January 27 | 2021
New Hope for Organ Transplantation: Life Without Anti-Rejection Drugs
Linda Marsa is a contributing editor at Discover, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves (Rodale, 2013), which the New York Times called “gripping to read.” Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science Writing, and she has written for numerous publications, including Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Nautilus, Men’s Journal, Playboy, Pacific Standard and Aeon.
Kidney transplant patient Robert Waddell, center, with his wife and children after being off immunosuppresants; photo aken last summer in Perdido Key, FL. Left to right: Christian, Bailey, Rob, Karen (wife), Robby and Casey.
Photo courtesy Rob Waddell
Rob Waddell dreaded getting a kidney transplant. He suffers from a genetic condition called polycystic kidney disease that causes the uncontrolled growth of cysts that gradually choke off kidney function. The inherited defect has haunted his family for generations, killing his great grandmother, grandmother, and numerous cousins, aunts and uncles.
But he saw how difficult it was for his mother and sister, who also suffer from this condition, to live with the side effects of the drugs they needed to take to prevent organ rejection, which can cause diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer, and even kidney failure because of their toxicity. Many of his relatives followed the same course, says Waddell: "They were all on dialysis, then a transplant and ended up usually dying from cancers caused by the medications."
When the Louisville native and father of four hit 40, his kidneys barely functioned and the only alternative was either a transplant or the slow death of dialysis. But in 2009, when Waddell heard about an experimental procedure that could eliminate the need for taking antirejection drugs, he jumped at the chance to be their first patient. Devised by scientists at the University of Louisville and Northwestern University, the innovative approach entails mixing stem cells from the live kidney donor with that of the recipient to create a hybrid immune system, known as a chimera, that would trick the immune system and prevent it from attacking the implanted kidney.
The procedure itself was done at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, using a live kidney donated by a neighbor of Waddell's, who camped out in Chicago during his recovery. Prior to surgery, Waddell underwent a conditioning treatment that consisted of low dose radiation and chemotherapy to weaken his own immune system and make room for the infusion of stem cells.
"The low intensity chemo and radiation conditioning regimen create just enough space for the donor stem cells to gain a foothold in the bone marrow and the donor's immune system takes over," says Dr. Joseph Levanthal, the transplant surgeon who performed the operation and director of kidney and pancreas transplantation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "That way the recipient develops an immune system that doesn't see the donor organ as foreign."
"As a surgeon, I saw what my patients had to go through—taking 25 pills a day, dying at an early age from heart disease, or having a 35% chance of dying every year on dialysis."
A week later, Waddell had the kidney transplant. The following day, he was infused with a complex cellular cocktail that included blood-forming stem cells derived from his donor's bone marrow mixed what are called tolerance inducing facilitator cells (FCs); these cells help the foreign stem cells get established in the recipient's bone marrow.
Over the course of the following year, he was slowly weaned off of antirejection medications—a precaution in case the procedure didn't work—and remarkably, hasn't needed them since. "I felt better than I had in decades because my kidneys [had been] degrading," recalls Waddell, now 54 and a CPA for a global beverage company. And what's even better is that this new approach offers hope for one of his sons who has also inherited the disorder.
Kidney transplants are the most frequent organ transplants in the world and more than 23,000 of these procedures were done in the United States in 2019, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Of this, about 7,000 operations are done annually using live organ donors; the remainder use organs from people who are deceased. Right now, this revolutionary new approach—as well as a similar strategy formulated by Stanford University scientists--is in the final phase of clinical trials. Ultimately, this research may pave the way towards realizing the holy grail of organ transplantation: preventing organ rejection by creating a tolerant state in which the recipient's immune system is compatible with the donor, which would eliminate the need for a lifetime of medications.
"As a surgeon, I saw what my patients had to go through—taking 25 pills a day, dying at an early age from heart disease, or having a 35% chance of dying every year on dialysis," says Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, a transplant surgeon and director of the Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville, whose discovery of facilitator cells were the basis for this therapeutic platform. Ildstad, who has spent more than two decades searching for a better way, says, "This is something I have worked for my entire life."
