The ongoing war between the Trump administration and Harvard University has taken a new twist, with the government sending Harvard a letter that, amid what appears to be a stream-of-consciousness culture war rant, announces that the university will not be receiving any further research grants. The letter potentially suggests that Harvard could see funding restored by “complying with long-settled Federal Law,” but earlier demands from the administration included conditions that went well beyond those required by law.
The letter, sent by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, makes it somewhat difficult to tell exactly what the government wants, because most of the text is a borderline deranged rant written in florid MAGA-ese. You don’t have to go beyond the first paragraph to get a sense that this is less a setting of funding conditions than an airing of grievances:
Instead of using these funds to advance the education of its students, Harvard is engaging in a systemic pattern of violating federal law. Where do many of these “students” come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country—and why is there so much HATE? These are questions that must be answered, among many more, but the biggest question of all is, why will Harvard not give straightforward answers to the American public?
Does Harvard have to answer these questions to get funding restored? It’s unclear.
From there, the letter changes topic so often that it gets difficult to remember that billions of dollars of funding to some of the world’s most prominent researchers is at stake. On the first page alone, the letter complains that a math class Harvard set up to handle COVID-driven gaps in incoming students’ math skills is a remedial course that shouldn’t be needed, given the university’s supposedly high standards. The resignation of Harvard’s former president, as well as its faculty hires, also make appearances. (Said hires being compared to “Hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation.”)
Hall claims that because of this, aides for Kennedy blocked him from being directly interviewed by New York Times reporters about the study. Instead, Hall was allowed to provide only written responses to the newspaper. However, Hall claims that Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for Kennedy, then downplayed the study’s results to the Times and edited Hall’s written responses and sent them to the reporter without Hall’s consent.
Further, Hall claims he was barred from presenting his research on ultra-processed foods at a conference and was forced to either edit a manuscript he had worked on with outside researchers or remove himself as a co-author.
An HHS spokesperson denied to CBS that Hall was censored or that his written responses to the Times were edited. “Any attempt to paint this as censorship is a deliberate distortion of the facts,” a statement from the HHS said.
In response, Hall wrote to CBS, “I wonder how they define censorship?”
Hall said he had reached out to NIH leadership about his concerns in hopes it all was an “aberration” but never received a response.
“Without any reassurance there wouldn’t be continued censorship or meddling in our research, I felt compelled to accept early retirement to preserve health insurance for my family,” he wrote in the LinkedIn post. “Due to very tight deadlines to make this decision, I don’t yet have plans for my future career.”
Shortly after its inauguration, the Trump administration has made no secret that it isn’t especially interested in funding research. Before January’s end, major science agencies had instituted pauses on research funding, and grant funding has not been restored to previous levels since. Many individual grants have been targeted on ideological grounds, and agencies like the National Science Foundation are expected to see significant cuts. Since then, individual universities have been targeted, starting with an ongoing fight with Columbia University over $400 million in research funding.
This week, however, it appears that the targeting of university research has entered overdrive, with multiple announcements of funding freezes targeting several universities. Should these last for any considerable amount of time, they will likely cripple research at the targeted universities.
On Wednesday, Science learned that the National Institutes of Health has frozen all of its research funding to Columbia, despite the university agreeing to steps previously demanded by the administration and the resignation of its acting president. In 2024, Columbia had received nearly $700 million in grants from the NIH, with the money largely going to the university’s prestigious medical and public health schools.
But the attack goes well beyond a single university. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a hold on all research funding to Northwestern University (nearly $800 million) and Cornell University ($1 billion). These involved money granted by multiple government agencies, including a significant amount from the Department of Defense in Cornell’s case. Ostensibly, all of these actions were taken because of the university administrators’ approach to protests about the conflict in Gaza, which the administration has characterized as allowing antisemitism.
Since Trump took office on January 20, research funding from the National Institutes of Health has plummeted by more than $3 billion compared with the pace of funding in 2024, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
By this time in March 2024, the NIH had awarded US researchers a total of $1.027 billion for new grants or competitive grant renewals. This year, the figure currently stands at about $400 million. Likewise, funding for renewals of existing grants without competition reached $4.5 billion by this time last year, but has only hit $2 billion this year. Together, this slowdown amounts to a 60 percent drop in grant support for a wide variety of research—from studies on cancer treatments, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, vaccines, mental health, transgender health, and more.
The NIH is the primary source of funding for biomedical research in the US. NIH grants support more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research organizations across all 50 states.
In the near term, the missing grant money means clinical trials have been abruptly halted, scientific projects are being shelved, supplies can’t be purchased, and experiments can’t be run. But, in the long run, it means a delay in scientific advancements and treatment, which could echo across future generations. With funding in question, academic researchers may be unable to retain staff or train younger scientists.
Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slashing a total of 20,000 jobs across the Department of Health and Human Services—or about 24 percent of the workforce—in a sweeping overhaul said to improve efficiency and save money, Kennedy and the HHS announced Thursday.
Combining workforce losses from early retirement, the “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation deal, and 10,000 positions axed in the reductions and restructuring announced today, HHS will shrink from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000 under Kennedy and the Trump administration. The HHS’s 28 divisions will be cut down to 15, while five of the department’s 10 regional offices will close.
“This will be a painful period,” Kennedy said in a video announcement posted on social media. Calling the HHS a “sprawling bureaucracy,” Kennedy claimed that the cuts would be aimed at “excess administrators.”
“I want to promise you now that we are going to do more with less,” he said in the video.
Kennedy and HHS said the cuts will save $1.8 billion each year. That’s about 0.027 percent of total federal spending, based on the $6.75 trillion the government spent in 2024, and about 0.06 percent of the $2.8 trillion HHS budget for that year.
The downsizing announced today includes significant cuts to the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Cuts upon cuts
The FDA will lose 3,500 employees, which The Wall Street Journal reported was about 19 percent of its staff. HHS did not provide current staff levels at the agency level or percentage cuts. The CDC, which will absorb the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), will lose 2,400 employees (1,400 from CDC and 1,000 from ASPR). The Journal reported that to be about 18 percent of the total workforce. NIH will lose 1,200 employees, about 6 percent of its workers.
Many schools are now bracing for steep declines in support. At Duke University, administrators have implemented hiring freezes, scaled back research plans, and will cut the number of admitted biomedical PhD students by 23 percent or more, according to reporting by the Associated Press. The school took in $580 million in grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health last year.
At Vanderbilt University, faculty were sent an email on February 6 instructing them to reduce graduate admissions by half across the board, according to Stat. The outlet also reported that faculty at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health have reduced admissions.
Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania also reported having to rescind admission offers to applicants and were directed to significantly reduce admission rates, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, too, is shrinking its graduate programs, according to the WKOW.com.
Beth Sullivan, who oversees graduate programs at Duke, told the AP that the shrinking classes mean a shrinking pipeline into America’s medical research community, which dominates the world’s health research fields and is a significant force in the country’s economy. “Our next generation of researchers are now poised on the edge of this cliff, not knowing if there’s going to be a bridge that’s going to get them to the other side, or if this is it,” Sullivan said.
“This is a severe blow to science and the training of the next generation of scientists,” Siyuan Wang, a geneticist and cell biologist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told Nature. “With fewer scientists, there will be less science and innovation that drive societal progress and the improvement of public health.”
This post was updated to correct Rachael Sirianni’s job title.
The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.
Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm.
But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.
Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,” she said.
There’s a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.
To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.
Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,” Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.
Study 3 essentially replicated study 2, but with the tweak that the articles varied whether the fictional scientist was male or female, in case gendered expectations affected how people perceived humility and trustworthiness. The results from 369 participants indicated that gender didn’t affect the link between IH and trust. Similarly, in study 4, with 371 participants, the researchers varied the race/ethnicity of the scientist, finding again that the link between IH and trust remained.
“Together, these four studies offer compelling evidence that perceptions of scientists’ IH play an important role in both trust in scientists and willingness to follow their research-based recommendations,” the authors concluded.
Next steps
In the final study involving 679 participants, researchers examined different ways that scientists might express IH, including whether the IH was expressed as a personal trait, limitations of research methods, or as limitations of research results. Unexpectedly, the strategies to express IH by highlighting limitations in the methods and results of research both increased perceptions of IH, but shook trust in the research. Only personal IH successfully boosted perceptions of IH without backfiring, the authors report.
The finding suggests that more research is needed to guide scientists on how best to express high IH. But, it’s clear that low IH is not good. “[W]e encourage scientists to be particularly mindful of displaying low IH, such as by expressing overconfidence, being unwilling to course correct or disrespecting others’ views,” the researchers caution.
Overall, Schumann said she was encouraged by the team’s findings. “They suggest that the public understands that science isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about asking the right questions, admitting what we don’t yet understand, and learning as we go. Although we still have much to discover about how scientists can authentically convey intellectual humility, we now know people sense that a lack of intellectual humility undermines the very aspects of science that make it valuable and rigorous. This is a great place to build from.”
If you need any inspiration for cutting loose and relaxing this weekend, look no further than a free-wheeling troop of monkeys that broke out of their South Carolina research facility Wednesday and, as of noon Friday, were still “playfully exploring” with their newfound freedom.
In an update Friday, the police department of Yemassee, SC said that the 43 young, female rhesus macaque monkeys are still staying around the perimeter of the Alpha Genesis Primate Research Facility. “The primates are exhibiting calm and playful behavior, which is a positive indication,” the department noted.
