Into darkness
Written by
Howy JacobsIt’s very hard to write about the current state of global science without getting sucked into the whirlpool of events in the United States that is perceived by most of our colleagues as nothing short of disastrous. However, so much has been written about it already. And by the time this blogpiece goes out some new assault on science, academic freedom or the right to study may have been announced and enacted. So I will confine myself to three particular vulnerabilities that affect the life sciences, and Europe in particular. In theory, my fears are counteracted by well-established international agreements, commercial laws and so on. But recent actions taken by the USA are akin to the behaviour of a rogue state. Any violation of legal obligations, written agreements or long- standing norms would likely be tied up for years in probably fruitless litigation. Yet the negative effects would be felt immediately.
Through EMBL and other organizations, Europe has unfettered access to the databases of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a subdivision of NIH. In theory. Europe maintains its own databases which are updated daily to mirror those of NCBI. However, in practice, almost all of us use NCBI resources directly, and on a daily basis; especially PubMed – the curated compendium of published literature in the life sciences, including abstracts and full citation details, which also acts as a gateway to download almost everything that is published ‘gold open access’ or to which our university libraries have a subscription, if still behind a paywall. Without such a resource, our ability to read the literature would be severely impaired. Even using customized tools to keep track of what has been published ultimately depends on interrogating PubMed. Other NCBI databases and tools, such as compiled nucleotide, protein and gene-expression data, or just the suite of BLAST programs, are also crucial for our work. But it would be easy and convenient for the US administration to restrict all such use, claiming that the American taxpayer was subsidizing European science and giving us an ‘unfair advantage’. There is a genuine risk that we could end up paying exorbitant user fees or losing access rights completely.
Much of current-day bioscience depends on equipment and materials manufactured and distributed globally: the same as applies to the automotive industry, to aircraft production, to agriculture and to many other major industries. But even relatively minor players such as whisky manufacture have become pawns in the burgeoning trade war sparked by the imposition of new tariffs by the USA. Virtually all of Europe’s life scientists are already living ‘hand-to-mouth’ at the limits of what our research grants can afford. If prices for materials, services and instrumentation were suddenly doubled or trebled, as has recently been threatened for European wines, our science would be crippled. And would soon become uncompetitive with science in other countries that have managed to shield themselves from such imposts. It’s easy to dismiss this as scaremongering, but it could easily happen: meanwhile our governments are themselves struggling to finance increased defence capabilities, so have little in reserve to compensate us for sudden large cost increases.
A third threat looms over the actual content of the published scientific literature. The US vice- president JD Vance has frequently castigated academia and has even gone so far as to assert that “professors are the enemy” (see Youtube ). This despite the fact that his own father-in-law and mother-in-law are both professors! If the US government comes to regard academia as a massive conspiracy against its interests, the principle of peer-review comes immediately into question. In Vance’s view, we academics maintain collective censorship over the scientific literature. So, the only way this could be broken would be to outlaw peer-review. There are already many obligations and restrictions specifying what US federal funding for science can and cannot be used for. If publication in any scientific journal that practises peer-review, or even exercises the mildest form of editorial filtering, were to be prohibited by such a mechanism, the credibility of the entire literature would be undermined, allowing prejudice, political dogma and outright fraud to drown out any vestige of objective scholarship.
We seem to be at a crossroads, with the genuine threat of a new dark age hanging over us. It may of course never happen. But, with all haste, we need to devise and implement a plan to insulate ourselves against its most egregious manifestations, just in case it does.
