selections, and then we're going to talk about that.
I've told you a little bit about it, but you have not heard the letter nor the commentary.
And we're going to do that.
And then we may have time for some other things.
Maybe not.
Without further ado.
That's right.
Adieu.
Without much ado, without much further ado.
Yes.
At the point that we have a-dude it, it will be a-dude.
Yes.
A-dude?
Maybe we should get on with it.
Well, your first sponsor is right at the top of the hour.
Oh, man.
Now I have to remember how to read.
Okay.
Well, all right.
I'm on it.
Three sponsors, top of the hour.
Yep.
Our first sponsor, Heather, is Timeline.
Timeline makes Mitopure, which contains a powerful postbiotic that is hard to get from your diet alone.
That is urolithin A. Found primarily in pomegranates, urolithin A has been the subject of hundreds of scientific or clinical studies.
Many of which find that it enhances mitochondrial function and cellular energy and improves muscle strength and endurance.
But how does it work?
Your mitochondria are the powerhouses of your cells, but like everything living, they can decay or get damaged.
The older we get, the more likely we are to have damaged mitochondria, which accumulate in joints and other tissues.
This is, in part, why mitophagy, the process by which damaged mitochondria are removed from cells, becomes less efficient the older we get.
The age-related decline of mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged or excess mitochondria, but related decline in mitophagy not...
No, wait a second.
Damn, I was doing so well with the reading.
Sorry, I forgot to pay attention.
You forgot to pay attention, and so you did not notice me reading the same sentence again.
And again.
Yes.
Was it an important one anyway?
It was.
It was this one.
It was, the age-related decline in mitophagy not only inhibits removal of damaged excess mitochondria, but also impairs the creation of new mitochondria, Heather, which results in an overall decline in cells.
Yes?
Go on.
Okay.
Mitopure from Timeline works by triggering mitophagy.
Quoting a research article published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2022, targeting mitophagy to activate the recycling of faulty mitochondria during aging is a strategy to mitigate muscle decline.
We present results from a randomized placebo-controlled trial in middle-aged adults where we administer a postbiotic compound, urolethan A, A known mitophagy activator at two doses for four months.
Months, not months.
Well, that's how it's pronounced.
Months.
The data show significant improvement in muscle strength, approximately 12%, with intake of urolithin A. We observe clinically meaningful improvements in urolithin A on aerobic endurance and physical performance, but do not notice a significant improvement on peak power output.
Furthermore, research published in Nature Medicine 2016 found that in mice, the beneficial effects of urolithin A on muscle physiology were independent of diet or age.
Take two soft gels of MitoPure a day for two months and you may see significant improvements in your muscle strength and endurance.
MitoPure enhances your cells' ability to clean themselves up and to regenerate new healthy mitochondria.
In combination with regular physical activity, And before you jump in,
let me just say that I had several conversations that will be released shortly.
While I was down in Austin for the premiere of Follow the Silenced, a movie, an excellent movie, about the plight of the vaccine injured from the COVID pandemic.
In any case, one of those conversations is a conversation with Dr. Lon Jones.
And in that conversation, he touches on...
This is a conversation that will be on the inside rail on Dark Horse.
Yes, it will be on Dark Horse shortly.
In that conversation, he discusses...
Urinary tract infections and some of the things that prevent them.
And I'm wondering if your lethal A is in fact connected to that conversation.
People should check it out because we discuss it towards the end of it.
That conversation is not out yet, but it will be out soon.
We may talk a little bit more about it later.
In any case.
Cool.
The floor is yours.
Oh, thank you.
And the desk and whatever you need for the purposes of this ad read.
How about the running dog cam?
That is the dogs.
And the dogs alone.
And it doesn't exist yet.
Our second sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
On Dark Horse, we have talked at length about how modern life puts our health at risk, including exposures to agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride in our water, food dyes, seed oils, the hazards of non-sticking coatings on cookware and bakeware.
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That should say a safer, healthier, slicker home.
Yes.
Shiker?
I mean, yeah, all right.
Shiker with a very high specific heat.
Enameled cast iron.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, absolutely.
That's what you want in your enamel cast iron.
I don't know how you could not have it.
You have no choice with enamel cast iron.
It's an easy goal to get to.
Yeah, in fact, it's so easy, it's tautological.
Yes.
Fantastic.
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They don't say this, but this feels to me a little bit like the difference between high-pasteurized products and not-pasteurized but otherwise purified-for-safety products.
The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free.
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Yeah, I was initially skeptical.
I am ever more convinced that this is an important set of issues and potential corrective for ills of modern life.
Yeah, and I think...
Often we have gotten products that we think, yeah, not for us, not necessary, or actually harmful.
We never thought that here.
But we're just skeptical.
And sometimes we just reject out of hand and say, not interested in trying it.
We've got many other interesting things that we know to think about.
And sometimes we say, okay, I'm going to look into it and start...
Trying it.
And, you know, only if they pass our, you know, admittedly, you know, anecdotal little home tests and bit of research, do we say yes.
And so, you know, we said yes to Timeline and we said yes to IMRA and we feel good about those choices.
Yep, absolutely.
All right.
Is it time for Prestate Week?
I'm sorry.
You know better than I do.
Yeah, I do.
All right.
So what am I referring to?
Well, obviously, everybody will have heard the News, and I will put it in quotes because I don't take anything at face value that comes out of the Democratic establishment.
But everybody will have heard that President Biden is apparently suffering from what is called stage 4 prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones.
And we're not going to dwell here too long.
I will say that there are a lot of us who are skeptical of the claim that this was just discovered, that if that is in fact his actual medical state, it is highly likely that that would have been known while he was president, and indeed before he had chosen to run for a second term, which he was of course forced to exit the race.
But anyway, we had a right to know.
We didn't know.
I don't know what we know now, but this has put prostate cancer on everybody's radar.
The next thing that happened is Scott Adams revealed that he is in fact suffering from prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones, and he is not expecting to live through the summer, which is very sad.
And I was heartened, A, to see how he's handling it, which you might not be so surprised.
He's a very thoughtful guy and In any case, his case is very rapidly progressing.
And then, I guess we have a...
An image of the tweet from Dr. Drew Pinsky, who in the aftermath of this revealed that he has prostate cancer, and he said he had a prostatectomy 12 years ago, etc.
And now the next part of this is just a pure coincidence.
So I have what is called prostatitis.
I have inflammation of the prostate, which is not unusual in men in their 50s.
I am a man in his 50s.
Itis being the suffix that namers of medical things affix to words to basically simply indicate inflammation of unknown origin.
The unknown origin part isn't inherently in the original, I think, Greek.
Whenever you hear something, itis, like, oh, that's gone and gotten inflamed, and we don't know why.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes we do know why, but the point is, the itis is a symptom of something, and it can be a symptom of cancer.
In my case, it's been looked at.
Nobody's concerned about it.
So I'm just going to tell you a few things about the prostate so you can process this information before I get to the interesting story that just by coincidence happened yesterday during Prostate Week here on...
podcast here in podcast to stand.
So, um, the, there is a test that is used to detect prostate issues.
It's called PSA.
It's prostate specific antigen.
Um, it gets elevated.
It's a blood test, it's blood work?
Yeah, it's a blood work.
If the number is climbing, that indicates a progressive thing.
So I have the very slight elevation just above what's considered normal, and it's been static for years.
So nobody's concerned about me in this regard.
But nonetheless, there is a question of the inflammation of the prostate, which I consider to be an adaptive mystery.
There's some reason that modern men are experiencing inflammation in this unusual organ.
I don't think we know what the explanation is.
If I had to hypothesize, I would say something modern in our diet or environment is being...
The prostate surrounds the urethra, so it is presumably exposed in some sense to things that are passing through the urethra, at least things that can diffuse out.
So I wonder if it's not an exposure issue.
Yeah, it seems likely.
And just to put some of the usual...
One of the things that may come back is, well, we're living longer.
And I've been hearing this from some not well-informed people who hate the idea of Maha.
uh who you know think that there's no problem with modern medicine and modern pharmaceuticals and the only reason that we're seeing you know more diagnoses of x y and z is that we're living longer than we used to um and this is frankly right uh so you know we do have um you know actually in america our life expectancy is declining somewhat but um our life expectancy is higher than it was 100 years ago And it has actually,
you know, if you hit the age of five, you are still more likely to live to 70, I think, than you were 100 years ago.
