President Trump’s scientific advisor Michael Kratsios called for a return to reproducible and transparent research to launch what he described as years of scientific progress in standby, in his first detailed public remarks on scientific policy since his entry into office in March.
Kratsios, which runs the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said on Monday that biomedical research budgets have increased sharply since the 1990s and have contributed to breakthroughs such as Crispr, a genetic publishing technology which is now the basis of sickle cell therapy. But he also said that this increase in federal dollars had not led to a global increase in new drug approvals, adding that Studies have found that scientific progress has become more and more progressive.
“This proof of scientific slowdown should encourage us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of finance, lead and use science,” Kratsios said in a speech to the National Academy of Sciences. “Spending more money on bad things is much worse than spending less money on good things.”
He assigned the problem to researchers deviating from what he called starry science. Such work, said Kratsios, “is structured for falsification, subject to an impartial peer exam, acceptance of negative results as positive and closed results to conflicts of interest.”
He added that promoting such research will be an accent point on the OSTP during his mandate, although he has not described specific measures that the office will take. Kratsios said the OSTP will strive to reduce administrative researchers from the federal government to release them to focus on science rather than “bureaucratic boxes”.
Kratsios’ remarks are involved during the unprecedented disruption for the scientific community, with the federal government Freezing financing at certain universities,, Finish subsidies that he judges in conflict with his political program, and dismiss thousands of employees Through scientific agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.
As Director of the OSTP, Kratsios tasks include the supply of contribution to the federal research budget and the coordination of scientific activities of various government agencies. The Trump administration recently asked a drop of 26% At the discretionary budget of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, including a reduction of $ 18 billion to NIH. Asked about the proposed discounts of the president of the National Academy of Sciences Marcia McNutt after her remarks, Kratsios stressed the importance of spending federal dollars.
“I think we are at a very important moment in the time when we have to reset the way we think of spending in many of these scientific agencies. And what (American service) has been able to show and reveal is that there have been large sums of money spent for things that are clearly not in national interests, “he said.
Kratsios have underlined the research linked to diversity, equity and inclusion as an example, arguing that such work “represents an existential threat to the real diversity of thought which constitutes the foundation of the scientific community”.
He also suggested that private funders in science could play a more important role in supporting basic research while the federal government seeks to tighten its belt. For example, he said, the industry could help finance the construction of research facilities in universities. It is a lively contrast to the arguments of many university institutions, which stressed that the role of the federal government in the coverage Administrative installations and costs is irreplaceable and that the administration’s plan to cap these payments at 15% would squeeze scientific progress when stopped.
Although Kratsios has not indicated specific examples of what standard science is, it highlighted examples of what it is not. One was a study of nature 2009 co-written by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, at the time a high-level researcher of Genentech, who described an interaction between two proteins which killed the neurons or lose their links between them.
The widely quoted discovery has fueled hopes for new ways to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, but in the years that followed, other researchers have not been able to reproduce key experiences and scientific detectives revealed that the study contained manipulated images. The study was retracted in 2023 after a Stanford survey revealed that Tessier-Lavigne, then president of the university, had not had any research misconduct but failed “Definitely and directly”, correct this study and others.
Kratsios did not appoint Tessier-Lavigne, but the reference was undoubtedly. The director of the OSTP noted that the 2009 document “had accumulated more than 800 quotes, poorly oriented huge amounts of money and helped the researcher to become president of a leading university”. He added that this “painful episode” stressed the importance of ensuring that published science is reproducible, and he suggested that it would be a priority for financing in the future.
“If the government is funding a greater search for reproducibility, there will be more research on reproducibility,” said Kratsios, who has also called for a broader change in science culture far from researchers only enriching for having published reflective results in high -level journals.
From Franklin D. Roosevelt, almost all presidents have had a scientific advisor with research training. Kratsios is an exception. Before joining the administration, the 38 -year -old technologist was the director general of the AI scale, a company in the Bay region which creates data for the formation of large languages models. In the performance of the inauguration of Trump, experts in scientific policy were concern: if Kratsios could be an effective and solid defender of the needs of the biomedical research community.
But the Kratsios, which was confirmed by the Senate in March by a vote of 74-25 years, attracted Bipartisan support and is Considered relatively controversial among Trump’s named people. During the president’s first term, he was director of administration technology and was mainly focused on artificial intelligence and quantum IT policy. When the pandemic blow COVVI-19, he led the training by the White House of a network of federal agencies and university establishments to make the supervisors available to researchers who seek to develop treatments and vaccines.
There are growing signs which, in the midst of research disruption in recent months, some scientists are seriously leave the United States, including a analysis work data by nature. When asked if Trump’s policies could trigger a scientific brain flight, Kratsios was unequivocal.
“I cannot do much for people who have an irrational behavior. But I believe that the United States, by far, is by far the best place to carry out research and to finally market this research,” he said. “And there is no study in the world that I find from a credible distance that will never question this today. We know we are the best. ”