I’ve been too busy (preparing to release an inexpensive and powerful instrument for nitrogen-fixation research) to start the promised This-Week-In-Natural-Selection posts, but I did make time to send the comment below to OMB, which is proposing disastrous political interference in US government grant programs for scientific research.

I am a scientist whose current research focuses on increasing nitrogen supply from symbiotic bacteria to crops, including soybean and alfalfa. The research has become more urgent, with recent increases in the price of nitrogen fertilizer. The basic research that made this applied research possible was supported by NSF because it was relevant to some fundamental questions with potential applications beyond these crops and even beyond agriculture.

Under the proposed regulations, including section 200.205, I would probably not be able to get the grant support needed to complete this work. Taking this research to farm fields would be a major undertaking, requiring at least one graduate student to commit 3-4 years to the project. I would not be able to recruit a student if he or she knew that support could be terminated under section 200.340 of the proposed rule.

Why might political appointee reject a grant proposal or terminate a grant focused on helping American farmers? They wouldn’t, if they were scientists with appropriate expertise and if they had enough time to review each grant in detail. But it’s unlikely that a political appointee would have either the relevant expertise or enough time to review each grant. Instead, I worry that they would use some version of AI to reject or terminate grants with certain keywords. (Removing references to the Enola Gay, the airplane that helped us win WWII, is an example of such a keyword-based approach.) In my grant proposals, the fatal keyword would be “evolution”, the biological replacement of some strains of bacteria by others. My students and I are developing ways to guide this evolution so that more-beneficial strains become more common in farm soils, but I can’t explain our approach without using the term “evolution.” Medical researchers trying to protect us from evolving bacteria and viruses would presumably face the same problem. Please reject political interference in government support for science, which has been key to US strength in agriculture, medicine, and across the economy.