But there were plenty of 70-year-olds 100 years ago, and 1,000 years ago, and 10,000 years ago, almost certainly.
So what we have in terms of the major demographic shift is real increases in maternal and infant health, and thus decreases in, yes, maternal death, but that's not going to affect these numbers so much, but infant death.
So we have far fewer babies dying in the very early stages, which of course takes the...
It takes the life expectancy up.
Yes.
I mean, when somebody dies at six months, it drags the average down a huge amount.
So the fact that there was a lot of infant mortality distorts that number.
If I can put it in another context, lots of people didn't make it to 50 in the past.
But the point is, a huge number of people, a huge fraction of the population did.
And so the degree to which natural selection can see...
The lifespan, you know, between 50 and 70, let's say, is considerable.
So it's not a failure that is the result of the fact that selection can't maintain the prostate at that age.
It is something else.
And my guess, my strong suspicion, as it is yours, is that there's something modern going on.
I will also say, in my case, I think bicycle riding actually is a probable Contributor.
I've been an avid bicyclist since I was a kid, and it is known to create a hazard of inflammation.
Yeah, the pressure points in a bicycle.
I mean, I ended up actually many, many years ago with an MRI because of numbness in my hands and arms.
And ultimately, I was like, oh, it's because of your grips.
It's because of the placement of your handlebars and how you're riding.
And you will notice that most modern...
Bicycle seats used by men have a cutout to relieve pressure on the prostate.
But how effective that is, we don't know.
In any case, I certainly rode for decades before those seats were available.
So anyway, probable contributor.
But none of this has anything to do with...
That's funny.
I read that cutout as saving ounces.
Nope.
It's saving your prostate.
Okay.
Okay.
So none of this is really important to the story in question.
The story in question, just purely accidentally here during Prostate Week, I happen to have an appointment that I have long been trying to get for a scan just to figure out what is going on with the inflammation of my prostate.
My prostate, which is not actually enlarged, but the inflammation going inward is creating pressure on the urethra.
So, okay, that's it for the embarrassing stuff.
Here's what happened.
So I went, I drove, I had to leave the island.
Actually, initially, this is interesting, I think.
Initially, my scan was scheduled for on the island where an MRI truck drives onto the island.
Many of you will live in communities where a truck comes by, you know, once a week and scans are scheduled.
I had it scheduled on the island and then they canceled it on me and it turns out that the resolution of the machine necessary is not part of the mobile apparatus, so I had to leave.
Go.
I had to go to America to get the scan.
That's a joke that won't be obvious to people.
But here in the archipelago in which we live, which is, of course, in the United States of America, it is remarkable how much it feels like you're actually entering a different country when you go to the mainland.
Yeah.
We all agree it's very near to America.
But in any case, so I went.
I drove to this place where scans is what they do.
And, you know, I checked in, they got me into the gown, and as I'm laying down on the machine, where they, you know, slide the tray into the big donut thing that makes all the noise, the tech says to me, okay, now we're going to start an IV drip with some gadolinium agent in it for contrast.
I was shocked because I did not know that contrast was going to be involved in this scan, and I'm now alarmed.
Anytime you want to give me something through a needle, well, what the heck is that?
Especially if it's metal.
Right, and in this case, it's metal.
It's gadolinium, which I know nothing about.
But what I do know is that if you chase down the supposedly safe and effective adjuvants that are used in vaccines, that they turn out to be...
Not at all safe and over-effective.
They trigger your immune system to freak out over all kinds of stuff it shouldn't, and they stay in the body, and the body has no way of excreting them because it doesn't have any evolutionary experience with this sort of thing.
So I became alarmed.
I did not sit up because I was, in fact, Not able to, but...
You already strapped down?
I think I wasn't exactly strapped down, but I was in a position where that would have been disruptive.
And so I said, well, tell me about this contrast agent.
And she didn't...
It has an acronym that I've forgotten.
But anyway, what I found out from her was that it is primarily...
She went and talked to the radiologist.
Not yet.
It's primarily made of gadolinium, which is a rare earth element.
And that it does exactly what you would expect it to do, which is it allows you to see things in a scan which are difficult to see otherwise.
And I said, is it necessary to the scan?
She said, you can decline it.
Though I got the impression that no one ever does.
But also that's not an answer.
Right.
Is it necessary?
You can decline it.
Well, if by declining it, I render the scan useless, then I have to make a different decision.
Which is exactly...
Do I or do not get the scan.
Which is exactly what I said to her.
And she said I could call the radiologist.
And I said, would you?
So she stepped out of the room.
I was able to hear her conversation or her side of the conversation with the radiologist.
And she came back and she said, it's very useful, but it's not required.
And I said, the scan will...
Still have value without it, and she said yes, and so anyway, I declined this contrast agent.
Then, after the scan, in the dressing room, I discovered that there was a sheet that actually talks about the contrast agent.
Jen, do you have an image of the sheet?
And you had theoretical access to this in advance, but you hadn't been told you were reading it.
Yeah, which could just be an oversight.
So anyway, are you able to read it?
Barely.
You want me to try?
Yeah.
Information concerning gadolinium contrast material.
If we can make that any bigger, that would help.
I can try though.
As part of your examination, the radiologist may deem it advisable to give you an IV injection of a contrast agent containing gadolinium.
This injection may help the physician more accurately diagnose your condition.
Although these contrast agents have been used solely in millions...
Safely, if you can send it to me, I really can't see it well enough.
If you could just send it to me, I can read it off my computer.
That would be useful.
Do I have it on my computer?
you do.
Okay.
Yeah.
Um, So, anyway.
So, you want to read the rest of it?
I can't make it bigger here either.
What kind of a freaking skin thing is this?
Although these contrast agents have been used safely in millions of cases, minor reactions, principally headache or nausea, do rarely occur and serious or life-threatening reactions have been reported.
A rare but serious complication known as NSF.
Oh, no.
Known to the NSF as NSF.
A rare but serious complication known as NSF has been reported when gadolinium is administered to patients on dialysis or who have severe kidney failure.
Okay, so...
This, after the scan was already over and I had declined the agent, led me down a path where I started looking into various aspects of this.
At first, I was concerned that gadolinium might cross the blood-brain barrier and end up in the brain.
I was also concerned that the body might have no way of excreting it just the same way that...
Aluminum accumulates because the body doesn't have a mechanism for dealing with it.
There's initially a whole layer of material that suggests that, in fact, it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier if the blood-brain barrier is intact, and that it is excreted by the body.
You know, almost all of it is gone within 24 hours.
So that's...
Very comforting.
It doesn't necessarily make it safe that it was coursing through your veins, which is in fact what it would be doing in this case.
It's not even an intramuscular injection.
It's, you know, it's an IV.
Also, on what basis should we assume that anyone has a fully intact blood-brain barrier at this point?
A hundred percent.
So I started looking into things that are known to damage the blood-brain barrier.
And there are a list of things that are commonly encountered.
For example, glyphosate damages the blood-brain barrier.
Glyphosate, which is apparently found in every single California wine, including organic wines, apparently having leaked through the environment.
BPA, a common ingredient in plastics that is often in contact with food, damages the blood-brain barrier.
Alcohol damages the blood-brain barrier.
The idea that it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier if it's intact So in gadolinium, the tiny bit that I looked into is basically only in...
In human endeavors, this is the thing it is used for.
Yeah.
So if in autopsies, gadolinium is being found in humans, it is from this contrast dye used for MRIs.
Exactly.
So to put a little more color on that, gadolinium is used for MRI studies specifically because it has highly unusual electromagnetic properties.
I think it has seven free electrons.
Under different conditions, it's differently magnetic.
It's very attracted to magnetic fields.
And so, of course, the MRI is entirely...
I mean, the MRI is a freaking miracle of a device.
What it does by, you know, exciting these electromagnetically charged particles, it allows you...
To see internally, to basically, you know, thin slice an organ or a part of a person.
And it's totally safe.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's totally safe, but at least...
No, we know it's not totally.
You know, you don't want to just, on a whim, get an MRI any more than on a whim you want to get an X-ray.
Well, let's put it this way.
I don't know that the magnetism...
is destructive.
I will not be at all surprised to discover that it is, but I don't know that the magnetism is itself destructive.