The fun-loving furballs got free after a caretaker “failed to secure doors” at the facility.
Alpha Genesis staff have been keeping an eye on the escapees, trying to entice them back in with food. But, instead of taking the bait, the primates have been playing on the perimeter fence while still keeping in touch with the monkeys inside by cooing to them.
“They’re just being goofy monkeys jumping back and forth playing with each other,” Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard told CBS News Thursday. “It’s kind of like a playground situation here.”
Yemassee police note that the monkeys are very young and small—only about 6 or 7 pounds each. They have not been used for any testing yet, don’t carry any disease, and pose no health risk to the public. Still, area residents have been advised to keep their doors and windows locked in case the wee primates try to pay a visit.
This isn’t the first time—or even the second time—Alpha Genesis has had trouble keeping its monkeys under control. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture fined the company $12,600 for violations between 2014 and 2016 that included four monkey breakouts. In those incidents, a total of 30 monkeys escaped. One was never found.
Hoau-Yan Wang, 67, a medical professor at the City University of New York, was a paid collaborator with the Austin, Texas-based pharmaceutical company Cassava Sciences. Wang’s research and publications provided scientific underpinnings for Cassava’s Alzheimer’s treatment, Simufilam, which is now in Phase III trials.
Simufilam is a small-molecule drug that Cassava claims can restore the structure and function of a scaffolding protein in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s, leading to slowed cognitive decline. But outside researchers have long expressed doubts and concerns about the research.
In 2023, Science magazine obtained a 50-page report from an internal investigation at CUNY that looked into 31 misconduct allegations made against Wang in 2021. According to the report, the investigating committee “found evidence highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct by Wang for 14 of the 31 allegations,” the report states. The allegations largely centered around doctored and fabricated images from Western blotting, an analytical technique used to separate and detect proteins. However, the committee couldn’t conclusively prove the images were falsified “due to the failure of Dr. Wang to provide underlying, original data or research records and the low quality of the published images that had to be examined in their place.”
In all, the investigation “revealed long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping by Dr. Wang,” and concluded that “the integrity of Dr. Wang’s work remains highly questionable.” The committee also concluded that Cassava’s lead scientist on its Alzheimer’s disease program, Lindsay Burns, who was a frequent co-author with Wang, also likely bears some responsibility for the misconduct.
In March 2022, five of Wang’s articles published in the journal PLOS One were retracted over integrity concerns with images in the papers. Other papers by Wang have also been retracted or had statements of concern attached to them. Further, in September 2022, the Food and Drug Administration conducted an inspection of the analytical work and techniques used by Wang to analyze blood and cerebrospinal fluid from patients in a simufilam trial. The investigation found a slew of egregious problems, which were laid out in a “damning” report obtained by Science.
In the indictment last week, federal authorities were explicit about the allegations, claiming that Wang falsified the results of his scientific research to NIH “by, among other things, manipulating data and images of Western blots to artificially add bands [which represent proteins], subtract bands, and change their relative thickness and/or darkness, and then drawing conclusions” based on those false results.
Wang is charged with one count of major fraud against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of false statements. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for the major fraud charge, 20 years in prison for each count of wire fraud, and five years in prison for the count of false statements, the Department of Justice said in an announcement.
In a statement posted to its website, Cassava acknowledged Wang’s indictment, calling him a “former” scientific adviser. The company also said that the grants central to the indictment were “related to the early development phases of the Company’s drug candidate and diagnostic test and how these were intended to work.” However, Cassava said that Wang “had no involvement in the Company’s Phase 3 clinical trials of simufilam.”
Those ongoing trials, which some have called to be halted, are estimated to include over 1,800 patients across several countries.
With most computer programs—even complex ones—you can meticulously trace through the code and memory usage to figure out why that program generates any specific behavior or output. That’s generally not true in the field of generative AI, where the non-interpretable neural networks underlying these models make it hard for even experts to figure out precisely why they often confabulate information, for instance.
Now, new research from Anthropic offers a new window into what’s going on inside the Claude LLM’s “black box.” The company’s new paper on “Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” describes a powerful new method for at least partially explaining just how the model’s millions of artificial neurons fire to create surprisingly lifelike responses to general queries.
Opening the hood
When analyzing an LLM, it’s trivial to see which specific artificial neurons are activated in response to any particular query. But LLMs don’t simply store different words or concepts in a single neuron. Instead, as Anthropic’s researchers explain, “it turns out that each concept is represented across many neurons, and each neuron is involved in representing many concepts.”
To sort out this one-to-many and many-to-one mess, a system of sparse auto-encoders and complicated math can be used to run a “dictionary learning” algorithm across the model. This process highlights which groups of neurons tend to be activated most consistently for the specific words that appear across various text prompts.
