Podcasts about nih

Kevin Hall, Ph.D., is a physicist-turned-nutrition scientist whose rigorous research has upended some of our most sacrosanct beliefs about metabolism, dieting, and weight loss. This conversation explores why diets fail, the truth behind the "slow metabolism" myth, how ultra-processed foods hijack our biology, and why the 800-pound gorilla driving the obesity epidemic isn't willpower—it's our toxic food environment. He also opens up about his decision to leave the NIH after 20 years due to political interference with his research. Kevin is an honest actor, always trying to set matters to rights amidst a hurricane of nutritional misinformation. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTubeNewsletter Sign-Up Today's Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style

Dr. Marissa Russo trained to become a cancer biologist. She spent four years studying one of the deadliest brain tumors in adults and built her entire research career around a simple, urgent goal: open her own lab and improve the odds for patients with almost no shot at survival. In 2024 she applied for an F31 diversity grant through the NIH. The reviewers liked her work. Her resubmission was strong. Then the grant system started glitching. Dates vanished. Study sections disappeared. Emails went silent. When she finally reached a program officer, the message was clear: scrub the DEI language, withdraw, and resubmit. She rewrote the application in ten days. It failed. She had to start over. Again. This time with her identity erased.Marissa left the lab. She found new purpose as a science communicator, working at STAT News through the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. Her story captures what happens when talent collides with institutional sabotage. Not every scientist gets to choose a Plan B. She made hers count.RELATED LINKSMarissa Russo at STAT NewsNIH F31 grant story in STATAAAS Mass Media FellowshipContact Marissa RussoFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, Dr. Paul Turek and I are talking about the latest research on isotretinoin aka Accutane (a medication traditionally used for acne) and its potential to restore sperm production in men who previously had no options. Our discussion explores the science behind this therapy, the real-world impact for patients, and what this means for the future of male fertility treatments. We also touch on the broader landscape of advances in male reproductive health, including the role of AI and the importance of early, expert evaluation. Read the full show notes on Dr. Aimee's website. In this episode, we cover: The story behind the recent study on isotretinoin and male infertility How vitamin A derivatives play a crucial role in sperm production The specifics of Dr. Turek's clinical trial with isotretinoin and its promising results Safety considerations and misconceptions about isotretinoin use in men How this therapy fits into the broader landscape of male fertility treatments The future of male fertility, including AI-driven advances and at-home diagnostics Practical advice for men and couples navigating infertility Resources: Turek Clinic Isotretinoin Study at NIH website Talk with Turek Podcast Contact Turek Clinic: San Francisco (415-392-3200), Los Angeles (310-499-9299) Egg Whisperer Show on YouTube Egg Whisperer Show on Spotify Do you have questions about IVF? Click here to join Dr. Aimee for The IVF Class. The next live class call is on Monday, January 12, 2026, at 4 pm PST, where I'll explain IVF and Egg Freezing, and answer your questions live on Zoom. Other ways to connect with me: Visit my YouTube channel for more fertility tipsSubscribe to the newsletter to get updatesJoin Egg Whisperer SchoolRequest a Consultation with Dr. Aimee Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America's most well-known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby-making gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.

The lymphatic system, or lymphoid system, is one of the components of the circulatory system, and it serves a critical role in both immune function and surplus extracellular fluid drainage.  Components of the lymphatic system include lymph, lymphatic vessels and plexuses, lymph nodes, lymphatic cells, and a variety of lymphoid organs. The pattern and form of lymphatic channels are more variable and complex but generally parallel those of the peripheral vascular system. The lymphatic system partly functions to convey lymphatic fluid, or lymph, through a network of lymphatic channels, filter lymphatic fluid through lymph nodes and return lymphatic fluid to the bloodstream, where it is eventually eliminated. Nearly all body organs, regions, and systems have lymphatic channels to collect the various byproducts that require elimination . Liver and intestinal lymphatics produce about 80% of the volume of lymph in the body. Notable territories of the body that do not appear to contain lymphatics include the bone marrow, epidermis, as well as other tissues where blood vessels are absent. The central nervous system was long considered to be absent of lymphatic vessels until they were recently identified in the cranial meninges. Moreover, a vessel appearing to have lymphatic features was also discovered in the eye. The lymphatic system is critical in a clinical context, particularly given that it is a major route for cancer metastasis and that the inflammation of lymphatic vessels and lymph nodes is an indicator of pathology.  Structure The lymphatic system includes numerous structural components, including lymphatic capillaries, afferent lymphatic vessels, lymph nodes, efferent lymphatic vessels, and various lymphoid organs.  Lymphatic capillaries are tiny, thin-walled vessels that originate blindly within the extracellular space of various tissues. Lymphatic capillaries tend to be larger in diameter than blood capillaries and are interspersed among them to enhance their ability to collect interstitial fluid efficiently. They are critical in the drainage of extracellular fluid and allow this fluid to enter the closed capillaries but not exit due to their unique morphology. Lymphatic capillaries at their blind ends are composed of a thin endothelium without a basement membrane. The endothelial cells at the closed end of the capillary overlap but shift to open the capillary end when interstitial fluid pressure is greater than intra-capillary pressure. This process permits lymphocytes, interstitial fluid, bacteria, cellular debris, plasma proteins, and other cells to enter the lymphatic capillaries. Special lymphatic capillaries called lacteals exist in the small intestine to contribute to the absorption of dietary fats. Lymphatics in the liver contribute to a specialized role in transporting hepatic proteins into the bloodstream. The lymphatic capillaries of the body form large networks of channels called lymphatic plexuses and converge to form larger lymphatic vessels. Lymphatic vessels convey lymph, or lymphatic fluid, through their channels. Afferent (toward) lymphatic vessels convey unfiltered lymphatic fluid from the body tissues to the lymph nodes, and efferent (away) lymphatic vessels convey filtered lymphatic fluid from lymph nodes to subsequent lymph nodes or into the venous system. The various efferent lymphatic vessels in the body eventually converge to form two major lymphatic channels: the right lymphatic duct and the thoracic duct.  The right lymphatic duct drains most of the right upper quadrant of the body, including the right upper trunk, right upper extremity, and right head and neck. The right lymphatic trunk is a visible channel in the right cervical region just anterior to the anterior scalene muscle. Its origin and termination are variable in morphology, typically forming as the convergence of the right bronchomediastinal, jugular, and subclavian trunks, extending 1 to 2 centimeters in length before returning its contents to the systemic circulation at the junction of the right internal jugular, subclavian, and/or brachiocephalic veins.  The thoracic duct, also known as the left lymphatic duct or van Hoorne's canal, is the largest of the body's lymphatic channels. It drains most of the body except for the territory of the right superior thorax, head, neck, and upper extremity served by the right lymphatic duct. The thoracic duct is a thin-walled tubular vessel measuring 2 to 6 mm in diameter. The length of the duct ranges from 36 to 45 cm. The thoracic duct is highly variable in form but typically arises in the abdomen at the superior aspect of the cisterna chyli, around the level of the twelfth thoracic vertebra (T12). The cisterna chyli, from which it extends, is an expanded lymphatic sac that forms at the convergence of the intestinal and lumbar lymphatic trunks extending along the L1-L2 vertebral levels. The cisterna chyli is present in approximately 40-60% of the population, and in its absence, the intestinal and lumbar lymphatic trunks communicate directly with the thoracic duct at the T12 level. As a result, the thoracic duct receives lymphatic fluid from the lumbar lymphatic trunks and chyle, composed of lymphatic fluid and emulsified fats, from the intestinal lymphatic trunk. Initially, the thoracic duct is located just to the right of the midline and posterior to the aorta. It exits the abdomen and enters the thorax via the aortic hiatus formed by the right and left crura of the diaphragm, side by side with the aorta. The thoracic duct then ascends in the thoracic cavity just anterior and to the right of the vertebral column between the aorta and azygos vein. At about the level of the fifth thoracic vertebra (T5), the thoracic duct typically crosses to the left of the vertebral column and posterior to the esophagus. From here, it ascends vertically and usually empties its contents into the junction of the left subclavian and left internal jugular veins in the cervical region. To ensure that lymph does not flow backward, collecting lymphatic vessels and larger lymphatic vessels have one-way valves. These valves are not present in the lymphatic capillaries. These lymphatic valves permit the continued advancement of lymph through the lymphatic vessels aided by a pressure gradient created by vascular smooth muscle, skeletal muscle contraction, and respiratory movements. However, it is important to note that lymphatic vessels also communicate with the venous system through various anastomoses. Lymph nodes are small bean-shaped tissues situated along lymphatic vessels. Lymph nodes receive lymphatic fluid from afferent lymphatic vessels and convey lymph away through efferent lymphatic vessels. Lymph nodes serve as a filter and function to monitor lymphatic fluid/blood composition, drain excess tissue fluid and leaked plasma proteins, engulf pathogens, augment an immune response, and eradicate infection. Several organs in the body are considered to