I would imagine there's a whole lot of radiation in these scans.
It's not x-ray radiation, so it's not as bad as a CAT scan, but nonetheless, I'm sure there's a cost to be paid for MRIs.
But nonetheless, this particular element is used because it has this very unusual electron configuration that causes it to be very reactive to the fields that are generated by this device.
It is in fact toxic, highly toxic.
Galidinium.
Yes, gadolinium is...
It is highly toxic in its elemental form, so it is bound to a ligand to cause it to be non-toxic, which raises a question about...
How long does it stay bound?
There's certainly some conditions in which it becomes unbound.
So anyway, the answer is I'm not saying that this contrast agent isn't safe enough to use.
Well, no.
I think I am saying it's not safe enough to use.
I'm not saying it is so harmful that it is not justified.
I am saying that What we have is the same pattern that we have seen in so many places now, where there is a layer of literature that will lead you into complacency, and then there is another layer of literature that will lead you into alarm if you ever discover it, because you will find out this is unnatural, persistent, toxic, that other features of our novel environment cause it to be more dangerous than that initial layer of literature would lead you to imagine.
And so, of course, the upshot of the entire story is that this is the place where informed consent plus liability is the key.
Now, in this case, I don't...
Let me say this carefully.
I do not bear any ill will to the people in this imaging center.
I do believe that I was due a warning.
Hey, we're planning to give you an IV of this stuff.
You should look into it before you come.
If you decline it, it will reduce the quality of the scan by blah, blah, blah.
But it is not required.
Instead of the sort of momentum that there was to giving me this thing.
Now, I understand why the momentum is there.
I'm guessing.
That you either come in with a kidney issue that will cause your doctor to flag this as don't give them the agent because it causes serious side effects, but that short of that, people just go along with it, not knowing what I now know as a sadder but wiser post-COVID biologist who has learned about...
metals and their various medical uses and the horrifying consequences of them So, you know, I did have the sense that I dodged a bullet, right?
I was able to, you know, if I had been just not really paying attention, you know, okay, we're going to give you an IV.
If, you know, it could easily have been done and I would, I would greatly regret it.
I have a question about the story.
You did not already have an IV at all.
Nope.
That is part of what protected you here, which is that, you know, when you first told me the story, I said, well, I've had an MRI, and I didn't have the contrast medal, right?
And either they weren't using it then, because it was some decades ago, or it wasn't relevant for that.
It was a grosser thing that they were looking for, and so they didn't need the help, didn't need the boost.
But in general, an MRI...
The idea of an IV associating in time and space with an MRI is strange to me.
And so once you have an IV in your arm, it's real easy for you not to be paying close attention to what it is that's being put into it.
And so in this case, the barrier was slightly higher.
I think you would have caught it either way.
But if you'd already had an IV for reasons I can't imagine.
The tech came in and said, okay, we're just, you know, maybe didn't even say anything because somewhere in the paperwork that you signed, presumably there was some, you know, something that you signed away and, you know, just started to add something that, you know, maybe it was a slightly different color that you looked at and went, wait, what hold up, right?
So because this required two important steps, it was easy to see and, you know, relatively easy to stop, but it also took...
Your presence of mind while you're lying down, getting ready for the procedure that you've been trying to get for over a year.
Most people aren't going to do that.
They aren't going to do that.
And, you know, so at the point that I had surrendered my clothes and put on this gown, I didn't have my phone with me.
So I couldn't do a quick check and figure out whether or not my alarm was justified.
Also, phones aren't so good with MRIs.
Yeah, but I mean...
I didn't have it, and so I couldn't reach out to any of the people that I am lucky enough to have direct access to.
I did reach out afterwards, and I said, did I screw up?
And the answer that came back was no.
Actually, there are a lot of complications that come from these contrast agents, and more to the point, there is a corrective step that the radiologist can do in reading the scan.
I'm sure it isn't...
100% the equal of.
But the question of whether or not it was a worthy risk to take, in my opinion, it clearly wasn't.
But if I think about the average person who has not had the graduate education in medical shenanigans that you and I got from COVID, that person is going to be very reluctant to stop that momentum to getting the contrast agent.
Not least because the scan is very expensive.
And so, you know, one of the thoughts is, well, am I going to ruin the scan, be months down the road for it being rescheduled, and have wasted, you know, $1,000 or more on a scan that is going to be, let's say you're a person with regular insurance.
Isn't your insurance company going to say, well, why'd you decline?
What do you mean you have to redo it?
Right.
It's safe.
And so the pressure that would be brought on a normal person who hadn't had our experiences would be, I think, enough to get most people just to...
Is it safe?
Oh, yes, it's very safe.
Then give it to me.
And I can't tell you how glad I am that I didn't get it at this point.
The idea...
Well, I think I didn't mention that in the literature, there is a distinction drawn between the contrast agent crossing the blood-brain barrier and retention in the brain, which I think has to be a non-distinction, right?
So let's say that maybe...
Not necessarily.
How did it get there?
Right, but if it crosses the blood-brain barrier, it can also cross right back out and not be retained in the brain.
So you need it for it to cross the blood-brain barrier for it to be retained in the brain.
Exactly.
But it being retained in the brain is not a necessary condition for having crossed the blood-brain barrier.
I 100% agree, but I guess my point is, if you're saying, well, it's not that it crossed the blood-brain barrier, it's retained in the brain, you're effectively admitting...
You shoot it up directly into my brain then?
Right.
Now, I would argue that...
Probably what's going on if the blood-brain barrier really does exclude it, which, you know, take that with a grain of salt.
But let's say it does, but a broken blood-brain barrier, which my guess is we are all suffering from more often than we know because of all of the exposures we can't control to all of the solvents and other things in the world.
That, okay, so it crosses the broken blood-brain barrier and then it's retained in the brain.
Maybe it's even held in the brain by the blood-brain barrier.
I don't know.
But nonetheless, the idea that it's being found in autopsies years later is reason to be very cautious about this stuff.
And to make a final point, so my main point is informed consent and liability would have had somebody provide the evidence to me.
Here's what we're going to give you.
Here's the benefit from it.
Here's what we know about harms.
Here's what we don't know about harms.
And my guess is that there is just a broken model inside medicine which says, well, we've tested it.
It's safe.
Sorry, no such thing.
Right?
You're taking some novel thing and you're giving it to people.
And you've done some test that might be able, if the test was really well done, to quantify the amount of harm in the period of time in the study.
But how long was your study?
Right?
You don't know what the long-term impacts of these things are if you didn't specifically look at them.
And there's only so long you could have looked at them.
So I think the problem is, let's say that you're in radiology.
And the question is, okay, patient is coming in.
They're going to get a scan.
Do you want to give them the contrast agent?
And the answer is, well, why not?
It's safe.
They don't have diabetes.
So it will make the scan a little better.
Why wouldn't we do it?
Why wouldn't you use the tools you have?
Right.
Why wouldn't you use the tools we have?
And the answer is because there ought to be a strong bias against introducing anything novel into the body, even if you think it's harmless.
Right?
Because the chances that you will discover later that it wasn't harmless are spectacular.
So my sense, especially in the case of a radiologist, who you don't even meet, right?
The radiologist is sitting in a room looking at screens, and that means that their sense of obligation to not...
Expose a patient to a risk that patient doesn't need to face is reduced compared to a regular doctor.
Who at least has to look you in the eye.
Right, who at least has to look you in the eye.
And if you ask questions, hey doc, is it safe?
Oh yeah, it's safe.
Well, how do you know?
How long was the study done in which you looked for effects?
Oh, I don't know.
Well, then I think I'll decline, right?
So the ability to have that conversation is important and intermediated through a tech, you know, and a pro forma.
I mean, at least they did have that little sheet in the waiting room, but that's presumably about legally protecting them, right?
I needed to have my attention called to it.
We're going to ask you this question when you get in there.
I needed more information.
The ability...
You know, I couldn't be informed at the point I was already lying on the table, right?
I suppose having encountered that sheet, if I had seen it before, you know, when I put my gown on, I suppose I still have my phone and I could have looked it up, but how many people are going to have that?
You know, the ability to even process what they would find in a search, right?
What they're really going to get back is that first layer of reassuring information.
Oh, it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier.
It's safe.
It's excreted from the body 98% in 24 hours, blah, blah, blah.
