We are all in this together. It is the honor of a lifetime to represent the membership of the society that has played such an important part in my own career. I intend to “pay it forward” by serving all of you.
This is my final week serving as President of ASPET. What will be remembered as my legacy? I was elected as ASPET President in 2024, a time when all seemed to be going well for American science. By the time my one-year term began in mid-2025, though, American science was under siege from anti-science elements within our own government. Massive funding cuts to the NIH and other science agencies were being pursued by the new administration. One of the central purposes of ASPET and other scientific societies is to facilitate collective action of scientists in times of crisis. Thus, I spent much of my year as ASPET President helping to organize our members to push back against research funding cuts, and coordinating with other scientific societies to magnify our efforts.
Why has trust in scientists declined, and what can be done about it? Numerous polls from 1990–2020 showed that scientists were trusted by a strong and stable majority of Americans. Since 2020, though, there has been a precipitous drop in public trust of scientists in the USA and around the world. The causative factor underlying this drop was undeniably the worldwide pandemic of 2020–2021.
It is a challenging time for international scientists who want to visit the USA. Wait times for visas have increased dramatically since 2024. Many visa requests by scientists are denied for unexplained reasons. And international scientists who do manage to make it to the USA for a meeting are sometimes detained and grilled by immigration officials.
What impact will AI have on biomedical research over the next few decades? Answers to this question vary wildly. Some prominent scientists have expressed skepticism that AI will have anything more than a marginal effect on the future of research. In contrast, others have argued that we are approaching the “singularity,” wherein the pace of AI development will accelerate exponentially to create a superintelligence far surpassing human abilities, yielding cures to all human diseases in just a few years.
I would like to thank the ASPET Washington Fellows for inspiring me. Like many people, I’ve been feeling a little cynical about politics recently, and discouraged about the current state of the union in the USA.
Are great mentors born that way, or can mentoring be learned? When I joined the faculty at Emory University 25 years ago, I had very little experience in mentoring. Suddenly, I found myself running a research lab and taking on trainees who were depending on me for advice and wisdom. It was a challenging time, especially considering that I had no mentor training other than observing my own mentors during my years as a grad student and post-doc.
Why don’t more scientists in the U.S. run for political office? In many nations, scientists have risen to the very highest levels of political power. For example, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the current President of Mexico, has a PhD in energy engineering and was a high-level researcher before getting into politics. The last 3 Presidents of China (Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin) all have backgrounds in engineering. Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the past century, and Angela Merkel, the long-serving Prime Minister of Germany, both had serious careers as chemists before politics came calling.
What is the value of going to a scientific meeting? There has been a lot of press recently about how scientists are cutting back on traveling to meetings and conferences. Many scientists have had grants canceled by the current administration, and/or funding delayed by the recent disruptions to normal government function. In response, some scientists are deciding not to travel, with attendance at a number of recent scientific meetings being noticeably lower than in previous years.
In the current political climate, should scientists speak up or keep their heads down to avoid unwanted attention? Dozens of scientists in the USA have been fired in the past couple of months (from universities, companies, and government) over comments made online. In addition to the risk of job loss, more than two-thirds of biomedical scientists (according to a recent survey) report being harassed on social media.
