Angie Rasmussen is a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she studies newly emerging viruses capable of causing severe disease, such as Ebola, the COVID-causing coronavirus, influenza viruses and others. She became well-known over the COVID pandemic as an expert who explained COVID vaccines, variants and other evidence-based coronavirus information across social media and television.
[This interview was edited for length and clarity.]
How would you describe the current state of American science?
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I mean, it’s grim. It’s in its death throes. I think there’s been so much capacity that has been lost from all the agencies that make science run, and so it’s not just a matter of losing people. It’s not just a matter of grants being defunded or funding being redistributed. It’s that that funding is going away entirely. The attempt early last year by the administration to implement a 15 percent cap on indirect costs [or overhead costs] would have destroyed pretty much every single academic research institute. That didn’t go through, fortunately, but they’ve been essentially trying to whittle away by just cutting entire programs. A lot of this stuff is so boring, and this is what makes it really challenging. Who wants to hear about facilities and administration cost rates? But the consequences of this money going away, these funds [for indirect costs] that we depend upon for our entire system to operate, for these facilities to even keep the lights on, for them to employ people to maintain the facilities, all of that stuff is just completely going away.
I think we're going to see more and more labs closing. Then we’re going to start to see departments probably closing. We’re going to start, eventually, to see entire facilities and hospitals maybe even closing. I don’t think people truly understand how closely linked [the sciences], at least health sciences, in America are to medicine and to accessing health care. There’s also the training pipeline. I think that is one of the other biggest long-term threats. You could eventually build a new building and replace all the instruments in it and hire new graduate students. But if you don't have anybody to teach those graduate students, that’s a problem.
What needs to change in American science?
We need to go back to being a democracy. I don’t think we can change anything [in science] until that changes. There’s a faction of people who think this is awesome—let’s burn it down. Let’s build a new thing. But that doesn't mean that there was nothing good about the old system. Same thing with people who are constantly berating peer-reviewed journals. I don’t like the fact that Vaccine, the journal that I am co-editor in chief of, has the paywall. But it is important to have peer review. We should keep stuff like peer review. We should also have open science [free access]. There’s no reason why we can’t do something that includes the old good parts and gets rid of the old bad parts or makes it more efficient. I think, going forward, I’m most interested in whatever the rebuilding plan is going to look like. It’s going to have to be responsive to the amount of damage that has been done. And I think to come up with a rebuilding plan that’s going to work, we should rethink the way that these [funding] agencies are organized and how people are qualified and how we make evidence-based policy decisions. I’m interested in making sure that the government can provide essential services that people need and, specifically, services that will prevent people from dying.
Does anything give you optimism right now?
I think artificial intelligence is cool, and I think it’ll move things along, but it’s way overhyped, and it certainly cannot replace actual research. I do think it’s great, and it’s one area where I’m optimistic, scientifically, that we’re actually in a leadership position. But I’m also pessimistic because of how careless people are being with the technology.
I am scientifically optimistic about the advances in AI computing. But again, that said, there are serious climate and environmental issues associated with that—AI [data] centers that are using up so much water and generating so much heat and using so much energy. So I’m optimistic about the potential for the technology, but I’m pessimistic about our abilities to be good stewards of it.
I’m also optimistic because more and more people are starting to realize how urgent this [science-funding problem] is and that this is not just a question of not getting involved in politics. People seem not to understand the difference between being political, which is everybody’s right, and being partisan or being, you know, ideological.