That sounds pretty good.
You want your scan to be diagnostic, don't you?
Right, exactly.
So anyway, I guess the message here is we have a lot of work to do upgrading the quality of our...
We need a lot more information than we have access to.
We need to understand our rights.
Just the same way you get a Miranda warning when you're being arrested so that you are being made aware of your rights at that moment so that you know you have them and you don't incriminate yourself.
We need to have our...
Medical Miranda.
Yeah, medical Miranda is something like that.
And then, I don't know how you do this exactly, but people also need to be made wiser with respect to what it means that there's a study that says something is safe.
It really means very little, right?
It has to be an excellent study, and the perverse incentives and difficulties in creating an excellent study mean that excellent studies are few and far between.
Informed consent and liability is the key.
I just wanted people to understand that even for somebody who I think is now highly sophisticated in understanding both my rights with respect to informed consent and, you know, the biology of injected stuff, metals, etc., even for somebody in that case, you know, I was one lapse in judgment.
One minute away from having something...
Or just not paying attention to every single step.
I don't think it even would have required a lapse in judgment.
Maybe this is my point about the IV.
If you'd already had the IV in, it wouldn't have required a lapse of judgment.
It just would have required a lapse in attention, which is a lower bar.
Yes, the default needs to be no.
Yes, that's right.
The default is not no, it's yes.
And this is once again a violation of the precautionary principle, which I think we need, you know, the precautionary principle, as I've said many times, is very difficult to instantiate.
But as a logical tool, it is extremely important when you're dealing with complex systems, especially ones with your health tied up in them.
So, all right.
That's my story.
And I've stuck to it.
You sure have.
All right.
Okay, so this week we actually both received a letter from a student, an MD-PhD student at Harvard, and I responded to him.
It was a very compelling letter, and I've published it on National Selections, and I'm going to read that along with my commentary here shortly, but let me just say a few things first, and then we'll talk about it.
So, MD-PhD, for those who recognize those letters as separate things but not as together, is a relatively new, like I think just a few decades old probably, phenomenon of a dual degree granting program where people who are likely to want to be research doctors as opposed to clinicians,
although anyone with an MD could presumably act as a clinician as well, seek both the PhD, which is the terminal degree, the highest degree in science space and research space, I don't know if Michigan, when we were there, had an MD-PhD program.
Maybe it did.
It probably did.
They were increasingly common.
They were getting common there.
And I don't know a ton about them.
And so in response to And he has asked me to redact his name, but there's a lot of identifying things in what he's written.
And he said, I don't mind if I'm recognized within the Harvard community, which says something about the community of people he's in, good things.
But he just didn't want the public attention outside.
I asked him a number of questions about his research, about the tragic early death of his mother, about what he knows about the particular cuts.
And we had a good back and forth.
And he said, you can publish any of my words here.
Just redact my name.
And the one thing I'll say before I read it is that my original title, which my original subtitle for the piece was something like, and I've now edited it out, was something like, Doge takes out federal grants and fellowships.
And one of the commenters on the piece said, you know, interesting stuff you're writing about here, but the doge part isn't right.
This wasn't doge.
This was an attempt by the administration to hold Harvard and other universities to account for basically equity-based admissions and DEI and such.
And indeed, my interlocutor, the young man...
Pursuing the MD-PhD at Harvard had indicated that in some of what he had written to me.
And so I had to use Doge in this sort of sensu-lata way to indicate the whole collection of things that are being done in this to use...
A metaphor that comes up in this piece, a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel to fix the problems.
And so I did, and I responded to the comment, and I changed the subtitle of the piece, and I footnoted the first time I used the term doge in the piece to indicate this.
But I wanted to say, too, that I also used the term antifa in the piece.
And exactly the same problem applies there.
And I was a tiny bit more careful in my use of the word Antifa, in part because Nancy Rollerman, who's a friend of ours, who I also cite here, who did a lot of sort of boots-on-the-ground work with the activists, the protesters, the violent protesters in Portland during that summer of 2020 after George Floyd died in Minneapolis.
Trying to integrate with those people.
And at some point she was recognized and they were not having any of it anymore.
But her point was, yes, Antifa is here, but this isn't just Antifa.
And indeed, it's not clear to me that Antifa are mostly what is leading this thing.
And yet for most of us, it's far easier to say, you know, Antifa.
And so it's this sort of sensu lato as opposed to sensu stricto.
Like, what is Antifa?
What is Doge?
Those terms have been defined by the people who are implementing the things, but I don't know that it's our obligation under all circumstances when it's not our primary focus to keep to their original defining terms.
And so I'm in...
I'm comparing and contrasting here sort of the doge thing that is happening downstream of Trump administration and the Antifa thing that was happening on the streets of many American cities in 2020 and on both sides temporarily of that.
So if I get you correctly, there is a Orientation of this administration to get rid of bureaucracy and bad structure.
And part of that is DOGE itself, which is an entity.
And part of that is just the ethos.
So Department of Government Efficiency, maybe it's just OGE.
There's a government efficiency, and then there's the department that's dealing with it.
But they are obviously related and of a piece.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I wanted to point out the Antifa thing, because this is true all over the place.
And I don't think that we should be as both accurate...
Certainly as accurate as possible, but our obligation to precision when the precision emerges from the people who are doing the things and may themselves have reasons to obscure narratives is not actually inherently our obligation.
Okay, so I'm going to share this and then we talk about it.
Okay.
Letter from Harvard.
Can you see my screen?
Good.
And so I change the subtitle to What Happens Downstream of the Eradication of Federal Grants and Fellowships?
This week I received the following letter.
It is reprinted here with permission by the author, although he is asked to have his name redacted.
I provide commentary after.
He writes, I am an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School.
I am the first in my family to go to college and the son of a working-class household that knows the weight of loss and the hope of science to recover such losses.
I am also a three-time Trump voter from Washington State, and as one among few conservatives at Harvard, I think my perspective is quite unique.
When I was 11, I lost my mother, a strong, beautiful, and stunningly brilliant woman to cancer at the age of 48. That loss became a defining compass in my life.
It is what led me to medicine, to science, and eventually to Harvard.
From St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, to the hospitals and labs boasted by Harvard, I have devoted over a decade of my career to understanding the proteomic and biochemical underpinnings of cancer.
Having the honor of being a member of such an institution in a fully funded MD-PhD is a role I do not take lightly.
It is the motivation of my life.
My current research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, kinase signaling and mass spectrometry aims to understand how cancer cells rewire signaling networks and how we might stop them.
So many of cancer's complexities rest beyond what is immediately perceptible to us, making AI critical in redefining our understanding of this disease.
Our discoveries have real implications for drug development, targeted therapies, and the future of precision oncology.
The algorithms I write in this endeavor have tremendous national security interest, and the scientific knowledge accrued in this field has great potential to impact the broader public.
This is the very reason we devote so much to the funding of good science.
Let me just take a step back a moment and say, I asked him a lot of questions, and I pushed back on some of the claims, and most of that interchange is not here.
But, you know, he's making some strong claims here, some of which I don't completely agree with, but the small parts I don't completely agree with don't do anything to diminish his overall claim here.
This week I received word that the grant funding which supports my research, and that of countless other physician scientists and training, has been terminated by the federal government.
In fact, a majority of my MD /PhD cohort who have fully funded positions in the medical school and graduate school are no longer being funded.
In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has abruptly ended NIH funding to Harvard Medical School, including the cancellation of 32 F30 Fellowship Awards and both of our MD and PhD training grants, representing millions of dollars lost just within our small cohort of 100 trainees, all of whom are funded by the NIH.
These cuts are not based on scientific merit, fiscal necessity, or public health priorities.
They are political, and they threaten to unravel decades of progress.
I want your readers to understand what this means.
It means students like me, students from low-income backgrounds with a real hunger to effect change in this world, may no longer have a path to contribute to the future of medicine.
So again, I'm not reading my footnotes here, but I footnote that with...
I do not see any reason that this is going to affect lower income students more than higher income students because while familial wealth obviously allows people to go to schools where parents without the ability to pay tuition wouldn't be able to go, we're talking about whole research programs and familial wealth doesn't pay for entire research programs except in very rare conditions.
It means that entire labs will grind to a halt.
It means that research into Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, and more may be delayed or derailed.