The Louisville group uses a combination of chemo and radiation to replace the recipient's immune and blood forming cells with that of the donor. In contrast, the Stanford protocol involves harvesting the donor's blood stem cells and T-cells, which are the foot soldiers of the immune system that fight off infections and would normally orchestrate the rejection of the transplanted organ. Their transplant recipients undergo a milder form of "conditioning" that only radiates discrete parts of the body and selectively targets the recipient's T-cells, creating room for both sets of T-cells, a strategy these researchers believe has a better safety profile and less of a chance of rejection.
"We try to achieve immune tolerance by a true chimerism," says Dr. Samuel Strober, a professor of medicine for immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University and a leader of this research team. "The recipients immune system cells are maintained but mixed in the blood with that of the donor."
Studies suggest both approaches work. In a 2018 clinical trial conducted by Talaris Therapeutics, a Louisville-based biotech founded by Ildstad, 26 of 37 (70%) of the live donor kidney transplant recipients no longer need immunosuppressants. Last fall, Talaris began the final phase of clinical tests that will eventually encompass more than 120 such patients.
The Stanford group's cell-based immunotherapy, which is called MDR-101 and is sponsored by the South San Francisco biotech, Medeor Therapeutics, has had similar results in patients who received organs from live donors who were either well matched, such as one from siblings, meaning they were immunologically identical, or partially matched; Talaris uses unrelated donors where there is only a partial match.
In their 2020 clinical trial of 51 patients, 29 were fully matched and 22 were a partial match; 22 of the fully matched recipients didn't need antirejection drugs and ten of the partial matches were able to stop taking some of these medications without rejection. "With our fully matched, roughly 80% have been completely off drugs up to 14 years later," says Strober, "and reducing the number of drugs from three to one [in the partial matches] means you have far fewer side effects. The goal is to get them off of all drugs."
But these protocols are limited to a small number of patients—living donor kidney recipients. As a consequence, both teams are experimenting with ways to broaden their approach so they can use cadaver organs from deceased donors, with human tests planned in the coming year. Here's how that would work: after the other organs are removed from a deceased donor, stem cells are harvested from the donor's vertebrae in the spinal column and then frozen for storage.
"We do the transplant and give the patient a chance to recover and maintain them on drugs," says Ildstad. "Then we do the tolerance conditioning at a later stage."
If this strategy is successful, it would be a genuine game changer, and open the door to using these protocols for transplanting other cadaver organs, including the heart, lungs and liver. While the overall procedure is complex and costly, in the long run it's less expensive than repeated transplant surgeries, the cost of medications and hospitalizations for complications caused by the drugs, or thrice weekly dialysis treatments, says Ildstad.
And she adds, you can't put a price tag on the vast improvement in quality of life.
Linda Marsa is a contributing editor at Discover, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves (Rodale, 2013), which the New York Times called “gripping to read.” Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science Writing, and she has written for numerous publications, including Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Nautilus, Men’s Journal, Playboy, Pacific Standard and Aeon.
Artificial avatars for hire and sophisticated video manipulation carry profound implications for society.
Image by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash
This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.
Alethea.ai sports a grid of faces smiling, blinking and looking about. Some are beautiful, some are oddly familiar, but all share one thing in common—they are fake.
Alethea creates "synthetic media"— including digital faces customers can license saying anything they choose with any voice they choose. Companies can hire these photorealistic avatars to appear in explainer videos, advertisements, multimedia projects or any other applications they might dream up without running auditions or paying talent agents or actor fees. Licenses begin at a mere $99. Companies may also license digital avatars of real celebrities or hire mashups created from real celebrities including "Don Exotic" (a mashup of Donald Trump and Joe Exotic) or "Baby Obama" (a large-eared toddler that looks remarkably similar to a former U.S. President).
Naturally, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the appeal is understandable. Rather than flying to a remote location to film a beer commercial, an actor can simply license their avatar to do the work for them. The question is—where and when this tech will cross the line between legitimately licensed and authorized synthetic media to deep fakes—synthetic videos designed to deceive the public for financial and political gain.
Deep fakes are not new. From written quotes that are manipulated and taken out of context to audio quotes that are spliced together to mean something other than originally intended, misrepresentation has been around for centuries. What is new is the technology that allows this sort of seamless and sophisticated deception to be brought to the world of video.
"At one point, video content was considered more reliable, and had a higher threshold of trust," said Alethea CEO and co-founder, Arif Khan. "We think video is harder to fake and we aren't yet as sensitive to detecting those fakes. But the technology is definitely there."