be lymphoid or lymphatic organs, given their role in the production of lymphocytes. These include the bone marrow, spleen, thymus, tonsils, lymph nodes, and other tissues. Lymphoid organs can be categorized as primary or secondary lymphoid organs. Primary lymphoid organs are those that produce lymphocytes, such as the bone marrow and thymus. Bone marrow is the primary site for the production of lymphocytes. The thymus is a glandular organ located anterior to the pericardium. It serves to mature and develop T cells, or thymus cell lymphocytes, in response to an inflammatory process or pathology. As individuals age, both their bone marrow and thymus reduce and accumulate fat. Secondary lymphoid organs serve as territories in which immune cells function and include the spleen, tonsils, lymph nodes, and various mucous membranes, such as in the intestines. The spleen is a purplish, fist-sized organ in the left upper abdominal quadrant that contributes to immune function by serving as a blood filter, storing lymphocytes within its white pulp, and being a site for an adaptive immune response to antigens. The lingual tonsils, palatine tonsils, and pharyngeal tonsils, or adenoids, work to prevent pathogens from entering the body. Mucous membranes in the gastrointestinal, respiratory, and genitourinary systems also function to prevent pathogens from entering the body. Lymph Lymphatic fluid, or lymph, is similar to blood plasma and tends to be watery, transparent, and yellowish in appearance. Extracellular fluid leaks out of the blood capillary walls because of pressure exerted by the heart or osmotic pressure at the cellular level. As the interstitial fluid accumulates, it is picked up by the tiny lymphatic capillaries along with other substances to form lymph. This fluid then passes through the lymphatic vessels and lymph nodes and finally enters the venous circulation. As the lymph passes through the lymph nodes, both monocytes and lymphocytes enter it.  Lymph is composed primarily of interstitial fluid with variable amounts of lymphocytes, bacteria, cellular debris, plasma proteins, and other cells. In the GI tract, lymphatic fluid is called chyle and has a milk-like appearance that is chiefly due to the presence of cholesterol, glycerol, fatty acids, and other fat products. The vessels that transport the lymphatic fluid from the GI tract are known as lacteals. Embryology The development of the lymphatic system is known from both human and animal, especially mouse studies. The lymphatic vessels form after the development of blood vessels, around six weeks post-fertilization. The endothelial cells that serve as precursors to the lymphatics arise from the embryonic cardinal veins. The process by which lymphatic vessels form is similar to that of the blood vessels and produces lymphatic-venous and intra-lymphatic anastomoses, but diverse origins exist for components of lymphatic vessel formation in different regions.  Six primary lymph sacs develop and are apparent about eight weeks post-fertilization. These include, from caudal to cranial, one cisterna chyli, one retroperitoneal lymph sac, two iliac lymph sacs, and two jugular lymph sacs. The jugular lymph sacs are the first to develop, initially appearing next to the jugular part of the cardinal vein. Lymphatic vessels then form adjacent to the blood vessels and connect the various lymph sacs. The lymphatic vessels primarily arise from the lymph sacs through the process of self-proliferation and polarized sprouting.  Stem/progenitor cells play a huge role in forming lymphatic tissues and vessels by contributing to sustained growth and postnatally differentiating into lymphatic endothelial cells. Lymphatic channels from the developing gut connect with the retroperitoneal lymph sac and the cisterna chyli, situated just posteriorly. The lymphatic channels of the lower extremities and inferior trunk communicate with the iliac lymph sacs. Finally, lymphatic channels in the head, neck and upper extremities drain to the jugular lymph sacs. Additionally, a right and left thoracic duct form and connect the cisterna chyli with the jugular lymph sacs and form anastomoses that eventually produce the typical adult form. The lymph sacs then produce groups of lymph nodes in the fetal period. Migrating mesenchyme enters the lymph sacs and produces lymphatic networks, connective tissue, and other layers of the lymph nodes. Function The lymphatic system's primary function is to balance the volume of interstitial fluid and convey it and excess protein molecules into the venous circulation. The lymphatic system is also important in immune surveillance, defending the body against foreign particles and microorganisms. It does so by conveying antigens and leukocytes to lymph nodes, where antigen-primed and targeted lymphocytes and other immune cells are conveyed into the lymphatic vessels and blood vessels. In addition, the system has a role in the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and fatty substances in the gut via the gastrointestinal tract's lacteals within the villi and the transport of this material into the venous circulation.  Newly recognized lymphatic vessels are visible in the meninges relating to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) outflow from the central nervous system. Finally, lymphatics may play a role in the clearance of ocular fluid via the lymphatic-like Schlemm canals. Clinical Significance Leaks of lymphatic fluid occur when the lymphatic vessels are damaged. In the abdomen, lymphatic vessel damage may occur during surgery, especially during retroperitoneal procedures such as repairing an abdominal aortic aneurysm. These leaks tend to be mild, and the vessels in the peritoneum and mesentery eventually absorb the lymphatic fluid or chyle. However, when the thoracic duct is injured in the chest, the chyle leak can be extensive. In most cases, conservative care with a no-fat diet (medium chain triglycerides) or total parenteral nutrition is unsuccessful. In most cases, if the injury to the thoracic duct was surgical, a surgical procedure is required to tie off the duct. If the thoracic duct is injured in the cervical region, then inserting a drainage tube and adopting a low-fat diet will help seal the leak. However, thoracic duct injury in the chest cavity usually requires drainage and surgery. It is rare for the thoracic segment of the thoracic duct to seal on its own. In terms of accumulation of chyle in the thorax (i.e., chylothorax), if a patient has an injury to the thoracic duct in the thorax below the T5 vertebral level, then fluid will collect in only the right pleural cavity. If the injury is to the thoracic duct in the thorax above the T5 vertebral level, then fluid will appear in both pleural cavities.   Other Issues The lymphatic system is prone to disorders like the venous and arterial circulatory systems. Developmental or functional defects of the lymphatic system cause lymphedema. When this occurs, the lymphatic system is unable to sufficiently drain lymphatic fluid resulting in its accumulation and swelling of the territory. Lymphedema, this swelling due to the accumulation of lymph, is classified as primary or secondary. Primary lymphedema is an inherited disorder where the lymphatic system development has been disrupted, causing absent or malformed lymphatic tissues. This condition often presents soon after birth, but some conditions may present later in life (e.g., at puberty or later adulthood). There are no effective treatments for primary lymphedema. Past surgical treatments were found to be mutilating and are no longer implemented. The present-day treatment revolves around compression stockings, pumps, and constrictive garments. Secondary lymphedema is an acquired disorder involving lymphatic system dysfunction that may result from many causes, including cancer, infection, trauma, or surgery. The treatment of secondary lymphedema depends on the cause. Oncological and other surgeries may result in secondary lymphedema due to the removal or biopsy of lymph nodes or lymphatic vessels. Non-surgical lymphedema may result from malignancies, obstruction within the lymphatic system, infection, or deep vein thrombosis. In most cases of obstructive secondary lymphedema, the drainage will resume if the inciting cause is removed, although some individuals may need to wear compressive stockings permanently. Also, physical therapy may help alleviate lymphedema when the extremities are involved. There is no absolute cure for lymphedema, but diagnosis and careful management can help to minimize complications. Lymphomas are cancers that arise from the cells of the lymphatic system. There are numerous types of lymphoma, but they are grouped into Hodgkin lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Lymphomas usually arise from the malignant transformation of specific lymphocytes in the lymphatic vessels or lymph nodes in the gastrointestinal tract, neck, axilla, or groin. Symptoms of lymphoma may include night sweats, fever, fatigue, itching, and weight loss. Cancers originating outside of the lymphatic system often spread via the lymphatic vessels and may involve regional lymph nodes serving the impacted organs or tissues. Lymphadenitis occurs when the lymph nodes become inflamed or enlarged. The cause is usually an adjacent bacterial infection but may also involve viruses or fungi. The lymph nodes usually enlarge and become tender. Lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis, is a very common mosquito-borne disorder caused by a parasite found in tropical and subtropical areas of the world, including Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and South America. This condition involves parasitic microscopic nematodes (roundworms) that infect the lymphatic system and rapidly multiply and disrupt lymphatic function. Many infected individuals may have no outward symptoms, although the kidneys and lymphatic tissues may be damaged and dysfunctional. Symptomatic individuals may present with disfigurement caused by significant lymphedema and elephantiasis (thickening of the skin, particularly the extremities). The parasite may also cause hydrocele, an enlargement of the scrotum due to the accumulation of fluid, which may result from obstruction of the lymph nodes or vessels in the groin. Individuals presenting with symptoms have poorly draining lymphatics, often involving the extremities, resulting in huge extremities and marked disability. Lymphatic filariasis is the most common cause of disfigurement in the world, and it is the second most common cause of long-term disability.  (credits: NIH)

