The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) includes the laws governing the Food and Drug Administration. These laws are written in the blood of the exploited and vulnerable, like the victims of the Tuskeege Syphillis Experiment. Many of these regulations are specifically written to keep pharmaceutical and food companies from cutting corners in product development, testing, and manufacturing.
It’s not a necessary disruption. It’s going to kill a lot of vulnerable people.
The article describes the review process - you’re right, these words just flag a paper for further review. I wonder if it’s an automatic flagging system like you suggested.
However, it took me almost a decade of rigorous training to understand my research. I sure as hell don’t trust an elected or appointed official with a political vendetta to critically read my grants. Leave politics out of peer review.
This is still an emergency situation, IMHO. Like you said, people’s grants are being canceled. I see this as a direct attack against higher education.
ETA: It’s also a waste of taxpayer money. These grants are already competing for meager funds. Why should we siphon away any resources to “investigate” them?
Sunglasses with polarized lenses? Worrying about eye cancer is too woke.
Here’s a quick off-the-cuff list of neuroscience domains, not part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that will be impacted by this censorship. This is not an exhaustive list, it’s just what I thought of after thinking critically for 10 minutes.
It goes without saying this practice is evil and reprehensible. No academic domain should be politically targeted. But it reaches more than their targets. It is dangerous. It is unscientific. It is book-burning. Contact your representatives. Take action. Donate to good causes.
Patient advocacy for people who have had a stroke, or have dementia, or have any number of disabilities, hereditary or acquired.
Any research about the blood brain barrier, including development of drugs that can cross it more efficiently.
Any research about the placental barrier, including development of safe medications for birthing people.
Research into cognitive bias.
Development of statistics (including Bayesian, the hot frontier), machine learning (that’s AI for anyone who prefers that term), where the term bias is used to talk about parameters and model performance.
Basic visual and auditory science, where we talk about visual and auditory discrimination.
Sex differences research- this isn’t just a social issue, we don’t understand how differences in metabolism impact drug metabolism. Can’t have female mice anymore, apparently.
Basic research in the function of neurons, which polarize, depolarize, htperpolarize, etc.
Concussion research and, again, stroke research. The field is broadly known as traumatic brain injury.
To be fair, people were treating mummies like cheesesteak for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy?wprov=sfla1
Oh neat, another brain implant startup. I published in this field. If anyone has questions, I’m happy to answer.
I’ve raged and seethed about Neuralink so many times. There are so many obstacles needed to be overcome for a true Brain Computer Interface to work. Unless the company has magically solved some of the hardest problems in bioengineering, they’re just sacrificing monkeys for sport.