“Things we’ll never know” science fair highlights US’s canceled research

Washington, DC—From a distance, the gathering looked like a standard poster session at an academic conference, with researchers standing next to large displays of the work they were doing. Except in this case, it was taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and the researchers were describing work that they weren’t doing. Called "The things we’ll never know," the event was meant to highlight the work of researchers whose grants had been canceled by the Trump administration. A lot of court cases have been dealing with these cancellations as a group, highlighting the lack of scientific—or seemingly rational—input into the decisions to cut funding for entire categories of research. Here, there was a much tighter focus on the individual pieces of research that had become casualties in that larger fight. Seeing even a small sampling of the individual grants that have been terminated provides a much better perspective on the sort of damage that is being done to the US public by these cuts and the utter mindlessness of the process that's causing that damage. “It’s no way to do science," one of the researchers told us. Targeting diversity and more While many of the scientists were perfectly willing to identify themselves at the event, more than one asked us not to name them in any coverage. Another noted that, while she wasn't concerned about retaliation from the federal government, she was at a state university in a state with a Republican governor and so could still face problems. As a result, we're not identifying any of the scientists we talked to in this article. With a few exceptions, most of these scientists could only surmise why their research was cut. A couple of them were funded by programs that were meant to increase minority participation in the sciences and so were targeted as DEI. Another was at Harvard and saw his materials science research into new refrigerants canceled, ostensibly because Harvard hadn't cracked down hard enough on campus antisemitism ("ostensibly" because the government has also issued a series of demands that have nothing to do with antisemitism).