BrainStorm wants to hear from you! Send us a text.BrainStorm guest Vradenburg, Chairman and Founder of UsAgainstAlzheimer's, sits down with host Meryl Comer for a comprehensive look at the state of Alzheimer's research, advocacy, and care in 2025.Vradenburg addresses critical challenges facing the Alzheimer's community, including threats to NIH funding and the impact of funding instability on researchers and clinical trials. The discussion covers key advocacy efforts like the CHANGE Act and ASAP Act, which aim to make cognitive checkups and blood-based diagnostic tests more accessible through Medicare coverage. Vradenburg also highlights UsAgainstAlzheimer's expanding initiatives, from the BrainGuide platform offering direct-to-consumer cognitive assessments to educational programs training healthcare professionals on brain health.Looking forward, Vradenburg makes a bold prediction: within the next decade, we could see preventive treatments for Alzheimer's, potentially including a vaccine. This episode offers both a candid assessment of current challenges and an optimistic vision for the future of Alzheimer's prevention and treatment. This is a must listen episode!Produced by Susan Quirk and Amber RonigerSupport the show

In this educational, refreshing, and beautifully hopeful episode, Wren, the creator of the Living Our Breast Lives Podcast, is joined by the incredible Metastatic Breast Cancer Thriver, Carolyn Leigh, the President of North Star Cancer Advocacy.In 2018, she was the third member of her family to be diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, including her mother and uncle. After her metastatic diagnosis, she spent years studying the latest scientific understandings about the immune system and immunotherapies for cancer before launching North Star Cancer Advocacy in 2022 with the aim of providing information to the community and advocating for vast increases in NIH funding. The North Star Board of Directors and the MBC community recently raised $100k to further the research of combining Natural Killer cells (immune system cells) and one of the most promising breast cancer drugs in preclinical development, ErSO-TFPy.In this episode, join me as Carolyn breaks down: - How the inspirational Judy Perkins and TILs therapy reshaped her belief in what's possible- The moment she decided to found North Star- A simple breakdown of MHC I expression and why some immunotherapies succeed while others don't- A crash course in how immunotherapy actually works inside the body- Her mission to raise six figures for immunotherapy-driven clinical trials — and what real success would look like - How and where to access immunotherapy clinical trials- A raw conversation about allyship, momentum, and why the MBC movement can't depend solely on those living with the diseaseCarolyn isn't just an MBC advocate… she's a brilliant mind, a fierce researcher, the president of the North Star Cancer Research Foundation, and a woman determined to change the future of metastatic breast cancer!Living Our Breast Lives Information:Email: livingourbreastlivespodcast1@gmail.comInstagram: @livingourbreastlivesFounder: Wren MorrobelPersonal Instagram: @wren_morrPodcast Guest Speaker: Carolyn Leigh's Information:Email: NorthStarCancerAdvocacy@yahoo.comInstagram: @north.star.cancer.advocacy@north.star.cancer.researchFacebook: North Star Cancer Research FoundationWebsite: NorthStarCancerResearch.orgCRI Clinical Trial Finder:https://cri.careboxhealth.com/en-US/

In this episode, I'm joined by my longtime friend Ian Simon, Head of Biotechnology at Aspis Intelligence. Ian's path runs from grad school vaccine research at Yale to senior roles at the White House, HHS, NIH, the State Department, and the Office of Long Covid. We talk about de-risking young biotech companies, what Covid taught us about science and public health, and how new technologies like AI might change how we do science altogether. ⁠⁠⁠TPM E52 highlights >⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Episode 52 links:Ian Simon on LinkedInAspis Intelligence

Aujourd'hui, Coach Lee & Coach Sim reçoivent Christian Maurice, naturopathe, praticien en médecine fonctionnelle et conférencier pour parler de tout ce qui touche le sommeil.Dans cet épisode, on discute de:- Qu'est-ce qui est qualifié comme un "bon sommeil"?- Les rôles des différentes phases de sommeil- Les impacts d'un mauvais sommeil à court/moyen/long terme- Quelles sont les meilleures conditions pour un bon sommeil?- À partir de quand devrait-on commencer à se préparer pour dormir?- Est-ce que les gadgets pour mesurer le sommeil sont fiables?- Bien plus!Bonne écoute!Pour nous suivre:Christian: @christianmaurice_elementalCoach Lee: @coach.lee__Coach Sim: @coachsim.lat Utilisez le code "WUACV10" pour économiser 10% sur votre commande NIH sur le site ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nihsupp.com

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a well-regarded ENT specialist, became one of the most polarizing figures in American medicine after refusing to fall in line during COVID. When her off-label use of ivermectin went public, the backlash was immediate: her hospital suspended her, the medical board came after her, and she was thrust into a national firestorm.In this episode, she lays out the blueprint she says was used to punish dissenting physicians—how hospital systems, public-health agencies, and industry interests closed ranks to enforce a single narrative. She breaks down the conflicts of interest baked into the modern “medical-industrial complex,” and why she decided to fight rather than fold.From vaccine-injury cases to mandate battles to the unprecedented wave of medical censorship, Dr. Bowden pulls no punches. She takes aim at the NIH, FDA, major hospital systems, and the Biden administration—exposing what she sees as a system more interested in profit, control, and compliance than patient care.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a well-regarded ENT specialist, became one of the most polarizing figures in American medicine after refusing to fall in line during COVID. When her off-label use of ivermectin went public, the backlash was immediate: her hospital suspended her, the medical board came after her, and she was thrust into a national firestorm. In this episode, she lays out the blueprint she says was used to punish dissenting physicians—how hospital systems, public-health agencies, and industry interests closed ranks to enforce a single narrative. She breaks down the conflicts of interest baked into the modern “medical-industrial complex,” and why she decided to fight rather than fold. From vaccine-injury cases to mandate battles to the unprecedented wave of medical censorship, Dr. Bowden pulls no punches. She takes aim at the NIH, FDA, major hospital systems, and the Biden administration—exposing what she sees as a system more interested in profit, control, and compliance than patient care.

The National Institutes of Health have historically funded scientists to find cures for diseases and protect public health. NIH funding has led to the discovery of immune therapies for cancer, antiviral treatments and prevention of HIV, and ground-breaking research into memory loss and Alzheimer's disease. After a year of funding cuts and freezes that have rocked the medical research field to its core, we catch up with leading researchers at the University of California to talk about the impact this has had on their work and our ability to fight humanity's most puzzling illnesses. Guests: Monica Gandhi, infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco - she is the director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86 Pamela Munster, professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco; co-director, Center for BRCA Research, Medical Oncology; distinguished professor in Hereditary Cancer Research Megan Molteni, science writer, STAT News Joel Spencer, associate professor of Bioengineering, University of California Merced - his lab uses funding from NIH to study the thymus, with implications for cancer treatment and healthy aging Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ianmsc.substack.comDr. Jay Bhattacharya is the director of the National Institutes of Health, the organization formerly run by Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. But Dr. Bhattacharya's importance extends much further than “just” NIH. And his appointment there under the second Donald Trump administration marked a dramatic about-face for an organization that was instrumental in creating many of the issues and problems we faced as a society during the pandemic.Dr. Bhattacharya was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. That paper contained a blueprint for focused protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of locking down all society, Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote, we should look to protect the most vulnerable. That's been proven prophetic, as the harms from lockdowns far exceeded any benefits.He also conducted a study in Silicon Valley early on in the lockdowns that identified COVID was far more prevalent in the community than people realized. That meant the virus was also far less deadly than organizations like the World Health Organization had suggested. He was skeptical about the efficacy of cloth masks, advocated for opening schools, and participated in a roundtable hosted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 that illustrated how ineffectual the Anthony Fauci-doctrine had been. Around that same time, Bhattacharya also spoke out against vaccine mandates and other abuses, which decreased public confidence and trust in vaccines.In short, he was a voice of sanity in a sea of absurdity, proven right about nearly every pandemic-related policy. For his efforts, he was demonized, labeled, censored, and targeted by Collins and Fauci in emails. I had the exclusive opportunity to ask him about many of these issues, and what he's bringing to NIH that his predecessors didn't.Unmasked is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There's something appealing and romantic about foraging and there's a special kind of calm that comes from working in your yard or garden.  But when plant encounters go wrong, you don't just get a bad taste in your mouth, it could be your last meal.Sources:CDC, News.com, KSBW, NIH, BBC, MDA State, Food Safety, Bon Appetit, Poison Control Utah, Local 12Support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month, with benefits starting at the $3 tier!Follow us on Instagram at offthetrailspodcastFollow us on Facebook at Off the Trails PodcastIf you have your own outdoor misadventure (or adventure) story that you'd like us to include in a listener episode, send it to us at offthetrailspodcast@gmail.com  Please take a moment to rate and review our show, and a big thanks if you already have!**We do our own research and try our best to cross-reference reliable sources to present the most accurate information we can. Please reach out to us if you believe we have mispresented any information during this episode, and we will be happy to correct ourselves in a future episode.