"In the future, each of us will only trust about 15 people and that's it," said Phil Lelyveld, who serves as Immersive Media Program Lead at the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California. "It's already very difficult to tell true footage from fake. In the future, I expect this will only become more difficult."
How do we know what's true in a world where original videos created with avatars of celebrities and politicians can be manipulated to say virtually anything?
As the U.S. 2020 Presidential Election nears, the potential moral and ethical implications of this technology are startling. A number of cases of truth tampering have recently been widely publicized. On August 5, President Donald Trump's campaign released an ad featuring several photos of Joe Biden that were altered to make it seem like was hiding all alone in his basement. In one photo, at least ten people who had been sitting with Biden in the original shot were cut out. In other photos, Biden's image was removed from a nature preserve and praying in church to make it appear Biden was in that same basement. Recently several videos of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were slowed down by 75 percent to make her sound as if her speech was slurred.
During a campaign event in Florida on September 15 of this year, former Vice President Joe Biden was introduced by Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Luis Fonsi. After he was introduced, Biden paid tribute to the singer-songwriter—he held up his cell phone and played the hit song "Despecito". Shortly afterward, a doctored version of this video appeared on self-described parody site the United Spot replacing the Despicito with N.W.A.'s "F—- Tha Police". By September 16, Donald Trump retweeted the video, twice—first with the line "What is this all about" and second with the line "China is drooling. They can't believe this!" Twitter was quick to mark the video in these tweets as manipulated media.
Twitter had previously addressed several of Donald Trump's tweets—flagging a video shared in June as manipulated media and removing altogether a video shared by Trump in July showing a group promoting the hydroxychloroquine as an effective cure for COVID-19. Many of these manipulated videos are ultimately flagged or taken down, but not before they are seen and shared by millions of online viewers.
These faked videos were exposed rather quickly, as they could be compared with the original, publicly available source material. But what happens when there is no original source material? How do we know what's true in a world where original videos created with avatars of celebrities and politicians can be manipulated to say virtually anything?
"This type of fake media is a profound threat to our democracy," said Reid Blackman, the CEO of VIRTUE--an ethics consultancy for AI leaders. "Democracy depends on well-informed citizens. When citizens can't or won't discern between real and fake news, the implications are huge."
In light of the importance of reliable information in the political system, there's a clear and present need to verify that the images and news we consume is authentic. So how can anyone ever know that the content they are viewing is real?
"This will not be a simple technological solution," said Blackman. "There is no 'truth' button to push to verify authenticity. There's plenty of blame and condemnation to go around. Purveyors of information have a responsibility to vet the reliability of their sources. And consumers also have a responsibility to vet their sources."
Yet the process of verifying sources has never been more challenging. More and more citizens are choosing to live in a "media bubble"—gathering and sharing news only from and with people who share their political leanings and opinions. At one time, United States broadcasters were bound by the Fairness Doctrine—requiring them to present controversial issues important to the public in a way that the FCC deemed honest, equitable and balanced. The repeal of this doctrine in 1987 paved the way for new forms of cable news channels such as Fox News and MSNBC that appealed to viewers with a particular point of view. The Internet has only exacerbated these tendencies. Social media algorithms are designed to keep people clicking within their comfort zones by presenting members with only the thoughts and opinions they want to hear.
"I sometimes laugh when I hear people tell me they can back a particular opinion they hold with research," said Blackman. "Having conducted a fair bit of true scientific research, I am aware that clicking on one article on the Internet hardly qualifies. But a surprising number of people believe that finding any source online that states the fact they choose to believe is the same as proving it true."
Back to the fundamental challenge: How do we as a society root out what's false online? Lelyveld suggests that it will begin by verifying things that are known to be true rather than trying to call out everything that is fake. "The EU called me in to talk about how to deal with fake news coming out of Russia," said Lelyveld. "I told them Hollywood has spent 100 years developing special effects technology to make things that are wholly fictional indistinguishable from the truth. I told them that you'll never chase down every source of fake news. You're better off focusing on what can be proved true."
