More than a Quarter of Computer-Programming Jobs Just Vanished. What happened?

More than a quarter of all computer programming jobs have vanished in the past two years, the worst downturn that industry has ever seen. Things are sufficiently abysmal that computer programming ranks among 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs for which we have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s Science, by Misha Angrist

Misha Angrist on Science and Authoritarianism

When I ask my students whether they’ve ever heard of the 2017 March for Science they are apt to furrow their brows, as if I were asking them about the cultural significance of pre-grunge hair metal or the comedic legacy of All in the Family.  In what now seem like quaint trespasses, the early days of 2017 were marked by an executive branch that tried to muzzle and perhaps purge government employees who worked on environmental issues; appointed a guy to run the Environmental Protection Agency who, as Oklahoma attorney general, had been suing the agency he was now appointed to run; and met with noted anti-vaxxers. Scientists, and especially young scientists, took to Reddit, which quickly mushroomed into a mass protest. More than a million people turned out to march in cities all over the world.

I wasn’t at the main event in 2017. I was attending a conference on open science in Seattle where the meeting organizer gave everyone a copy of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. On the last day of the conference we adjourned early so attendees could join the local march in Cal Anderson Park and walk the mile and a half to the Space Needle. It was pissing down rain, which was a shame because it’s hard to hold an umbrella in one hand and a soggy sign in the other that reads  “Science: because you can’t just make 💩 up.”

But many with real power in the scientific industrial complex declined to participate in the 2017 MFS, choosing instead to condescend and pooh-pooh it beforehand and ignore it afterward. “What are they marching for?” wondered Princeton physicist and consensus-climate-change denier William Happer. “[I]t’s like the toddler banging his spoon in the highchair.” Elsewhere, a geologist took to The Times to call the march “a bad idea”; The New England Journal of Medicine agreed. The fault was not in our science, they said, but in ourselves—we needed to tell better stories. To march was to debase oneself.

One policy scholar published a slightly less scoldy plea to okay, maybe march, but please don’t voice any partisan objections. The “reality-based community” seemed to fear that marching could only provoke and alienate science’s benefactors (Congress, philanthropists, taxpayers) and thus be counterproductive; they responded with a defensive crouch. Other outlets, like Nature (based in the UK, probably not coincidentally!) voiced support for the march.

Like most protest movements, the original MFS was ephemeral. Within a few months the organization was beset with infighting and accusations of opacity, financial underhandedness, and forgetting its grassroots origins. The following year’s March for Science in DC march drew just 10,000 people—a drop of 90 percent. The passion that fuels a tryst while the bombs are falling is not the same thing that sustains a long marriage.

The fizzle of the first MFS made me skeptical about the reach and impact of the March 7, 2025 Stand Up for Science at the Lincoln Memorial (Lincoln signed the National Academy of Sciences into law in 1863). I had had no trouble finding a hotel room in the neighborhood and, as I walked around Foggy Bottom and Dupont Circle that morning, there were no obvious signs that any kind of Event was imminent, save some young women (graduate students, I’m guessing) I saw in a coffee shop, their small signs tucked behind their chairs. There was a stiff breeze and in the shade it still felt cold. But at least it wasn’t raining.  

The stakes, of course, are much higher now. It’s not just a petroleum shill running the EPA or a president undermining the public health establishment by promoting snake-oil treatments for Covid, but rather an entire administration relentlessly and violently shoveling sand into the gears of American science, and especially biomedical science: unilaterally capping administrative expenditures; slowing down or halting grant funding; canceling government publications and thus the grant-funding-decision meetings advertised therein; censorship; soft-pedaling a measles outbreak; declaring by executive fiat that there are exactly two genders, science be damned; and moving to shut down public comment on HHS activities. (This is by no means a comprehensive list; frankly, it’s hard to keep up.)  If scientists’ response eight years ago had been “Want you so bad, baby, hurt my feelings,” then this moment felt more like “Bitch better have my money.”

By the time SUFS finally got underway sometime after its advertised noon start and just a couple thousand souls strong, the vibe was a mix of fellowship, outrage, and playfulness. As I walked along the plaza in front of the memorial trying to get a better view a man approached me with a receipt-sized slip of paper and said, “Can I give you a poem?” 

It was a haiku entitled “Neuralink electrophysiological recording device (N1),” which refers to a brain-implant device made by a startup owned by the same fecund, unelected, Sieg-Heiling techno-billionaire who owns a car company and a rocket ship company.  The poem included a footnote (because of course it did) that Neuralink stock was currently available to insiders only.

At the Reflecting Pool a little after 11:00 a.m. I saw the former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, a tall man in a butterscotch puffy coat tuning his ubiquitous acoustic guitar. Collins served three presidents. In his speech a little while later he invoked Lincoln at Gettysburg (“of the people, by the people, for the people”) and shouted out the achievements, promise, and value of government-sponsored Big Science—the Human Genome Project, the Brain Initiative, the All Of Us Research Program. He reminded us that the latter two efforts were still ongoing and now at serious risk. He called out pharma’s conspicuous silence about the gutting of the government research portfolio by noting that more than 99 percent of new drug approvals “depended in some way” on NIH research. He said that while “‘moving fast and breaking things’ might be an appropriate mantra for Silicon Valley,” pausing for a loud chorus of boos, a better mantra for biomedical research would be “first do no harm.”

In 30-plus years of Francis-watching, this was as fiery and acidic as I’d ever seen him. At least in part because of his placid demeanor and the evangelical Christian faith he wore prominently on his sleeve, Collins was able to mollify Congress and keep the Institutes and most of American biomedical research intact from 2016-2021. He defended science, and Americans should be quick to thank him for his service; for his corny-ass folk act, maybe less so. When I saw him reach for the guitar, I retreated to find a porta-potty.