Neil Klompas, President and CEO of Augurex, has a mission to improve the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases, with a primary focus on axial spondyloarthritis, a form of inflammatory back pain that is often misdiagnosed. The Augurex blood test SpineStat is designed to differentiate axSpA from mechanical back pain by identifying a specific biomarker present in axSpA. Currently, there is an average nine-year delay from the onset of symptoms to an accurate diagnosis of axSpA, causing irreversible spinal damage and years of using drugs and therapy with no benefit. Neil explains, "I think we're all familiar with back pain. Some of the NIH data and WHO data out there show that almost 28% of adult Americans live with chronic back pain, back pain lasting more than three months. It can be a real journey to figure out what the drivers are, with some patients really never getting resolution, resulting in pain management and, in some cases, even opioid pain management. But if you dive deeper into that category of back pain, there are really two broad classifications we can think about. We can think about mechanical back pain, which is due to lifting, twisting, sports injury, or maybe a car accident. But then there's this whole other category, as you indicated, called inflammatory back pain, which really has its roots in autoimmune, where the body's immune system is actually attacking itself. "   "Well, this is when the body's immune system attacks its peripheral joints. In inflammatory back pain, or as you said, axial spondyloarthritis, it's an autoimmune condition where the body's immune system actually attacks the spine. This can lead to pain increasing over time, new bone growth, fusion of the spinal cord, and permanent stiffness and loss of mobility. It's progressive. It keeps getting worse, and because it's an autoimmune condition. Simply stretching or swearing to take up yoga or getting a new pair of runners or doing PT or massage, while it might help with some of the symptoms, it's not going to slow down or stop the disease. The challenge with axSpA, with axial spondyloarthritis, is that while it's not really that well known or talked about in the media, it's actually more than twice as prevalent as rheumatoid arthritis, a condition which many people have heard about." #Augurex #AdvancedDiagnostics #AutoimmuneDiseases #axSpA #AxialSpondyloarthritis #BackPain augurex.com Listen to the podcast here

Neil Klompas, President and CEO of Augurex, has a mission to improve the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases, with a primary focus on axial spondyloarthritis, a form of inflammatory back pain that is often misdiagnosed. The Augurex blood test SpineStat is designed to differentiate axSpA from mechanical back pain by identifying a specific biomarker present in axSpA. Currently, there is an average nine-year delay from the onset of symptoms to an accurate diagnosis of axSpA, causing irreversible spinal damage and years of using drugs and therapy with no benefit. Neil explains, "I think we're all familiar with back pain. Some of the NIH data and WHO data out there show that almost 28% of adult Americans live with chronic back pain, back pain lasting more than three months. It can be a real journey to figure out what the drivers are, with some patients really never getting resolution, resulting in pain management and, in some cases, even opioid pain management. But if you dive deeper into that category of back pain, there are really two broad classifications we can think about. We can think about mechanical back pain, which is due to lifting, twisting, sports injury, or maybe a car accident. But then there's this whole other category, as you indicated, called inflammatory back pain, which really has its roots in autoimmune, where the body's immune system is actually attacking itself. "   "Well, this is when the body's immune system attacks its peripheral joints. In inflammatory back pain, or as you said, axial spondyloarthritis, it's an autoimmune condition where the body's immune system actually attacks the spine. This can lead to pain increasing over time, new bone growth, fusion of the spinal cord, and permanent stiffness and loss of mobility. It's progressive. It keeps getting worse, and because it's an autoimmune condition. Simply stretching or swearing to take up yoga or getting a new pair of runners or doing PT or massage, while it might help with some of the symptoms, it's not going to slow down or stop the disease. The challenge with axSpA, with axial spondyloarthritis, is that while it's not really that well known or talked about in the media, it's actually more than twice as prevalent as rheumatoid arthritis, a condition which many people have heard about." #Augurex #AdvancedDiagnostics #AutoimmuneDiseases #axSpA #AxialSpondyloarthritis #BackPain augurex.com Download the transcript here

Episode 5 of Standard Deviation with Oliver Bogler on the Out of Patients podcast feed pulls you straight into the story of Dr Ethan Moitra, a psychologist who fights for LGBTQ mental health while the system throws every obstacle it can find at him.Ethan built a study that tracked how COVID 19 tore through an already vulnerable community. He secured an NIH grant. He built a team. He reached 180 participants. Then he opened an email on a Saturday and learned that Washington had erased his work with one sentence about taxpayer priorities. The funding vanished. The timeline collapsed. His team scattered. Participants who trusted him sat in limbo.A federal court eventually forced the government to reinstate the grant, but the damage stayed baked into the process. Ethan had to push through months of paperwork while his university kept the original deadline as if the shutdown had not happened. The system handed him a win that felt like a warning.I brought Ethan on because his story shows how politics reaches into science and punishes the people who serve communities already carrying too much trauma. His honesty lands hard because he names the fear now spreading across academia and how young scientists question whether they can afford to care about the wrong population.You will hear what this ordeal did to him, what it cost his team, and why he refuses to walk away.RELATED LINKSFaculty PageNIH Grant DetailsScientific PresentationBoston Globe CoverageFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The dotEDU hosts look back at a year that reshaped higher education in ways few expected back in January. Mushtaq, Sarah, and Jon talk through their top five stories of 2025, including  the push to dismantle the Department of Education, the cuts at NIH and NSF, the sweeping changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill, and Congress's response to it all. Here are some of the links and references from this week's show:  Register now for ACEx, Feb. 25-28, 2026, in Washington, DC  Higher Education & The Trump Administration: Resources Trump Administration Higher Ed Executive Order Tracker Full coverage of the 2nd Trump administration from The Chronicle of Higher Education  The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine The New York Times (sub. req.) | Oct. 3, 2025

 If you're a scientist, and you apply for federal research funding, you'll ask for a specific dollar amount. Let's say you're asking for a million-dollar grant. Your grant covers the direct costs, things like the salaries of the researchers that you're paying. If you get that grant, your university might get an extra $500,000. That money is called “indirect costs,” but think of it as overhead: that money goes to lab space, to shared equipment, and so on.This is the system we've used to fund American research infrastructure for more than 60 years. But earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed capping these payments at just 15% of direct costs, way lower than current indirect cost rates. There are legal questions about whether the admin can do that. But if it does, it would force universities to fundamentally rethink how they do science.The indirect costs system is pretty opaque from the outside. Is the admin right to try and slash these indirect costs? Where does all that money go? And if we want to change how we fund research overhead, what are the alternatives? How do you design a research system to incentivize the research you actually wanna see in the world?I'm joined today by Pierre Azoulay from MIT Sloan and Dan Gross from Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Together with Bhaven Sampat at Johns Hopkins, they conducted the first comprehensive empirical study of how indirect costs actually work. Earlier this year, I worked with them to write up that study as a more accessible policy brief for IFP. They've assembled data on over 350 research institutions, and they found some striking results. While negotiated rates often exceed 50-60%, universities actually receive much less, due to built-in caps and exclusions.Moreover, the institutions that would be hit hardest by proposed cuts are those whose research most often leads to new drugs and commercial breakthroughs.Thanks to Katerina Barton, Harry Fletcher-Wood, and Inder Lohla for their help with this episode, and to Beez for her help on the charts.Let's say I'm a researcher at a university and I apply for a federal grant. I'm looking at cancer cells in mice. It will cost me $1 million to do that research — to pay grad students, to buy mice and test tubes. I apply for a grant from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. Where do indirect costs come in?Dan Gross: Research generally incurs two categories of costs, much as business operations do.* Direct or variable costs are typically project-specific; they include salaries and consumable supplies.* Indirect or fixed costs are not as easily assigned to any particular project. [They include] things like lab space, data and computing resources, biosecurity, keeping the lights on and the buildings cooled and heated — even complying with the regulatory requirements the federal government imposes on researchers. They are the overhead costs of doing research.Pierre Azoulay: You will use those grad students, mice, and test tubes, the direct costs. But you're also using the lab space. You may be using a shared facility where the mice are kept and fed. Pieces of large equipment are shared by many other people to conduct experiments. So those are fixed costs from the standpoint of your research project.Dan: Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) is how the federal government has been paying for the fixed cost of research for the past 60 years. This has been done by paying universities institution-specific fixed percentages on top of the direct cost of the research. That's the indirect cost rate. That rate is negotiated by institutions, typically every two to four years, supported by several hundred pages of documentation around its incurred costs over the recent funding cycle.The idea is to compensate federally funded researchers for the investments, infrastructure, and overhead expenses related to the research they perform for the government. Without that funding, universities would have to pay those costs out of pocket and, frankly, many would not be interested or able to do the science the government is funding them to do.Imagine I'm doing my mouse cancer science at MIT, Pierre's parent institution. Some time in the last four years, MIT had this negotiation with the National Institutes of Health to figure out what the MIT reimbursable rate is. But as a researcher, I don't have to worry about what indirect costs are reimbursable. I'm all mouse research, all day.Dan: These rates are as much of a mystery to the researchers as it is to the public. When I was junior faculty, I applied for an external grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) — you can look up awards folks have won in the award search portal. It doesn't break down indirect and direct cost shares of each grant. You see the total and say, “Wow, this person got $300,000.” Then you go to write your own grant and realize you can only budget about 60% of what you thought, because the rest goes to overhead. It comes as a bit of a shock the first time you apply for grant funding.What goes into the overhead rates? Most researchers and institutions don't have clear visibility into that. The process is so complicated that it's hard even for those who are experts to keep track of all the pieces.Pierre: As an individual researcher applying for a project, you think about the direct costs of your research projects. You're not thinking about the indirect rate. When the research administration of your institution sends the application, it's going to apply the right rates.So I've got this $1 million experiment I want to run on mouse cancer. If I get the grant, the total is $1.5 million. The university takes that .5 million for the indirect costs: the building, the massive microscope we bought last year, and a tiny bit for the janitor. Then I get my $1 million. Is that right?Dan: Duke University has a 61% indirect cost rate. If I propose a grant to the NSF for $100,000 of direct costs — it might be for data, OpenAI API credits, research staff salaries — I would need to budget an extra $61,000 on top for ICR, bringing the total grant to $161,000.My impression is that most federal support for research happens through project-specific grants. It's not these massive institutional block grants. Is that right?Pierre: By and large, there aren't infrastructure grants in the science funding system. There are other things, such as center grants that fund groups of investigators. Sometimes those can get pretty large — the NIH grant for a major cancer center like Dana-Farber could be tens of millions of dollars per year.Dan: In the past, US science funding agencies did provide more funding for infrastructure and the instrumentation that you need to perform research through block grants. In the 1960s, the NSF and the Department of Defense were kicking up major programs to establish new data collection efforts — observatories, radio astronomy, or the Deep Sea Drilling project the NSF ran, collecting core samples from the ocean floor around the world. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — back then the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) — was investing in nuclear test detection to monitor adherence to nuclear test ban treaties. Some of these were satellite observation methods for atmospheric testing. Some were seismic measurement methods for underground testing. ARPA supported the installation of a network of seismic monitors around the world. Those monitors are responsible for validating tectonic plate theory. Over the next decade, their readings mapped the tectonic plates of the earth. That large-scale investment in research infrastructure is not as common in the US research policy enterprise today.That's fascinating. I learned last year how modern that validation of tectonic plate theory was. Until well into my grandparents' lifetime, we didn't know if tectonic plates existed.Dan: Santi, when were you born?1997.Dan: So I'm a good decade older than you — I was born in 1985. When we were learning tectonic plate theory in the 1990s, it seemed like something everybody had always known. It turns out that it had only been known for maybe 25 years.So there's this idea of federal funding for science as these massive pieces of infrastructure, like the Hubble Telescope. But although projects like that do happen, the median dollar the Feds spend on science today is for an individual grant, not installing seismic monitors all over the globe.Dan: You applied for a grant to fund a specific project, whose contours you've outlined in advance, and we provided the funding to execute that project.Pierre: You want to do some observations at the observatory in Chile, and you are going to need to buy a plane ticket — not first class, not business class, very much economy.Let's move to current events. In February of this year, the NIH announced it was capping indirect cost reimbursement at 15% on all grants.What's the administration's argument here?Pierre: The argument is there are cases where foundations only charge 15% overhead rate on grants — and universities acquiesce to such low rates — and the federal government is entitled to some sort of “most-favored nation” clause where no one pays less in overhead than they pay. That's the argument in this half-a-page notice. It's not much more elaborate than that.The idea is, the Gates Foundation says, “We will give you a grant to do health research and we're only going to pay 15% indirect costs.” Some universities say, “Thank you. We'll do that.” So clearly the universities don't need the extra indirect cost reimbursement?Pierre: I think so.Dan: Whether you can extrapolate from that to federal research funding is a different question, let alone if federal research was funding less research and including even less overhead. Would foundations make up some of the difference, or even continue funding as much research, if the resources provided by the federal government were lower? Those are open questions. Foundations complement federal funding, as opposed to substitute for it, and may be less interested in funding research if it's less productive.What are some reasons that argument might be misguided?Pierre: First, universities don't always say, “Yes” [to a researcher wishing to accept a grant]. At MIT, getting a grant means getting special authorization from the provost. That special authorization is not always forthcoming. The provost has a special fund, presumably funded out of the endowment, that under certain conditions they will dip into to make up for the missing overhead.So you've got some research that, for whatever reason, the federal government won't fund, and the Gates Foundation is only willing to fund it at this low rate, and the university has budgeted a little bit extra for those grants that it still wants.Pierre: That's my understanding. I know that if you're going to get a grant, you're going to have to sit in many meetings and cajole any number of administrators, and you don't always get your way.Second, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison [between federal and foundation grants] because there are ways to budget an item as a direct cost in a foundation grant that the government would consider an indirect cost. So you might budget some fractional access to a facility…Like the mouse microscope I have to use?Pierre: Yes, or some sort of Cryo-EM machine. You end up getting more overhead through the back door.The more fundamental way in which that approach is misguided is that the government wants its infrastructure — that it has contributed to through [past] indirect costs — to be leveraged by other funders. It's already there, it's been paid for, it's sitting idle, and we can get more bang for our buck if we get those additional funders to piggyback on that investment.Dan: That [other funders] might not be interested in funding otherwise.Why wouldn't they be interested in funding it otherwise? What shouldn't the federal government say, “We're going to pay less. If it's important research, somebody else will pay for it.”Dan: We're talking about an economies-of-scale problem. These are fixed costs. The more they're utilized, the more the costs get spread over individual research projects.For the past several decades, the federal government has funded an order of magnitude more university research than private firms or foundations. If you look at NSF survey data, 55% of university R&D is federally funded; 6% is funded by foundations. That is an order of magnitude difference. The federal government has the scale to support and extract value for whatever its goals are for American science.We haven't even started to get into the administrative costs of research. That is part of the public and political discomfort with indirect-cost recovery. The idea that this is money that's going to fund university bloat.I should lay my cards on the table here for readers. There are a ton of problems with the American scientific enterprise as it currently exists. But when you look at studies from a wide range of folks, it's obvious that R&D in American universities is hugely valuable. Federal R&D dollars more than pay for themselves. I want to leave room for all critiques of the scientific ecosystem, of the universities, of individual research ideas. But at this 30,000-foot level, federal R&D dollars are well spent.Dan: The evidence may suggest that, but that's not where the political and public dialogue around science policy is. Again, I'm going to bring in a long arc here. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was, “We're in a race with the Soviet Union. If we want to win this race, we're going to have to take some risky bets.” And the US did. It was more flexible with its investments in university and industrial science, especially related to defense aims. But over time, with the waning of these political pressures and with new budgetary pressures, the tenor shifted from, “Let's take chances” to “Let's make science and other parts of government more accountable.” The undercurrent of Indirect Cost Recovery policy debates has more of this accountability framing.This comes up in this comparison to foundation rates: “Is the government overpaying?” Clearly universities are willing to accept less from foundations. It comes up in this perception that ICR is funding administrative growth that may not be productive or socially efficient. Accountability seems to be a priority in the current day.Where are we right now [August 2025] on that 15% cap on indirect costs?Dan: Recent changes first kicked off on February 7th, when NIH posted its supplemental guidance, that introduced a policy that the direct cost rates that it paid on its grants would be 15% to institutions of higher education. That policy was then adopted by the NSF, the DOD, and the Department of Energy. All of these have gotten held up in court by litigation from universities. Things are stuck in legal limbo. Congress has presented its point of view that, “At least for now, I'd like to keep things as they are.” But this has been an object of controversy long before the current administration even took office in January. I don't think it's going away.Pierre: If I had to guess, the proposal as it first took shape is not what is going to end up being adopted. But the idea that overhead rates are an object of controversy — are too high, and need to be reformed — is going to stay relevant.Dan: Partly that's because it's a complicated issue. Partly there's not a real benchmark of what an appropriate Indirect Cost Recovery policy should be. Any way you try to fund the cost of research, you're going to run into trade-offs. Those are complicated.ICR does draw criticism. People think it's bloated or lacks transparency. We would agree some of these critiques are well-founded. Yet it's also important to remember that ICR pays for facilities and administration. It doesn't just fund administrative costs, which is what people usually associate it with. The share of ICR that goes to administrative costs is legally capped at 26% of direct costs. That cap has been in place since 1991. Many universities have been at that cap for many years — you can see this in public records. So the idea that indirect costs are going up over time, and that that's because of bloat at US universities, has to be incorrect, because the administrative rate has been capped for three decades.Many of those costs are incurred in service of complying