Arif Khan agrees. "There are probably 100 accounts attributed to Elon Musk on Twitter, but only one has the blue checkmark," said Khan. "That means Twitter has verified that an account of public interest is real. That's what we're trying to do with our platform. Allow celebrities to verify that specific videos were licensed and authorized directly by them."
Alethea will use another key technology called blockchain to mark all authentic authorized videos with celebrity avatars. Blockchain uses a distributed ledger technology to make sure that no undetected changes have been made to the content. Think of the difference between editing a document in a traditional word processing program and editing in a distributed online editing system like Google Docs. In a traditional word processing program, you can edit and copy a document without revealing any changes. In a shared editing system like Google Docs, every person who shares the document can see a record of every edit, addition and copy made of any portion of the document. In a similar way, blockchain helps Alethea ensure that approved videos have not been copied or altered inappropriately.
While AI companies like Alethea are moving to ensure that avatars based on real individuals aren't wrongly identified, the situation becomes a bit murkier when it comes to the question of representing groups, races, creeds, and other forms of identity. Alethea is rightly proud that the completely artificial avatars visually represent a variety of ages, races and sexes. However, companies could conceivably license an avatar to represent a marginalized group without actually hiring a person within that group to decide what the avatar will do or say.
"I don't know if I would call this tokenism, as that is difficult to identify without understanding the hiring company's intent," said Blackman. "Where this becomes deeply troubling is when avatars are used to represent a marginalized group without clearly pointing out the actor is an avatar. It's one thing for an African American woman avatar to say, 'I like ice cream.' It's entirely different thing for an African American woman avatar to say she supports a particular political candidate. In the second case, the avatar is being used as social proof that real people of a certain type back a certain political idea. And there the deception is far more problematic."
"It always comes down to unintended consequences of technology," said Lelyveld. "Technology is neutral—it's only the implementation that has the power to be good or bad. Without a thoughtful approach to the cultural, moral and political implications of technology, it often drifts towards the bad. We need to make a conscious decision as we release new technology to ensure it moves towards the good."
When presented with the idea that his avatars might be used to misrepresent marginalized groups, Khan was thoughtful. "Yes, I can see that is an unintended consequence of our technology. We would like to encourage people to license the avatars of real people, who would have final approval over what their avatars say or do. As to what people do with our completely artificial avatars, we will have to consider that moving forward."
Lelyveld frankly sees the ability for advertisers to create avatars that are our assistants or even our friends as a greater moral concern. "Once our digital assistant or avatar becomes an integral part of our life—even a friend as it were, what's to stop marketers from having those digital friends make suggestions about what drink we buy, which shirt we wear or even which candidate we elect? The possibilities for bad actors to reach us through our digital circle is mind-boggling."
Ultimately, Blackman suggests, we as a society will need to make decisions about what matters to us. "We will need to build policies and write laws—tackling the biggest problems like political deep fakes first. And then we have to figure out how to make the penalties stiff enough to matter. Fining a multibillion-dollar company a few million for a major offense isn't likely to move the needle. The punishment will need to fit the crime."
Until then, media consumers will need to do their own due diligence—to do the difficult work of uncovering the often messy and deeply uncomfortable news that's the truth.
[Editor's Note: To read other articles in this special magazine issue, visit the beautifully designed e-reader version.]
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Jeanette DePatie describes herself as a professional “techsplainer”--taking complicated technologies and technological concepts and breaking them down into everyday language that everyone can understand. She has shared her entertaining and educational views on technology trends with companies like, McDonalds, Reynolds, Meredith, Better Homes and Gardens, Facebook and 20th Century Fox. She also proudly boasts that she once raised several million dollars in venture capital for a technology company with a presentation featuring two pieces of PVC pipe, a plastic funnel and a rubber chicken. She has been hired to describe technology by a host of Fortune 500 companies including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Monsanto, NTT Electronics, Panasonic, Pulitzer Samsung and Sony. She has spoken at CES, NAB, SMPTE CEATECH The Lean Startup Conference and a variety of Colleges and Universities.
October 14 | 2020
The Nation’s Science and Health Agencies Face a Credibility Crisis: Can Their Reputations Be Restored?
Morale at federal science agencies -- and public trust in their guidance -- is at a concerning low right now.
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This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.