I had worried that there’d be too many white coats and too much nerdsplaining. The first speaker, Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, cited infamous Soviet pseudoscientist and Stalin lapdog Trofim Lysenko. This was an apt comparison and red meat for someone like me, but would the biomedical engineering postdocs or the patient advocates in the audience care? Bill Nye, too, preached to the choir: His speech included an exegesis on Article I Section 8 of the Constitution, which empowers the legislative branch “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Were these callbacks really better stories than the ones we told in 2017?

But to their credit, the organizers had invited speakers who showed rather than told, among them patients who were alive today thanks in part to NIH-funded research. These included Emily Whitehead, the first pediatric patient treated with CAR-T, a powerful immunotherapy that had eradicated her aggressive form of leukemia, paving the way for thousands of other patients. She is now a sophomore at Penn.

Atul Gawande, in addition to writing books and articles and performing surgeries, once worked at USAID (full disclosure: I’m a fanboy…also: he is so tall and handsome!). He took the stage and did his best to summon both the fervor and musical cadence of the pulpit. “Are you scientists? Are you health professionals? Are you NERDS???” he cried to raucous cheers before bringing the gravitas. “They use these lies to take down entire agencies…they destroy thousands of careers…then they deny the harm [they are doing] to millions of lives… Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Our job, he said, was not just to debunk the lies but to “point out the game.” This purge was happening for “the same reason the Inquisition imprisoned Galileo. It is the same reason that Einstein had to flee Hitler’s Germany. It is because science is independent. It is because science doesn’t always give the answer that power wants.”

On the south side of the Reflecting Pool I met my brother-in-law Bill, a Georgetown neuroscientist. His sign read “Science Builds” on one side and “Lies Kill” on the other. When I asked whether he had participated in the 2017 March for Science he said that he hadn’t, but he reminded me that he, his wife, and their then-four-year-old son had created a tableau of outraged plastic dinosaurs agitating for science in their front garden. A neighbor’s tweet about it had gone viral. 

“Does that count?”

It was not lost on Bill that visceral expressions of outrage like SUFS were well outside the wheelhouse of scientists. “We think people are listening to us. We’re saying complicated things. We try to be accurate… like the way I’m speaking right now—measuring my words. Precision and nuance. It doesn’t necessarily make for good soundbites.”

He and his colleagues are spending more and more time these days trying to figure out how they can keep their labs going, he told me. He was concerned about the downstream negative consequences for patients, for businesses, the elderly. Why weren’t more people more upset?

“I think it’s sad that people don’t trust themselves to fight against what is wrong,” he said. 

In 1942, sociologist Robert Merton wrote “A Note on Science and Democracy,” later published as “Science and Democratic Social Structure” [free to read with registration to Open Library]. Merton acknowledged a growing atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, with “incipient and actual attacks upon the integrity of science,” and set out the means of fighting back. 

“After a prolonged period of relative security,” he wrote—a period in which the pursuit of knowledge had reached the summit of cultural values—scientists were now “compelled to vindicate the ways of science to man.” His argument was based on the norms of science, its self-correcting nature, its openness and accessibility, and its egalitarian ethos, as well as its arms-length distance from the concerns of the world outside it. “[T]he scientist,” Merton wrote, “came to regard himself as independent of society and science as a self-validating enterprise which was in society but not of it” [emphasis mine].  

Vannevar Bush would come to embody the Mertonian model of above-the-fray-wrapped-in-a-vow-of-purity when he joined FDR’s inner circle as wartime science advisor. Bush was a pipe-smoking genius engineer who’d earned his MIT Ph.D. in a single year and who eventually oversaw the transition of the Manhattan Project from energy research to bomb development (you might remember Matthew Modine’s understated but powerful portrayal of Bush in 2023’s Oppenheimer). Once it became clear that the Allies were going to win, FDR asked Bush to articulate how the wartime science apparatus might be deployed in peacetime. 

Bush’s long, dense, detailed response was published in 1945 asScience: The Endless Frontier. This document laid the groundwork for the postwar professionalization of science that created both NIH and the National Science Foundation. In it, Bush went all in on self-validation. He argued that scientific progress resulted from “…the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” In other words, “Y’all write the checks, but we get to decide what we want to work on. We are the experts.” Bush’s premise was that science’sindependence was a function of scientists’ independence—the white coats were in society but not of it, and thus, not bound by it.

And that’s how it was, more or less, until a couple of months ago.

Are there valid arguments to be made about the need to improve the governance of science, empower patients and the public, and reduce overhead? Are there systemic problems with the free play model? Has scientists’ conflation of scientific expertise with policy wisdom fueled the current moment? Oh my God, one hundred percent! We need look no further than the pandemic for the answers to these questions. 

The problem is that, while the machetes are out in force, with few exceptions, valid arguments made in good faith are not. Does science not demand the latter?

NIH Cuts Will Cost Triangle Universities Millions. Now NC Is Suing Trump To Block Action.

New guidance Friday from the National Institutes of Health has sent a tremor through U.S. research institutions, including the Triangle’s two largest, as Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill stand to lose hundreds of millions in federal funding if a governmental cap on indirect medical research payments survives a legal challenge. “We’re talking about massive layoffs across the Triangle if this (rule) holds,” former UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp said in a phone interview Monday. Duke and UNC each rank among the top 15 recipients of NIH grants in the nation. In 2023, they received a combined $1.2 billion from the agency, accounting for more than half the state’s total NIH funding. Duke had 1,025 awards that year alone while UNC reported 1,020.

Read more at: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article300050859.html#storylink=cpy

Risk of Heart Defects Higher in Babies Conceived With I.V.F.

The birth defects were more likely, but still very uncommon, in infants conceived through certain fertility treatments, a large study found.