It means that scientific innovation, which has long been a point of pride and promise in this country, is now vulnerable to political retaliation.
For those of us who have given our lives to research, this isn't a funding issue.
It's a moral issue.
To defund science is to betray the very people we seek to serve, patients, families, and the future.
I urge you to shine a spotlight on this story.
There is more than academic inconvenience at stake.
There is a fundamental question of who we are as a country and whether we will continue to stand behind science, truth, and the kind of future my mother dreamed her son might live to build.
Sincerely, MD-PhD candidate at Harvard Medical School.
So the author and I exchanged several emails after he sent me this.
He provided both more details on his research, which I put some of that in a footnote as well here, and moving words on the tragic early death of his mother.
I am compelled that he is doing valuable and honest scientific work, and that his agreement with Harvard was contingent on Harvard's agreements with NIH, which have been yanked through no fault of his own.
As the author of the letter says in a later communication with me, "Scientific funding is largely bloated and cuts are certainly necessary, but outright termination of funding across entire universities likely does more harm than good." I agree with him, but let's take a step back for a moment.
American science has become so reliant on federal funding that even the wealthiest institutions run much of their operations on the taxpayer's dime.
Or perhaps it is especially the wealthiest institutions that rely the most on federal funds.
The National Science Foundation, different as if, runs an annual survey called the Higher Education Research and Development Survey.
The Heard Survey attempts to summarize how much research each institution of higher education in the United States does, as measured by that most quantifiable of proxies, dollars.
That is...
Research is variable in quality and effect, but dollars are dollars, so let's assume that the best research is both the most expensive and the best funded, and just count the grant dollars that come in.
These assumptions are some of what led us into the scientific morass we're in today, but put that substantial criticism aside for the moment, what does the herd survey reveal?
Spend time looking through many of the HERD survey's tables, if you will, but in case you're not so inclined, just take a look at these top 15 rows of Table 24, which shows federally financed higher education R&D expenditures for fiscal years 2010 to 2023.
So I'm going to have to go back into the main part of my thing to read the rest of the piece, but this is, again, this is Table 24. I didn't pick the most egregious one, and this just happened to be the one that shows what I wanted to show.
Over the last 13 years, so one thing is that these amounts are in thousands of dollars, so just the top right cell.
In 2023, across all institutions in the U.S., there was not $59 million, but $59,603,993,000 in federal expenditures going to research at American institutions.
Johns Hopkins received by far the most, $3 billion, $324 billion.
1,551.
In 2010, Johns Hopkins received a mere 1,700,000.
And that's one of the things that I really want to point out here, that these numbers are staggering in their scope, but also that the column to the left, 2010 up through 2023, you see across every single institution, and I've just shown the top 15 here.
Harvard does not make the top 15, in fact.
When you look at all funding for research, Harvard is in the top 15, but actually Harvard gets less of its research funding from federal sources than most of the top funded universities, but the big R1 universities.
But in every single case, the amount of federal funding these institutions are receiving from 2010 to 2013, which is not that long a span of time, a mere 13 years, is doubling or more.
No, sorry.
It's going up 50% or more, and in many cases, it's in fact doubling or more.
So, going back out here, I already said data are on thousands of dollars.
All of the top earners in federal grant monies are garnering substantially more every year, which shows us that, you know, just like at the individual level, money begets money at the institutional level.
And as I pointed out, the total amount of federally financed higher education R&D expenditures in 2023 was over $59 billion.
These are amounts of money that we have a hard time understanding what they mean, and of course, without knowing what the entire rest of the federal budget is, it's hard to compare, but by any metric, that's a lot of money.
Taxpayer dollars fund American science at a level that is difficult to comprehend and utterly shocking to many.
How science can and should be funded is a tricky question with no easy answers.
Back in the era of gentlemen scientists, being born white and male into a family of means was necessary if one wanted to try one's hand at science.
Today, being the wrong race, sex, or class are not inherent barriers to being a scientist.
Sure, this is progress.
But when you make headway in solving one set of problems, be assured that you will create new ones.
Now that science is available to more people, how shall it be funded?
If it is to be funded by the public, as so much of American science is, who gets to make the decisions?
Letting only experts decide, those people who are already intimately familiar with the questions and methods in play, creates the perfect conditions for the same kind of circle jerk we see in peer review.
Science becomes a popularity contest, and the most fashionable ideas, rather than the ones with the most promise, get funded.
But letting people wholly unfamiliar with the research decide what will get funded seems absurd.
On what basis would they make their decisions?
Public funding of science seems to me to be the, or at least a, right solution, but operationalizing it fairly and objectively may be impossible.
Collectively, we have allowed the entire system to become broken.
So much of what passes for science isn't science at all.
The questions being asked are overly simplistic, or the research is corrupt, or the whole enterprise comprises a rejection of reality.
And I've got links to evidence of all of that in the footnotes.
And yet...
Actual science, science which is not beset with conflicts of interest or incompetence or fraud, is a beautiful and necessary human endeavor.
And much of the value of scientific exploration is not in the form of obvious positive ramifications for human health or well-being.
We can't know what avenues may open up later as a result of basic research today.
We cannot know.
So it may be fun to laugh at absurd-sounding research, but we cannot restrict ourselves to asking only questions that have obvious utility.
If we do so, our horizons will narrow, our region will constrict, and ultimately we will have no creativity, no analysis, no capacity to do it.
This is the unhooking of the human spirit.
Science is an expansive and liberating endeavor that, when edited down to only its most practical manifestations, becomes a straitjacket.
Science is and must remain open.
Technology and engineering are important too, but they're different.
Basic research, the kind that just tries to answer questions about reality, is necessary.
But we are failing to teach people to think broadly, to ask big questions, to make careful predictions that follow from hypotheses.
These are at the core of science.
Instead, today's scientists are too often trained to do highly specific things with very narrow scope.
And yet, again, and yet, there are many good scientists still out there, with more in the wings.
Surely some among them are at Harvard.
A May 14 email signed by both the President and Provost of Harvard began thusly: We write today to reaffirm the university's commitment to the research enterprise as we navigate this extraordinarily challenging time.
Last month, the federal government announced a freeze on more than $2 billion of grants and contracts that have been competitively awarded to Harvard researchers.
A freeze of $2 billion in grants and contracts is immense.
As the MD-PhD student who wrote to me said in a later message to me, the approach that is currently being taken by the Trump administration is with a sledgehammer rather than with a scalpel.
His analogy is a good one.
Is a sledgehammer to the entire enterprise the only way to do this?
Would a scalpel work?
I don't think so.
Scalpels are designed to do detail work.
They don't work at scale.
Sledgehammers, on the other hand, can be scaled up.
Sledgehammers, wrecking balls, bombs, agents of destruction exist at every scale.
Maybe it all needs to be destroyed before being rebuilt anew.
Then the precision work can begin.
I remember, however, one of the most salient critiques of the leftist activists who took over American cities during the summer of 2020 after George Floyd died in Minneapolis.
Those activists, Antifa clad in black bloc among them, had already been destroying good things for some years, including at the Evergreen State College, when my professorship there was unraveling, and in Portland, Oregon, where I lived afterwards.
Nancy Rommelman, who had been living in Portland for many years when the activist mob came for her husband's business, brought that salient critique of these activists to the table.
They create nothing.
She said.
Destruction is easy, and they are good at it.
They are creating only rubble and emptiness, with no thought to what happens afterwards.
This is mere vandalism.
So is the doge, again, sensu lato, approach akin to that of leftist activists, then?
Or is the comparison unfair?
Antifa terrorized the good citizens of cities across America, including Portland, where they showed us who was boss by finally, finally knocking over several historic public sculptures, including those of presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, and sufficiently vandalizing an iconic bronze elk sculpture such that it was quietly disappeared.
The elk had it coming, presumably.
One could argue that leftist activists had some real grievances, persistent bias and prejudice on even playing fields that would not level themselves.
Those small rocks of grievance, however, were overrun by rivers of confusion, hedonism, and fury.
Doge is terrorizing good scientists by yanking their funding midstream, breaking contracts for work that had already begun, and effectively breaking promises to young scientists who had not merely worked hard, but worked well to get where they are.
They do not deserve to be terrorized.
Doge is also, however, terrorizing the very university administrators who have helped create and benefit from the mess.
Those of us who voted for this administration, myself included, knew that the swamps of federal graft and other corruption needed to be drained.