It didn't have to be this way. More than 200,000 Americans dead, seven million infected, with numbers continuing to climb, an economy in shambles with millions out of work, hundreds of thousands of small businesses crushed with most of the country still under lockdown. And all with no end in sight. This catastrophic result is due in large part to the willful disregard of scientific evidence and of muzzling policy experts by the Trump White House, which has spent its entire time in office attacking science.
One of the few weapons we had to combat the spread of Covid-19—wearing face masks—has been politicized by the President, who transformed this simple public health precaution into a first amendment issue to rally his base. Dedicated public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the highly respected director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, have received death threats, which have prompted many of them around the country to resign.
Over the summer, the Trump White House pressured the Centers for Disease Control, which is normally in charge of fighting epidemics, to downplay COVID risks among young people and encourage schools to reopen. And in late September, the CDC was forced to pull federal teams who were going door-to-door doing testing surveys in Minnesota because of multiple incidents of threats and abuse. This list goes on and on.
Still, while the Trump administration's COVID failures are the most visible—and deadly—the nation's entire federal science infrastructure has been undermined in ways large and small.
The White House has steadily slashed monies for science—the 2021 budget cuts funding by 10–30% or more for crucial agencies like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—and has gutted health and science agencies across the board, including key agencies of the Department of Energy and the Interior, especially in divisions that deal with issues they oppose ideologically like climate change.
Even farmers can't get reliable information about how climate change affects planting seasons because the White House moved the entire staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture agency who does this research, relocating them from Maryland to Kansas City, Missouri. Many of these scientists couldn't uproot their families and sell their homes, so the division has had to pretty much start over from scratch with a skeleton crew.
More than 1,600 federal scientists left government in the first two years of the Trump Administration, according to data compiled by the Washington Post, and one-fifth of top positions in science are vacant, depriving agencies of the expertise they need to fulfill their vital functions. Industry executives and lobbyists have been installed as gatekeepers—HHS Secretary Alex Azar was previously president of Eli Lilly, and three climate change deniers were appointed to key posts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to cite just a couple of examples. Trump-appointed officials have sidelined, bullied, or even vilified those who dare to speak out, which chills the rigorous debate that is the essential to sound, independent science.
"The CDC needs to be able to speak regularly to the American people to explain what it knows and how it knows it."
Linda Birnbaum knows firsthand what it's like to become a target. The microbiologist recently retired after more than a decade as the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is the world's largest environmental health organization and the greatest funder of environmental health and toxicology research, a position that often put her agency at odds with the chemical and fossil fuel industry. There was an attempt to get her fired, she says, "because I had the nerve to write that science should be used in making policy. The chemical industry really went after me, and my last two years were not so much fun under this administration. I'd like to believe it was because I was making a difference—if I wasn't, they wouldn't care."
Little wonder that morale at federal agencies is low. "We're very frustrated," says Dr. William Schaffner, a veteran infectious disease specialist and a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. "My colleagues within these agencies, the CDC rank and file, are keeping their heads down doing the best they can, and they hope to weather this storm."
The cruel irony is that the United States was once a beacon of scientific innovation. In the heady post World War II years, while Europe lay in ruins, the successful development of penicillin and the atomic bomb—which Americans believed helped vanquish the Axis powers—unleashed a gusher of public money into research, launching an unprecedented era of achievement in American science. Scientists conquered polio, deciphered the genetic code, harnessed the power of the atom, invented lasers, transistors, microchips and computers, sent missions beyond Mars, and landed men on the moon. A once-inconsequential hygiene laboratory was transformed into the colossus the National Institutes of Health has become, which remains today the world's flagship medical research center, unrivaled in size and scope.
At the same time, a tiny public health agency headquartered in Atlanta, which had been in charge of eradicating the malaria outbreaks that plagued impoverished rural areas in the Deep South until the late 1940s, evolved into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC became the world's leader in fighting disease outbreaks, and the agency's crack team of epidemiologists—members of the vaunted Epidemic Intelligence Service—were routinely dispatched to battle global outbreaks of contagions such as Ebola and malaria and help lead the vaccination campaigns to eradicate killers like polio and small pox that have saved millions of lives.
What will it take to rebuild our federal science infrastructure and restore not only the public's confidence but the respect of the world's scientific community? There are some hopeful signs that there is pushback against the current national leadership, and non-profit watchdog groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists have mapped out comprehensive game plans to restore public trust and the integrity of science.
