June 15, 2025 — The previously unquestioned American leadership in science is evaporating. Groundbreaking medical research is stopping abruptly. Research institutes at NIH are disappearing. As this unfolds, the response of many people in supposed roles of scientific leadership has been to duck and take cover. Tell us when it’s over and we can get back to work. Yes, […]
May 5, 2025 — The first ever estimates of the economic impact of cuts to U.S. government-funded research are out from economists at American University in Washington. The current administration has already frozen billions of dollars in research funding. The president’s budget proposal last week called for cutting funding to the National Science Foundation by more than half. The […]
March 9, 2025 — For many people who toil in pursuit of insights from scientific research, these are stressful times. Mass firings have decimated U.S. science agencies, according to reporting in Science. The chaos has shattered the careers of many scientists and has been especially harsh for vulnerable early career scientists. As this is happening, a climate of fear […]
November 2, 2023 — Over the past 20 years or so, there has been growing concern that many research results published in scientific journals can’t be reproduced. Depending on the field of research, studies have found efforts to redo published studies lead to different results in between 23% and 89% of cases. To understand how different researchers might arrive […]
December 11, 2022 — “Let’s just agree to disagree” is an expression of utter nonsense, says Professor David Allison in an introduction to the concept of adversarial collaboration. Of course, he is describing this in the context of scientific controversies. And in obesity and nutrition research, it’s quite easy to construct a list of subjects on which the disagreements […]
October 7, 2022 — Publishing research and academic journals is a business that is both important and highly profitable. The business model for this industry could be a whole post of its own, but it’s worth noting that just four companies publish more than half of the world’s academic papers. Elsevier alone published more than half a million peer-reviewed […]
July 24, 2022 — Institutions of public health are in a tough spot right now. COVID has so battered public trust in the CDC that it has put us into the figure-it-out-yourself phase of this pandemic. Likewise, the public health response to obesity has long been one of both moral panic and ineffective policy prescriptions. Decades of exhortations to […]
March 20, 2022 — “Focusing on cancer, focusing on obesity, focusing on diabetes, a whole range of diseases … we’re going to make significant breakthroughs.” This in a nutshell is the aspiration for ARPA-H, as voiced by President Joe Biden. It is a new agency with a billion dollars of funding for the next three years, passed in a bipartisan […]
January 21, 2022 — Bariatric surgery has a profound effect on the chronic disease of obesity. Diabetes goes into remission and hunger recedes. Metabolism finds a steadier state, more compatible with good health. But the billion-dollar question is, how? Make no mistake. This is a big puzzle. Now a series of publications over the last several weeks reveals the […]
August 9, 2021 — Could it be that innovation and competition for better obesity care will overtake the health problem of obesity? We see several signs pointing to this. A decade ago, it was tough to get FDA to take obesity innovation seriously. So big pharma research was running from the challenge. Sanofi had invested heavily in developing rimonabant […]