We knew that it would get ugly.
This is very ugly indeed.
It is also true that the hypocrisy of the administrators who helped create the grotesque mess that is being so uglily dismantled is now on full display.
Here is the director of Harvard's joint MD-PhD program in a May 16 email that describes the vast cuts to Harvard's federal funding while asking the MD-PhD students to "stay focused and keep doing your critically important work." I'm not going to read all of this here because most of it is already in my piece, but the final paragraph that I've...
Clipped here, it's not the final paragraph of his email, says, In the meantime, I've taken on a new full-time role, emergency fundraising, something that, as you know, was already top of mind for me as part of our 50th anniversary celebration, but none of us could have imagined just how urgent and consequential that effort would become.
At least some among Harvard's leadership apparently have heavy hearts and unwavering senses of duty.
I do not doubt that this is true.
But where was the leadership at Harvard when, for instance, evolutionary biologist Carol Hooven was driven out of her position for daring to take the obvious position that sex in humans is real and binary?
Dr. Hooven is now being encouraged by the leadership at Harvard to back them up while they are under attack.
Seems that she could have used some backup when an absolutely rudderless assault was made on her and she ended up having to leave her job, one for which she had been celebrated justly and often.
As Dr. Hooven wrote on May 19th of this year, When I asked my correspondent at Harvard how he could be sure that the cuts his program was experiencing were political, he said this, quote, I can empathize with the Trump administration's desire to cut certain projects.
However, for work like mine and others who I know full well have tremendously powerful implications for the future of science in our country, I simply cannot rationalize a motive other than one which is political." There are many incompetent, lazy, and greedy people among the good, and no approach would be perfect at discerning between them.
Perhaps bringing it all to the ground, a tactic shared by Antifa and Doge, is in fact the best approach.
I'm not sure.
There will, however, be much to clean up and rebuild in the aftermath.
Will there be anyone left to do so?
Excellent.
I, of course, agree, especially with the idea that this is effectively the Academy's chickens coming home to roost.
And I would just point out...
Interesting.
Yeah.
Now, I don't know what the administration is actually thinking.
I don't think the administration can possibly be thinking that they are going to shutter American science and walk away.
I again wonder if this is a negotiation tactic.
Well, yes.
And in fact, that's one of the commenters says, of course, this is negotiating.
And in the particular case of the high-profile universities, where they're being told, actually, what you need to do is...
And in fact, actually my interlocutor at Harvard responds to a comment.
Sorry, let me just, because it's relevant to what you just said.
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to find it here.
Actually, why don't you keep going and I'll find it and show what Harvard is specifically being asked to do by the administration.
Well, there's something very unsettling about the fact that most people in academic science at this point Believe that they are innocent.
That the targeting, they will all roll their eyes and behind closed doors admit that there's a certain amount that isn't good work and should probably be cut.
But the problem is where is the biology department that stood up?
And said, you cannot switch your sex.
Right.
And, you know, and we happen to have the example of the amazing human being and biologist Carol Hoeven, who I know personally, who literally ran into that problem at Harvard.
And what happened to her.
So the point is, the rot is actually riddled throughout the science departments.
And that fact...
You know, back in 2017, 2018, I called this an epidemic of cowardice in the academy.
That epidemic of cowardice has resulted in huge numbers of people who either knew better and said nothing or didn't know better inexplicably, who were silent on the issue of all of the issues of COVID.
The number of people who actually stood up and said anything relevant during COVID rather than just rubber stamping the garbage that was coming down from on high is tiny.
Didn't say anything about the absurdities of the scientific claims of the trans activists and aren't now saying anything about the absurdity of the research into climate change.
So the point is just...
We need to understand that science, because of the way it functions, is very powerful, but it does not endure politics.
It cannot withstand that level of cowardice.
Scientists hold each other's feet to the fire.
That is what they do.
If they do not do that, they are not behaving scientifically.
And so it is all well and good for people to look at their own laboratory, And say, well, there's nothing about gender here.
This is not a climate laboratory.
We don't study COVID.
But where the hell were you doing your job asking the questions that would have caused any of these stories to unravel?
The chances are you didn't do it.
And if you did do it, you're not still in the academy.
You're looking for somebody.
If you so much as rolled your eyes in a faculty meeting, you probably got targeted.
You probably got targeted and you're gone or you were punished in some way at the very least.
And so I do not think the academy has become a racket.
Are there honest people in the racket?
Undoubtedly, but not as many as you'd think.
And many of the people who are sure that they themselves are honest are not.
They are at least editing.
They are saying things that are true and failing to say a great many other things that are true because it would be politically costly to them.
And so...
Lies of omission, complicity, it's a dishonesty and a cowardice at the very least.
Right.
One that actually has profound consequences for...
Human health in the case of COVID, for the maiming of children in the case of trans, for the upending of democracy in the case of bad climate science.
These are really important issues.
And if you're being quiet because it will interfere with your career and you need to be quiet in order to continue your role in the academy doing what you think is good science, then you need to figure out.
That sentence right there tells you you're not doing good science.
You may be doing a little bit and then doing harm elsewhere.
And, you know, I appreciate that the person who wrote to you is a student and therefore not guilty of much yet.
But you know what would happen to that person if they continued and were successful?
They would be brought into the racket.
Well, and let me, so I didn't put it into the piece because I think it's, although I did put it into responding to a comment that came in later.
One of the surprising things that I didn't see coming.
That I learned from interacting with this young man is that his entire degree program is funded by NIH.
And yet his diploma isn't going to say the federal government on it.
His diploma is going to say Harvard.
And I didn't actually know the degree programs were being So completely or nearly completely funded.
And, you know, I'm sure someone could come back and say, no, no, no, you know, not completely funded.
Like, okay.
But the fact is NIH pulled, you know, or, you know, NIH under the direction of the administration pulled all the NIH grants and suddenly this program is going to have trouble.
I mean, there's another issue, of course, which is that Harvard's endowment is so giant that on the interest alone they could be funding.
All of which just got pulled.
So there's this long-standing implicit agreement between the R1 universities, the big research universities, and the federal government.
The federal government is going to be paying for things that actually the universities could afford to be paying for and I think should be paying for.
And I think there's actually a real distinction to be made between, you know, I'm interested in doing...
A study, and no, it does not have to have obvious repercussions for human health or well-being.
I'm interested in doing a study.
I believe in the idea that the federal government shall fund science, and so I'm going to apply to NSF for a grant to do that study.
And, oh, I'm applying to a degree program.
And, oh, I just got into one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
I received a letter from Harvard telling me I've been admitted to their prestigious program, and it's fully funded.
That's amazing.
I'll bet that letter didn't say.
Actually, Harvard isn't funding this.
Harvard has let you in.
Harvard is in the position of choosing who it is that they are going to educate, hopefully, and put out into the world with the new degrees, but Harvard's not paying for it.
And mostly you wouldn't know, and I thought about it.
Again, I put some of my thoughts into the comments here.
I don't think that any of our degrees were paid for by the federal government.
We both got honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Awards, but so we got time with a supercomputer that we never used.
And I got one very small grant for travel to a conference in Prague to present the results of my research, which was not funded by federal grants.
And, you know, this is a particularity of a biology PhD, that there's so many pre-health students, undergraduates out there, that a school needs a lot of graduate students who are willing to be TAs to teach the labs and seminars, to teach all of the undergraduates, which used to be tuition was what was paying, you know, running the university.
So, effectively, us teaching was funding our degrees, and we both got grants to do the research, but they were internal to Michigan.
I can't trace it back.
I don't think that they were in turn funded by NSF.
It wouldn't have been NIH, but NSF.
But certainly the idea that the entire program, like your entire degree is funded by the federal government, but you get a degree from the institution, is very strange to me.
And this is nothing negative about any of the students there.
I'll bet they didn't even know.
Like, presumably, once they're there, they start to hear about the, I can't remember the names of the various grants.
I looked into them, and like, oh, yeah, actually, these are huge programs at NIH.
And presumably, it's not just Harvard.
Presumably, a lot of these giant, well-endowed R1 universities who are putting out graduates with their institutional name on the diploma have actually been funded entirely by taxpayer dollars.
And that's a...
Very strange situation, which is different from, I think, that scientific research should be funded by the federal government.
I'd like to draw the circle a little tighter.