These include methods of protecting science from political manipulation; restoring the oversight role of independent federal advisory committees, whose numbers were decimated by recent executive orders; strengthening scientific agencies that have been starved by budget cuts and staff attrition; and supporting whistleblower protections and allowing scientists to do their jobs without political meddling to restore integrity to the process. And this isn't just a problem at the CDC. A survey of 1,600 EPA scientists revealed that more than half had been victims of political interference and were pressured to skew their findings, according to research released in April by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"Federal agencies are staffed by dedicated professionals," says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former fisheries biologist for NOAA. "Their job is not to serve the president but the public interest. Inspector generals are continuing to do what they're supposed to, but their findings are not being adhered to. But they need to hold agencies accountable. If an agency has not met its mission or engaged in misconduct, there needs to be real consequences."
On other fronts, last month nine vaccine makers, including Sanofi, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca, took the unprecedented stop of announcing that their COVID-19 vaccines would be thoroughly vetted before they were released. In their implicit refusal to bow to political pressure from the White House to have a vaccine available before the election, their goal was to restore public confidence in vaccine safety, and ensure that enough Americans would consent to have the shot when it was eventually approved so that we'd reach the long-sought holy grail of herd immunity.
"That's why it's really important that all of the decisions need to be made with complete transparency and not taking shortcuts," says Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the CDC during the H1N1, Ebola, and Zika emergencies. "A vaccine is our most important tool, and we can't break that tool by meddling in the science approval process."
In late September, Senate Democrats introduced a new bill to halt political meddling in public health initiatives by the White House. Called Science and Transparency Over Politics Act (STOP), the legislation would create an independent task force to investigate political interference in the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. "The Trump administration is still pushing the president's political priorities rather than following the science to defeat this virus," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a press release.
To effectively bring the pandemic under control and restore public confidence, the CDC must assume the leadership role in fighting COVID-19. During previous outbreaks, the top federal infectious disease specialists like Drs. Fauci and Frieden would have daily press briefings, and these need to resume. "The CDC needs to be able to speak regularly to the American people to explain what it knows and how it knows it," says Frieden, who cautions that a vaccine won't be a magic bullet. "There is no one thing that is going to make this virus go away. We need to continue to limit indoor exposures, wear masks, and do strategic testing, isolation, and quarantine. We need a comprehensive approach, and not just a vaccine."
We must also appoint competent and trustworthy leaders, says Rosenberg of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Top posts in too many science agencies are now filled by former industry executives and lobbyists with a built-in bias, as well as people lacking relevant scientific experience, many of whom were never properly vetted because of the current administration's penchant for bypassing Congress and appointing "acting" officials. "We've got great career people who have hung in, but in so much of the federal government, they just put in 'acting' people," says Linda Birnbaum. "They need to bring in better, qualified senior leadership."
Open positions need to be filled, too. Federal science agencies have been seriously crippled by staffing attrition, and the Trump Administration instituted a hiring freeze when it first came in. Staffing levels remain at least ten percent down from previous levels, says Birnbaum and in many agencies, like the EPA, "everything has come to a screeching halt, making it difficult to get anything done."
But in the meantime, the critical first step may be at the ballot box in November. Even Scientific American, the esteemed consumer science publication, for the first time in its 175-year history felt "compelled" to endorse a presidential candidate, Joe Biden, because of the enormity of the damage they say Donald Trump has inflicted on scientists, their legal protections, and on the federal science agencies.
"If the current administration continues, the national political leadership will be emboldened and will be even more assertive of their executive prerogatives and less concerned about traditional niceties, leading to further erosion of the activities of many federal agencies," says Vanderbilt's William Schaffner. "But the reality is, if the team is losing, you change the coach. Then agencies really have to buckle down because it will take some time to restore their hard-earned reputations."
[Editor's Note: To read other articles in this special magazine issue, visit the beautifully designed e-reader version.]
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Linda Marsa is a contributing editor at Discover, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of Fevered: Why a Hotter Planet Will Harm Our Health and How We Can Save Ourselves (Rodale, 2013), which the New York Times called “gripping to read.” Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Science Writing, and she has written for numerous publications, including Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Nautilus, Men’s Journal, Playboy, Pacific Standard and Aeon.