with regulations that govern research, including the cost of administering ICR to begin with. Compiling great proposals every two to four years and a new round of negotiations — all of that takes resources. Those are among the things that indirect cost funding reimburses.Even then, universities appear to under-recover their true indirect costs of federally-sponsored research. We have examples from specific universities which have reported detailed numbers. That under-recovery means less incentive to invest in infrastructure, less capacity for innovation, fewer clinical trials. So there's a case to be made that indirect cost funding is too low.Pierre: The bottom line is we don't know if there is under- or over-recovery of indirect costs. There's an incentive for university administrators to claim there's under-recovery. So I take that with a huge grain of salt.Dan: It's ambiguous what a best policy would look like, but this is all to say that, first, public understanding of this complex issue is sometimes a bit murky. Second, a path forward has to embrace the trade-offs that any particular approach to ICR presents.From reading your paper, I got a much better sense that a ton of the administrative bloat of the modern university is responding to federal regulations on research. The average researcher reports spending almost half of their time on paperwork. Some of that is a consequence of the research or grant process; some is regulatory compliance.The other thing, which I want to hear more on, is that research tools seem to be becoming more expensive and complex. So the microscope I'm using today is an order of magnitude more expensive than the microscope I was using in 1950. And you've got to recoup those costs somehow.Pierre: Everything costs more than it used to. Research is subject to Baumol's cost disease. There are areas where there's been productivity gains — software has had an impact.The stakes are high because, if we get this wrong, we're telling researchers that they should bias the type of research they're going to pursue and training that they're going to undergo, with an eye to what is cheaper. If we reduce the overhead rate, we should expect research that has less fixed cost and more variable costs to gain in favor — and research that is more scale-intensive to lose favor. There's no reason for a benevolent social planner to find that a good development. The government should be neutral with respect to the cost structure of research activities. We don't know in advance what's going to be more productive.Wouldn't a critic respond, “We're going to fund a little bit of indirect costs, but we're not going to subsidize stuff that takes huge amounts of overhead. If universities want to build that fancy new telescope because it's valuable, they'll do it.” Why is that wrong when it comes to science funding?Pierre: There's a grain of truth to it.Dan: With what resources though? Who's incentivized to invest in this infrastructure? There's not a paid market for science. Universities can generate some licensing fees from patents that result from science. But those are meager revenue streams, realistically. There are reasons to believe that commercial firms are under-incentivized to invest in basic scientific research. Prior to 1940, the scientific enterprise was dramatically smaller because there wasn't funding the way that there is today. The exigencies of war drew the federal government into funding research in order to win. Then it was productive enough that folks decided we should keep doing it. History and economic logic tells us that you're not going to see as much science — especially in these fixed-cost heavy endeavors — when those resources aren't provided by the public.Pierre: My one possible answer to the question is, “The endowment is going to pay for it.” MIT has an endowment, but many other universities do not. What does that mean for them? The administration also wants to tax the heck out of the endowment.This is a good opportunity to look at the empirical work you guys did in this great paper. As far as I can tell, this was one of the first real looks at what indirect costs rates look like in real life. What did you guys find?Dan: Two decades ago, Pierre and Bhaven began collecting information on universities' historical indirect cost rates. This is a resource that was quietly sitting on the shelf waiting for its day. That day came this past February. Bhaven and Pierre collected information on negotiated ICR rates for the past 60 years. During this project, we also collected the most recent versions of those agreements from university websites to bring the numbers up to the current day.We pulled together data for around 350 universities and other research institutions. Together, they account for around 85% of all NIH research funding over the last 20 years.We looked at their:* Negotiated indirect cost rates, from institutional indirect cost agreements with the government, and their;* Effective rates [how much they actually get when you look at grant payments], using NIH grant funding data.Negotiated cost rates have gone up. That has led to concerns that the overhead cost of research is going up — these claims that it's funding administrative bloat. But our most important finding is that there's a large gap between the sticker rates — the negotiated ICR rates that are visible to the public, and get floated on Twitter as examples of university exorbitance — and the rates that universities are paid in practice, at least on NIH grants; we think it's likely the case for NSF and other agency grants too.An institution's effective ICR funding rates are much, much lower than their negotiated rates and they haven't changed much for 40 years. If you look at NIH's annual budget, the share of grant funding that goes to indirect costs has been roughly constant at 27-28% for a long time. That implies an effective rate of around 40% over direct costs. Even though many institutions have negotiated rates of 50-70%, they usually receive 30-50%.The difference between those negotiated rates and the effective rates seems to be due to limits and exceptions built into NIH grant rules. Those rules exclude some grants, such as training grants, from full indirect cost funding. They also exclude some direct costs from the figure used to calculate ICR rates. The implication is that institutions receive ICR payments based on a smaller portion of their incurred direct costs than typically assumed. As the negotiated direct cost falls, you see a university being paid a higher indirect cost rate off a smaller — modified — direct cost base, to recover the same amount of overhead.Is it that the federal government is saying for more parts of the grant, “We're not going to reimburse that as an indirect cost.”?Dan: This is where we shift a little bit from assessment to speculation. What's excluded from total direct costs? One thing is researcher salaries above a certain level.What is that level? Can you give me a dollar amount?Dan: It's a $225,700 annual salary. There aren't enough people being paid that on these grants for that to explain the difference, especially when you consider that research salaries are being paid to postdocs and grad students.You're looking around the scientists in your institution and thinking, “That's not where the money is”?Dan: It's not, even if you consider Principal Investigators. If you consider postdocs and grad students, it certainly isn't.Dan: My best hunch is that research projects have become more capital-intensive, and only a certain level of expenditure on equipment can be included in the modified total direct cost base. I don't have smoking gun evidence, it's my intuition.In the paper, there's this fascinating chart where you show the institutions that would get hit hardest by a 15% cap tend to be those that do the most valuable medical research. Explain that on this framework. Is it that doing high-quality medical research is capital-intensive?Pierre: We look at all the private-sector patents that build on NIH research. The more a university stands to lose under the administration policy, the more it has contributed over the past 25 years — in research the private sector found relevant in terms of pharmaceutical patents.This is counterintuitive if your whole model of funding for science is, “Let's cut subsidies for the stuff the private sector doesn't care about — all this big equipment.” When you cut those subsidies, what suffers most is the stuff that the private sector likes.Pierre: To me it makes perfect sense. This is the stuff that the private sector would not be willing to invest in on its own. But that research, having come into being, is now a very valuable input into activities that profit-minded investors find interesting and worth taking a risk on.This is the argument for the government to fund basic research?Pierre: That argument has been made at the macro-level forever, but the bibliometric revolution of the past 15 years allows you to look at this at the nano-level. Recently I've been able to look at the history of Ozempic. The main patent cites zero publicly-funded research, but it cites a bunch of patents, including patents taken up by academics. Those cite the foundational research performed by Joel Habener and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital in the early 1980s that elucidated the role of GLP-1 as a potential target. This grant was first awarded to Habener in 1979, was renewed every four or five years, and finally died in 2008, when he moved on to other things. Those chains are complex, but we can now validate the macro picture at this more granular level.Dan: I do want to add one qualification which also suggests some directions for the future. There are things we still can't see — despite Pierre's zeal. Our projections of the consequence of a 15% rate cap are still pretty coarse. We don't know what research might not take place. We don't know what indirect cost categories are exposed, or how universities would reallocate. All those things are going to be difficult to project without a proper experiment.One thing that I would've loved to have more visibility into is, “What is the structure of indirect costs at universities across the country? What share of paid indirect costs are going to administrative expenses? What direct cost categories are being excluded?” We would need a more transparency into the system to know the answers.Does that information have to be proprietary? It's part of negotiations with the federal government about how much the taxpayer will pay for overhead on these grants. Which piece is so special that it can't be shared?Pierre: You are talking to the wrong people here because we're meta-scientists, so our answer is none of it should be private.Dan: But now you have to ask the university lawyers.What would the case from the universities be? “We can't tell the public what we spend subsidy on”?Pierre: My sense is that there are institutions of academia that strike most lay people as completely bizarre.Hard to explain without context?Pierre: People haven't thought about it. They will find it so bizarre that they will typically jump from the odd aspect to, “That must be corruption.” University administrators are hugely attuned to that. So the natural defensive approach is to shroud it in secrecy. This way we don't see how the sausage is made.Dan: Transparency can be a blessing and a curse. More information supports more considered decision-making. It also opens the door to misrepresentation by critics who have their own agendas. Pierre's right: there are some practices that to the public might look unusual — or might be familiar, but one might say, “How is that useful expense?” Even a simple thing like having an administrator who manages a faculty's calendar might seem excessive. Many