Hi, Benjamin from the Nature podcast here. We've been covering the current situation that science is facing in the US in the wake of President Trump's election, and as we've said, there's a lot going on in this space right now. In fact, a lot happened this week as we were putting the regular podcast to bed. So to get us up to speed in this podcast

extra, I'm joined by Nature's Max Kozlov, who's been following all the developments. Max, thank you

as ever for joining me. Happy to be here. So this week, you've been reporting once again on everything

that's been going on at the NIH, the US.S. National Institutes of Health. Of course,

the biggest funder of medical research in the world. And there have been some big leadership changes

at institutes that make up the NIH. Yeah, exactly. So the NIH is made up of 27 institutes and

centers, for example, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of

Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And four of those institute heads were placed on administrative

leave this week, and some were offered reassignment to Alaska, Montana, Oklahoma,

elsewhere in the country as part of the Indian Health Service. So clearly they have

essentially removed these folks from their positions. And that is unprecedented because these are

career officials. These are not political appointees. And nothing like this has ever happened where multiple

institute directors are reassigned or removed from their posts like this.

So this isn't part of the sort of natural churn that you might expect when a new presidential

administration comes in. This is something unseen before.

Exactly. And these institute directors oversee billions of dollars of research each.

They're kind of the figureheads, and they're chosen by the scientific community to represent and to lead research in that field.

And people noticed that the four institute directors they removed from their posts,

they all fund a disproportionate amount of the research that the administration has deemed

unworthy or unscientific or that they've been targeting.

So that is research about gender ideology,

research about COVID-19, about vaccine hesitancy, about quote-unquote transgender issues.

...