Okay.
First of all, yeah, I don't think our programs were funded federally in that way, but indirectly they were because the universities in question were fueled by grant overhead.
University of Michigan is a state school.
Yep.
And, you know, Santa Cruz.
And so, you know...
We did benefit a tremendous amount from public funding.
Well, I think we've lived up to our obligation.
We did what we were supposed to do.
And in fact, that's why we're sitting in a podcast studio now rather than still employed in the academy.
So here's the point I would make.
If you are in a research university, Your case may be extreme like this one, where your entire program is effectively a cryptic federal program, or you may be indirectly benefiting from a huge amount of federal money that is flowing through grants into your institution, creating buildings and laboratories and all of that stuff.
One way or the other, your obligation is to the public.
You have that obligation twice over.
That is your scientific obligation to discover what is true and to say it without fear.
And secondly, We've paid for it as citizens.
You are absolutely obligated to stand up against bad science and say that that's what you are seeing.
And if you're not doing it, you've fallen down on your obligation.
That's why you're being fired.
And, you know, I'm inclined to want to be nicer about this.
But after all of these years of pointing out that this is a racket.
That there is a huge amount of money flowing through it, that it has become a profit center, that it is saying things that are not true because it is profitable to say them.
That is a broken system.
And at the point that the government goes after a crime family, right?
Let's say the crime family is running a sanitation business.
There are trash collectors in that sanitation business.
And there are people who live in neighborhoods who won't have their trash collected.
Right.
There are problems that are caused by it.
But at some level, it's a phony.
It's a fake business.
Even if it is collecting the trash, it's doing a lot of other stuff.
And if the net consequence of the thing is negative, which I don't think it's such a leap to say that it is, it's not like science has all of these marvelous successes and the occasional embarrassment.
The fact is, drug after drug does harm, and we discover it decades down the road after people have been maimed.
Right?
These harms are major.
The degree to which we are turning civilization upside down over climate science couldn't possibly be overstated.
The fact is, it's immense the amount that is part of this racket.
And I don't know who believes, I mean, your point about...
Sledgehammers and scalpels is the right one.
And your interlocutor seems to think that the comparison is obvious.
No, actually, he doesn't.
And he responded to me after I showed him the piece before I published it.
And he said he particularly liked that section.
So, you know, I think he's an honest, smart young man who is really trying to figure out what is true and what should be true.
And living with a sudden situation that was not of his making.
Well, I'm sympathetic to a young person in that position, but really only because there's a decent chance that that young person would have at some point said, I've had it, I can't do this anymore, and left.
If they were going to become a part of this system, then they were going to be corrupted by it.
And somebody who has decided to take a sledgehammer to the racket, of course it was going to be ugly.
And, you know, of course people who have, you know, are maybe mostly morally intact and have only the defect of being cowards, of course a number of those people are going to be caught up in it.
But goddammit, this has been happening all around you.
You've had ample evidence.
You've had multiple topics on which to discover how broken the academy is.
And if you didn't stand up and make that point somewhere, then some of the responsibility, some of it at least, belongs to you.
So with regard to a point you made earlier, you know, were there, so originally the cut, the funding was frozen, and now some of it has apparently been permanently stopped, but with regard to the freezes, he writes in the comments of my piece,
correct, the letter sent by HHS and GSA to Harvard had the following stipulations to unfreeze the funds, requiring governance and leadership reforms, Merit-based hiring reform, merit-based admissions reform, international admissions reform, viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring, reforming programs with egregious records of anti-Semitism or other bias, discontinuation of DEI, student discipline reform and accountability, whistleblower reporting and protections, transparency and monitoring.
And the letter provides details, and he's got that linked here too.
So you could read that.
You know, with different lenses, that list as, oh my God, like, how dare the federal government ask for all this reform across all these things?
But, you know, it's actually, you know, there's a common theme with, you know, there's a common theme here of, you know, get back to merit, guys, and stop it with the equity and DEI-based policies that, frankly, are hurting everyone.
They're hurting everyone, and, frankly, it's generous.
If all you got to do is get rid of that bias and you get to walk away and play your little careerist cowardly games, you know, it's not going to fix the system.
And that does make it look like a negotiation, but one in which, yeah, not enough will have been won, I think.
Yeah, not enough will have been won.
It's a good start, but it's not sufficient.
And, you know, let's not forget that this is effectively a hidden war in which the Academy moved first.
The invasion was by the Academy, right?
The Academy provided the nonsense that fueled all of these epic boondoggles.
This is, as a response, you know, we, the public, have a right to defend ourselves against the Academy, which has decided to sign up with a lot of people who want to monetize, you know, our health and things like that.
And they've ended up making us terribly sick.
Created vulnerabilities, and at some level, goddammit, this is the chicken's home to roost, and anybody who doesn't recognize that much is not in a great position to discuss how fair this is, because they don't understand what they've been part of, or they're not ready to admit it.
Yep.
Maybe this is the moment to speak briefly about uterine transplants for trans women.
Oh, are we finally able to do that?
No.
So I went looking when working on this piece for examples of, I just was like, how stupid an example can I find of research that has been funded by the federal government that just denies reality?
And the best worst paper that I found was actually, and this is its own rabbit warren with its own grotesqueries, this piece.
That I found called Uterine Transplantation in Transgender Women was not funded by the federal government.
This was entirely funded according to what is at the end of the article, and all peer-reviewed research is expected, is required to say how the work was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Wellcome with two L's.
So the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation are some of the largest non-governmental NGOs, non-governmental funders of research.
That may at first pass sound cool to people.
Like, okay, well, at least it's not taxpayer money, which is kind of my first reaction when we were talking about it this morning or last night.
But that's not true.
It's just less direct.
It's less accountable, if that's even conceivable.
It's less accountable, if that's even conceivable, exactly.
So let me just share the introduction and one of the final paragraphs of this insane piece of research that was funded entirely, apparently, by the Wellcome Trust.
So again, this isn't about the federal government at this point.
I'm sure they've, I'm sure that they have funded a lot of I'm going to call bullshit on that, but okay.
Treatment aims at congruence to allow those who experience it to find comfort within their gendered self, which optimizes psychological well-being and self-fulfillment.
Although many experiencing gender dysphoria require partial treatment or social transition, others only find comfort following surgical intervention to change their external genitalia and sexual characteristics.
Traditionally, infertility has been an unfortunate consequence of the realignment of a transgender person's body with their gender identity.
Wait a second.
I know.
You don't get to claim that the destruction of your reproductive capacity is a side effect of your decision to decide to destroy your reproductive capacity.
But it's not a choice, honey.
They were born this way.
Is that so?
No, they weren't.
Following a successful clinical trial investigating uterine transplantation in Sweden, resulting in eight live births so far.
So here they're talking about actual women.
So here they've segued without being clear.
There have been successful uterine transplantations in actual women.
I refuse to use the word this.
How much do you know about what that means?
I looked into it earlier, like a year or two ago, and I have not...
When I looked into it, we talked about this a couple years ago.
And I think, if memory serves, there had been a successful story, but the expectation was that this was a temporary transplant.
And so there was a transplant, there was then an implantation, there was a successful gestation, birth through C-section, and then removal of the transplant.
I think I remember correctly.
Oh, I dimly remember you talking about this.
Maybe I've blocked it out.
Yeah.
Women, actual women, who have infertility and desperately want to carry their own children are a totally different story.
I have concerns in that space as well, real concerns, but it's a different story entirely.
So, following a successful clinical trial investigating uterine transplantation in Sweden, resulting in eight live births so far...
Uterine transplantation appears to be a viable therapeutic option for women with absolute uterine factor infertility, AUFI, absolute uterine factor infertility.
More than 42 uterine transplants have been performed globally and at least 12 live births have been reported.
Following the establishment of the International Society of Uterine Transplantation and the formation of research teams globally, it is anticipated that uterine transplants will make the transition from research to clinical care in the future.
Following these developments, speculation has escalated regarding the possibility of performing uterine transplants in male-to-female transgender women, which would enable them to gestate and give birth to their own children.
Ethically, the consideration of performing transplants in transgender women is primarily motivated by the considerations of, wait for it, justice and equality.
Like all women, psychological harm may arise secondary to a mismatch between reproductive capacity and aspiration.
Transgender women have absolute uterine factor infertility.