people manage their own calendars. At the same time, when you think about how someone's time is best used, given their expertise, and heavy investment in specialized human capital, are emails, calendaring, and note-taking the right things for scientists [to be doing]? Scientists spend a large chunk of their time now administering grants. Does it make sense to outsource that and preserve the scientist's time for more science?When you put forward data that shows some share of federal research funding is going to fund administrative costs, at first glance it might look wasteful, yet it might still be productive. But I would be able to make a more considered judgment on a path forward if I had access to more facts, including what indirect costs look like under the hood.One last question: in a world where you guys have the ear of the Senate, political leadership at the NIH, and maybe the universities, what would you be pushing for on indirect costs?Pierre: I've come to think that this indirect cost rate is a second-best institution: terrible and yet superior to many of the alternatives. My favorite alternative would be one where there would be a flat rate applied to direct costs. That would be the average effective rate currently observed — on the order of 40%.You're swapping out this complicated system to — in the end — reimburse universities the same 40%.Pierre: We know there are fixed costs. Those fixed costs need to be paid. We could have an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus to try to get it exactly right, but it's mission impossible. So why don't we give up on that and set a rate that's unlikely to lead to large errors in under- or over-recovery. I'm not particularly attached to 40%. But the 15% that was contemplated seems absurdly low.Dan: In the work we've done, we do lay out different approaches. The 15% rate wouldn't fully cut out the negotiation process: to receive that, you have to document your overhead costs and demonstrate that they reached that level. In any case, it's simplifying. It forces more cost-sharing and maybe more judicious investments by universities. But it's also so low that it's likely to make a significant amount of high-value, life-improving research economically unattractive.The current system is complicated and burdensome. It might encourage investment in less productive things, particularly because universities can get it paid back through future ICR. At the same time, it provides pretty good incentives to take on expensive, high-value research on behalf of the public.I would land on one of two alternatives. One of those is close to what Pierre said, with fixed rates, but varied by institution types: one for universities, one for medical schools, one for independent research institutions — because we do see some variation in their cost structures. We might set those rates around their historical average effective rates, since those haven't changed for quite a long time. If you set different rates for different categories of institution, the more finely you slice the pie, the closer you end up to the current system. So that's why I said maybe, at a very high level, four categories.The other I could imagine is to shift more of these costs “above the line” — to adapt the system to enable more of these indirect costs to be budgeted as direct costs in grants. This isn't always easy, but presumably some things we currently call indirect costs could be accounted for in a direct cost manner. Foundations do it a bit more than the federal government does, so that could be another path forward.There's no silver bullet. Our goal was to try to bring some understanding to this long-running policy debate over how to fund the indirect cost of research and what appropriate rates should be. It's been a recurring question for several decades and now is in the hot seat again. Hopefully through this work, we've been able to help push that dialogue along. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Dr. Monty Pal and Dr. Jason Westin discuss the federal funding climate for cancer research and the persistent problem of drug shortages, two of the major concerns facing the oncology community in 2026. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Monty Pal: Hello and welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Monty Pal. I am a medical oncologist and vice chair of academic affairs at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. There are always multiple challenges facing oncologists, and today, we discuss two of them that really stand out for 2026: threats to federal funding for cancer research and the persistent problem of drug shortages. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Jason Westin, who believes that one way to meet these challenges is to get oncologists more involved in advocacy, and he will share some strategies to help us meet this moment in oncology. Dr. Westin is a professor in the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, but he actually wears a lot of hats within ASCO. He is a member of the Board of Directors and has also previously served as chair of ASCO's Government Relations Committee. And he is also one of the inaugural members of ASCO's Political Action Committee, or PAC. He has testified before Congress about drug shortages and many other issues. Dr. Westin, I am really excited to have you on the podcast today and dive into some of these elements that will really impact our community in 2026. Thanks so much for joining us today. Dr. Jason Westin: Thank you for having me. Dr. Monty Pal: You've had such a range of experience. I already alluded to you testifying before Congress. You've actually run for office before. You wear so many different hats. I'm used to checking my PubMed every other day and seeing a new paper out from you and your group, and you publish in the New England Journal [of Medicine] on practice-setting standards and the diseases that you treat. But you've also done all this work in the domain of advocacy. I can't imagine that balancing that is easy. What has sort of motivated you on the advocacy front? Dr. Jason Westin: Advocacy to me is another way to apply our skills and help more people than just those that you're sitting across from at the time. Clinical research, of course, is a tool to try and take what we know and apply it more broadly to people that you'll never meet. And advocacy, I think, can do the same thing, where you can have a conversation with a lawmaker, you can advocate for a position, and that hopefully will help thousands or maybe even more people down the road who you'd never get to directly interact with. And so, I think it's a force multiplier in the same way that research can be. And so, I think advocacy is a wonderful part of how doctors care for our patients. And it's something that is often difficult to know where to start, but once people get into advocacy, they can see that the power, the rewarding nature of it is attractive, and most people, once they get going, continue with that through the rest of their career. Dr. Monty Pal: So, I'll ask you to expand on that a little bit. We have a lot of our younger ASCO members listening to this podcast, folks that are just starting out their careers in clinical practice or academia. Where does that journey begin? How do you get to the point that you're testifying in front of Congress and taking on these bigger sort of stances for the oncology community? Dr. Jason Westin: Yeah, with anything in medicine and in our careers, you have to start somewhere. And often you start with baby steps before you get in front of a panel of senators or other high-profile engagement opportunities. But often the first setting for junior colleagues to be engaged is doing things – we call them "Hill Days" – but basically being involved in kind of low-stakes meetings where you're with a group of peers, some of whom have done this multiple times before, and can get engaged talking to members of representatives' offices, and doing so in a way where it's a natural conversation that you're telling a story about a patient in your clinic, or that you're telling a personal experience from a policy that impacted your ability to deliver optimal care. It sounds stressful, but once you're doing it, it's not stressful. It's actually kind of fun. And it's a way that you can get comfort and skill with a group of peers who are there and able to help you. And ASCO has a number of ways to do that, both at the federal level, there's the Hill Day where we each April have several hundred ASCO members travel to Capitol Hill. There's also state engagement that can be done, so-called visiting at home, when representatives from the U.S. Congress or from state legislators are back in district. You can meet with your own representatives on behalf of yourself, on behalf of your organization, and advocate for policies in a way that can be beneficial to your patients. But those initial meetings that are in the office often they're low stakes because you could be meeting not with the representative but with their staff. And that staff sometimes is as young or even younger than our junior colleagues. These sometimes can be people in their 20s, but they're often extremely knowledgeable, extremely approachable, and are used to dealing with people who are new to advocacy. But they actually help make decisions within the office. So it's not a waste of time. It's actually a super useful way to engage. So, it's that first step of anything in life. The activation energy is always high to do something new. But I'd encourage people who are listening to this podcast already having some level of interest about it to explore ways that they could engage more. Dr. Monty Pal: You know, I have to tell you, I'm going to riff on what you just said for a second. ASCO couldn't make it any easier, I think, for folks to participate and get involved. So, if you're listening to this and scratching your head and thinking, "Well, where do I begin? How do I actually sign on for that meeting with a local representative?" Go to the ASCO ACT Network website. And I'll actually talk to our producer, Geraldine, to make sure we've got a link to that somewhere associated with this podcast after it's published, Jason, but I actually keep that on my browser and it's super easy. I check in there every now and then and see if there's any new policy or legislation that ASCO, you know, is sort of taking a stance on, and it gives me some fodder for conversation with my local representatives too. I mean, it's just an awesome, awesome vehicle. I'm going to segue right from there right to the issues. So, you and I are both at academic centers. You know, I think this is something that really pervades academia and enters into implications for general clinical practice. There's been this, you know, massive sort of proposal for decreased funding to the NCI and to the NIH and so forth. Tell us what ASCO is doing in that regard, and tell us perhaps how our community can help. Dr. Jason Westin: We live in interesting times, and I think that may be an understatement x 100. But obviously investments in research are things that when you're at an academic center, you see and feel that as part of your daily life. Members of Congress need to be reminded of that because there's a lot of other competing interests out there besides investing in the future through research. And being an elected representative is a hard job. That is something where you have to make difficult choices to support this, and that may mean not supporting that. And there's lots of good things where our tax dollars could be spent. And so, I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's not unlimited resources. However, ASCO has done an excellent job, and ASCO members have led the charge on this, of stating what