Enlarge/ The same internal LLM “feature” describes the Golden Gate Bridge in multiple languages and modes.
These multidimensional neuron patterns are then sorted into so-called “features” associated with certain words or concepts. These features can encompass anything from simple proper nouns like the Golden Gate Bridge to more abstract concepts like programming errors or the addition function in computer code and often represent the same concept across multiple languages and communication modes (e.g., text and images).
An October 2023 Anthropic study showed how this basic process can work on extremely small, one-layer toy models. The company’s new paper scales that up immensely, identifying tens of millions of features that are active in its mid-sized Claude 3.0 Sonnet model. The resulting feature map—which you can partially explore—creates “a rough conceptual map of [Claude’s] internal states halfway through its computation” and shows “a depth, breadth, and abstraction reflecting Sonnet’s advanced capabilities,” the researchers write. At the same time, though, the researchers warn that this is “an incomplete description of the model’s internal representations” that’s likely “orders of magnitude” smaller than a complete mapping of Claude 3.
Enlarge/ A simplified map shows some of the concepts that are “near” the “inner conflict” feature in Anthropic’s Claude model.
Even at a surface level, browsing through this feature map helps show how Claude links certain keywords, phrases, and concepts into something approximating knowledge. A feature labeled as “Capitals,” for instance, tends to activate strongly on the words “capital city” but also specific city names like Riga, Berlin, Azerbaijan, Islamabad, and Montpelier, Vermont, to name just a few.
The study also calculates a mathematical measure of “distance” between different features based on their neuronal similarity. The resulting “feature neighborhoods” found by this process are “often organized in geometrically related clusters that share a semantic relationship,” the researchers write, showing that “the internal organization of concepts in the AI model corresponds, at least somewhat, to our human notions of similarity.” The Golden Gate Bridge feature, for instance, is relatively “close” to features describing “Alcatraz Island, Ghirardelli Square, the Golden State Warriors, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the 1906 earthquake, and the San Francisco-set Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo.”
Enlarge/ Some of the most important features involved in answering a query about the capital of Kobe Bryant’s team’s state.
Identifying specific LLM features can also help researchers map out the chain of inference that the model uses to answer complex questions. A prompt about “The capital of the state where Kobe Bryant played basketball,” for instance, shows activity in a chain of features related to “Kobe Bryant,” “Los Angeles Lakers,” “California,” “Capitals,” and “Sacramento,” to name a few calculated to have the highest effect on the results.
Enlarge/ Medical marijuana growing in a facility in Canada.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration is preparing to reclassify marijuana to a lower-risk drug category, a major federal policy change that is in line with recommendations from the US health department last year. The upcoming move was first reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon and has since been confirmed by several other outlets.
The DEA currently designates marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, defined as drugs “with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It puts marijuana in league with LSD and heroin. According to the reports today, the DEA is moving to reclassify it as a Schedule 3 drug, defined as having “a moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” The move would place marijuana in the ranks of ketamine, testosterone, and products containing less than 90 milligrams of codeine.
Marijuana’s rescheduling would be a nod to its potential medical benefits and would shift federal policy in line with many states. To date, 38 states have already legalized medical marijuana.
In August, the Department of Health and Human Services advised the DEA to move marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 based on a review of data by the Food and Drug Administration. The recommendation came after the FDA, in August, granted the first approval of a marijuana-based drug. The drug, Epidiolex (cannabidiol), is approved to treat rare and severe forms of epilepsy. The approval was expected to spur the DEA to downgrade marijuana’s scheduling, though some had predicted it would have occurred earlier. Independent expert advisors for the FDA voted unanimously in favor of approval, convinced by data from three high-quality clinical trials that indicated benefits and a “negligible abuse potential.”
The shift may have a limited effect on consumers in states that have already eased access to marijuana. In addition to the 38 states with medical marijuana access, 24 states have legalized recreational use. But, as a Schedule 3 drug, marijuana would still be regulated by the DEA. The Associated Press notes that the rule change means that roughly 15,000 dispensaries would need to register with the DEA, much like pharmacies, and follow strict reporting requirements.
One area that will clearly benefit from the change is scientific research on marijuana’s effects. Many academic scientists are federally funded and, as such, they must follow federal regulations. Researching a Schedule 1 drug carries extensive restrictions and rules, even for researchers in states where marijuana is legalized. A lower scheduling will allow researchers better access to conduct long-awaited studies.
It’s unclear exactly when the move will be announced and finalized. The DEA must get sign-off from the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before proceeding. A source for NBC News said Attorney General Merrick Garland may submit the rescheduling to the OMB as early as Tuesday afternoon. After that, the DEA will open a public comment period before it can finalize the rule.
The US Department of Justice told several outlets that it “continues to work on this rule. We have no further comment at this time.”