Oh my god.
And yes, because they do and always have and always will lack uteruses of their own.
And therefore they cannot experience gestation, which may play an integral role in the expression and consolidation of a female identity, and is considered by many to constitute a transformative experience.
Legally, under the Equality Act, 2010, transgender people are afforded explicit protection from both direct and indirect forms of discrimination through the characterization of gender reassignment as a protected characteristic.
As such, male to female transgender women cannot be subjected to discrimination on the basis of this characteristic.
Subsequently, if uterine transplantation becomes an established treatment option for women with AUFI, UK and EU legislation would make it legally impermissible to refuse to perform uterine transplants in transgender women solely because of their gender identity.
Performing uterine transplants in this population, however, raises a number of anatomical, physiological, fertility, and obstetric considerations.
The aim of this manuscript is to discuss these factors and provide an initial framework for assessing the feasibility of uterine transplants in male-to-female transgender women.
One more paragraph at the end.
Is this a paragraph about the rights of the children who will be born to these transgender men?
Women?
We don't care about the children.
We don't care.
How did that happen?
So, just, I'm showing here too.
Funding, this fund was, this work was supported by the Wellcome Trust.
Final paragraph of the piece.
The reproductive aspirations of male to female transgender women deserve equal consideration to those assigned female at birth.
And, subject to feasibility being shown in the suggested areas of research, it may be legally and ethically impermissible not to consider performing uterine transplants in this population.
Yep.
We have officially gone bonkers.
It's...
Reprehensible.
It is reprehensible at every level.
And reducing women once more to assigned female at birth and women with whatever it was, absolute uterine infertility syndrome, I don't remember what the thing was, but equating such women with dudes cosplaying as women who really like to imagine babies suckling at their fake breasts.
It's inhuman at every level.
Yeah, it's inhuman at every level.
And just the fact that the children are not even discussed here.
No mention is made.
Completing of a female identity.
Like, what the hell?
Where did you lose the plot that you failed to understand that the whole point of the exercise of reproduction is healthy children who you are going to create...
You are going to have them gestated in, at the very least, a radically surgically altered body of somebody who is undoubtedly on numerous pharmaceuticals.
And when the child is born, they will then be raised by somebody who at the very least has a profound mental disorder, which has created the entire landscape.
I mean, you're talking about somebody who is not at one with Obviously, actual women can be sick and get pregnant.
Of course.
And there are many actual women who are in lots of pharmaceuticals and no one reasonable is.
Trying to keep that from happening, although good doctors will advise that you should get as healthy as possible and get off as much as you can before you would like to be pregnant.
So I think those arguments that you just made are actually the weak end of it.
And mentally ill people have babies.
Yeah, but this is a question of civilization going way out of its way to facilitate.
The production of children by people who ended up in this category by surrendering their capacity to produce children of their own.
Yeah.
No, I mean, the argument in that paper, funded by the Wellcome Trust, not by...
And, you know, that's a UK paper.
It couldn't have been...
Hopefully it couldn't have been funded by NIH because it's not...
They're not Americans.
Argues that it would be ethically irresponsible not to.
At the point that uterine transplants are available to women, then it would be ethically irresponsible not to provide them to men cosplaying as women.
So, this just raises so many issues.
And I would just point out, I didn't set out to discuss it today, but a number of interesting things emerged from Highly placed federal employees now this week.
I just think it's worth thinking about them.
One of them, Bobby Kennedy released a statement in the wake of the World Health Organization passing their pandemic preparedness plan, which thankfully the United States was not part of and will not be subject to because President Trump has very wisely decided to pull us out of the World Health Organization.
Until an administration rejoins us.
Until some other administration puts us back in.
At which point, I would argue, the requirement of the United States to abide by a process that it was not party to is certainly not clear.
I mean, in fact, I think it's clear that we are not obligated to some process that was done without our participation.
So we are exempt, irrespective of whether we rejoin the WHO.
Your logic makes sense.
Well, that's the thing about my logic, is I try to make it make sense.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that it will play out that way.
Okay, well, speaking of things that do not make sense...
Jay Bhattacharya.
No, no.
That's not where we were.
Bad segue.
Go on.
See, the thing is, a bad segue is it'll give you a hell of a ride.
Never got on one.
No.
I haven't either.
I've heard many descendants of the clade.
So, Jay Bhattacharya gave a speech this week at NIH, and he...
Very reasonably pointed to the importance of the apparent lab leak that created the COVID so-called pandemic.
And he said that he had looked at the evidence.
Most Americans believe that the virus began with a laboratory accident or that the spread of the virus began with a laboratory accident and that he had looked at the evidence and that's also what he believes.
Which caused a huge fraction of the audience to walk out on him, suggesting that somehow, whatever this religion is that has got people believing preposterous things, that it is still deeply enmeshed in our federal institutions in a most dangerous way.
And I'm sad to say that Vinay Prasad also Revealed the same thing this week when he was talking about what seemed to many of us to be good news at one level, which is the reduction in the scope of the recommendation of the mRNA COVID shots, except...
It's off the childhood vaccine schedule.
It will be off the childhood vaccine schedule, but...
It will not be generally recommended, except for people who are considered to be highly vulnerable, a category which he does not say includes pregnant women.
It's on the list.
He doesn't say it, but it's true that.
But it is true that.
So, you know, as much as I think that Vinay Prasad is a guy who has, and potentially he's very intelligent, I think his heart's in the right place.
The game he's trying to play, where he's straddling this line, is going to result in Innocent, vulnerable people being maimed at the hands of corporate greed, corporations with greed at best.
This is increasingly an argument that I feel like is underneath a lot of the other arguments around vaccines, that will at least surely you acknowledge that we should be giving these to the most vulnerable.
But if they're not safe and effective...
Drop effective if they're not safe enough to recommend them to the general population.
Why would you recommend them more strongly to the people who were already at health risk?
Isn't it more likely to do them harm?
Well, and we know it is.
You know, we spent a lot of time during COVID talking about what was at that point easily available research, I don't know if it still is, but on the fact that comorbidities were the, I mean, this is a little bit tautological the way I'm saying it here, but like comorbidities were the prediction, were the predictive And
and the idea that well but the most vulnerable need the protection like you you just send them to an early grave faster well it starts with the faith that they are costless and so the idea that I mean, their efficacy...
Yes, they're doing one half of the equation.
They're doing one half of the equation.
They're doing it all, but they're showing one half of the equation.
Right, and the idea, you know, I mean, pregnant women are vulnerable.
No, pregnant women are in need of our highest degree of protection from unknowns, from radical medical interventions, because not only do those women need to be protected, but so do the children that they are going to give birth to who have the absolute most to suffer from our bad judgment because they have very long lives ahead of them.
And they're not fully formed.
They're at their most fragile.
They're at their most.
Absolutely.
And so anyway, you know, what you've got is the right thing.
I hate to say it, Vinny, but You have found yourself negotiating with the devil.
And I'm sure you think you're doing the right thing.
I'm sure you think you did some good by backing these vaccines off so they will reach fewer people.
But who did you, you know, leave on the sacrificial altar?
And why?
And how are you going to sleep at night?
I mean, it's ghastly and enough is enough.
The Academy should be standing up en masse and demanding good science, and they should be figuring out how to discover their balls again and hold each other's feet to the fire over important issues of human welfare.
Even those of us without prostates?
Should we be saving our balls?
Your metaphorical balls, yes.
You should find them, apply them as needed.
Okay.
Did you want to say anything more about things following from your conversations in Austin this week?
I think I will save it.
I will say I had three conversations in Austin, which will be released on the Inside Rail section of Dark Horse.
And I think they were all fascinating.
Michael Malice, that conversation is out already, right, Jen?
So Michael Malice and I had an excellent, if infuriating, conversation about many different topics.
Were you presumably both equally infuriated with one another?
It escalated.
There were moments at which each of us was in the lead with respect to being infuriated.
But, you know, Michael is a marvelous person.
He's extremely intelligent and holds some...
Views that most people would regard as shocking.
I appreciate him for that.
That he's willing to hold those views and willing to defend them.
And he's an honest broker when it comes to an argument.
So anyway, the frustration is all part of the package.
I hope you will check out that conversation and get something meaningful from it.
Awesome.
Find us on Locals where we do our Q&As.
We had one last week.
Those are kept up.
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