research does, what is the benefit of research, and therefore why should this matter to elected representatives, to their staff, and to those people that they're elected to serve. And ASCO has led with a targeted campaign to basically have that message be conveyed at every opportunity to elected representatives. And each year on Hill Day, one of the asks that we have is to continue to support research: the NCI, NIH, ARPA-H, these are things that are always in the asks to make sure that there's appropriate funding. But effectively playing offense by saying, "It's not just a number on a sheet of paper, this is what it means to patients. This is what it means to potentially your loved ones in the future if you are in the opposite situation where you're not on the legislative side, but you're in the office receiving a diagnosis or receiving a difficult piece of news." We only have the tools we have now because of research, and each breakthrough has been years in the making and countless hours spent funded through the engine of innovation: clinical research and translational research. And so ASCO continues to beat that drum. You mentioned earlier the ACT Network. Just to bring that back again is a very useful, very easy tool to communicate to your elected representatives. When you sign up on the ASCO ACT website, you get emails periodically, not too much, but periodically get emails of, "This is a way you can engage with your lawmakers to speak up for this." And as you said, Monty, they make it as easy as possible. You click the button, you type in your address so that it figures out who your elected representatives are, and then it will send a letter on your behalf after like five clicks to say, "I want you to support research. I want you to vote for this particular thing which is of interest to ASCO and by definition to members of ASCO." And so the ACT Network is a way that people listening can engage without having to spend hours and significant time, but just a few clicks can send that letter to a representative in Congress. And the question could be: does that matter? Does contacting your senator or your elected representative do anything? If all they're hearing is somebody else making a different argument and they're hearing over and over again from people that want investments in AI or investments in something else besides cancer research, whatever it is, they may think that there's a ground shift that people want dollars to be spent over here as opposed to at the NIH or NCI or in federally funded research. It is important to continue to express the need for federal funding for our research. And so, it really is important for folks to engage. Dr. Monty Pal: 100%. One of the things that I think is not often obvious to a lot of our listeners is where the support for clinical trials comes from. You know, you've obviously run the whole gamut of studies as have I. You know, we have our pharmaceutical company-sponsored studies, which are in a particular bucket. But I would say that there's a very important and critical subset of studies that are actually government funded, right? NCI-funded clinical trials. If you don't mind, just explain to our audience the critical nature of the work that's being done in those types of studies and if you can, maybe compare and contrast the studies that are done in that bucket versus perhaps the pharmaceutical bucket. Dr. Jason Westin: Both are critical, and we're privileged that we have pharma studies that are sponsored and federally funded clinical research. And I think that part of a healthy ecosystem for us to develop new breakthroughs has a need for both. The pharma sponsored studies are done through the lens of trying to get an approval for an agent that's of interest so that the pharma company can then turn around and use that outside of a clinical trial after an FDA approval. And so those studies are often done through the lens of getting over the finish line by showing some superiority over an existing treatment or in a new patient population. But they're done through that lens of kind of the broadest population and sometimes relatively narrow endpoints, but to get the approval so that then the drug can be widely utilized. Clinical trials done through cooperative groups are sometimes done to try and optimize that or to try and look at comparative things that may not be as attractive to pharma studies, not necessarily going for that initial approval, but the fine tuning or the looking at health outcomes or looking at ensuring that we do studies in representative populations that may not be as well identified on the pharma sponsored trials, but basically filling out the gaps in the knowledge that we didn't gain from the initial phase 3 trial that led to the approval. And so both are critical. But if we only do pharma sponsored trials, if we don't fund federally supported research and that dries up, the fear I have, and many others have, is that we're going to be lacking a lot of knowledge about the best ways to use these great new therapies, these new immune therapies, or in my team, we do a lot of clinical trials on CAR T-cell therapies. If we don't have federally funded research to do the important clinical studies, we'll be in the dark about the best ways to use these drugs, and that's going to be a terrible shame. And so we really do need to continue to support federal research. Dr. Monty Pal: Yeah, there are no softball questions on this podcast, but I think everybody would be hard pressed to think that you and I would come on here and say, "Well, no, we don't need as much money for clinical trials and NCI funding" and so forth. But I think a really challenging issue to tackle, and this is something we thought to ask you ahead of the podcast, is what to do about the general climate of, you know, whether it's academic research or clinical practice here that seems to be getting some of our colleagues thinking about moving elsewhere. I've actually talked to a couple of folks who are picking up and moving to Europe for a variety of considerations, other continents, frankly. The U.S. has always been a leader when it comes to oncology research and, one might argue, research in general. Some have the mindset these days that we're losing that footing a little bit. What's your perspective? Are you concerned about some of the trends that you're seeing? What does your crystal ball tell you? Dr. Jason Westin: I am highly concerned about this. I think as you said, the U.S. has been a leader for a long time, but it wasn't always. This is not something that's preordained that the world-leading clinical research and translational research will always be done in the United States. That is something that has been developed as an ecosystem, as an engine for innovation and for job development, new technology development, since World War II. That's something that through intentional investments in research was developed that the best and brightest around the world, if they could choose to go anywhere, you wanted them to come to work at universities and academic places within the United States. And I think, as you said, that's at risk if you begin to dry up the investment in research or if you begin to have less focus on being engaged in research in a way that is forward thinking, not just kind of maintaining what we do now or only looking at having private, for profit sponsored research. But if you don't have the investment in the basic science research and the translational research and the forward-thinking part of it, the fear is that we lose the advantage and that other countries will say, "Thank you very much," and be happy to invest in ways to their advantage. And I think as you mentioned, there are people that are beginning to look elsewhere. I don't think that it's likely that a significant population of researchers in the U.S. who are established and have careers and families – I don't think that we're going to see a mass exodus of folks. I think the real risk to me is that the younger, up-and-coming people in undergraduate or in graduate school or in medical school and are the future superstars, that they could either choose to go into a different field, so they decide not to go into what could be the latest breakthroughs for cancer patients but could be doing something in AI or something in a different field that could be attractive to them because of less uncertainty about funding streams, or they could take that job offer if it's in a different country. And I think that's the concern is it may not be a 2026 problem, but it could be a 2036 or a 2046 problem that we reap what we sow if we don't invest in the future. Dr. Monty Pal: Indeed, indeed. You know, I've had the pleasure of reviewing abstracts for some of our big international meetings, as I'm sure you've done in the past too. I see this trend where, as before, we would see the preponderance of large phase 3 clinical trials and practice setting studies being done here in the U.S., I'm seeing this emergence of China, of other countries outside of the U.S. really taking lead on these things. And it certainly concerns me. If I had to sort of gauge this particular issue, it's at the top of my list in terms of what I'm concerned about. But I also wanted to ask you, Jason, in terms of the issues that are looming over oncology from an advocacy perspective, what else really sort of keeps you up at night? Dr. Jason Westin: I'm quite concerned about the drug shortages. I think that's something that is a surprisingly evergreen problem. This is something that is on its face illogical that we're talking about the greatest engine for research in the world being the United States and the investment that we've made in drug development and the breakthroughs that have happened for patients all around the world, many of them happen in the United States, and yet we don't necessarily have access to drugs from the 1970s or 1980s that are cheap, generic, sterile, injectable drugs. This is the cisplatins and the vincristines and the fludarabine type medications which are not the sexy ones that you see the ads in the magazine or on TV at night. These are the backbone drugs for many of our curative intent regimens for pediatrics and for heme malignancies and many solid tumors. And the fact that that's continuing to be an issue is, in my opinion, a failure to address the root causes, and those are going to require legislative solutions. The root causes here are basically a race to the bottom where the economics to invest in quality manufacturing really haven't been prioritized. And so it's a race to the cheapest price, which often means you undercut your competitor, and when you don't have the money to invest in good manufacturing processes, the factory breaks down, there's no alternative, you go into shortage. And this has been going on for a couple of decades, and I don't think there's an end in sight until we get a serious solution proposed by our elected officials. That is something that bothers me in the ways where we know what we should be doing for our patients, but if we don't have the drugs, we're left to be creative in ways we shouldn't have to do to figure out a plan B when we've got curative intent therapies. And I think that's a real shame.  There's obviously a lot of other things that are concerning related to oncology, but something that I have personally had experience with when I wanted to give a patient a CAR T-cell, and we don't have a supply of fludarabine, which is a trivial drug from decades ago in terms of the technology investments in genetically modified T-cells, to not then have access to a drug that should be pennies on the dollar and available at any time you want it is almost like the Air Force investing in building the latest stealth bomber, but then forgetting to get the jet fuel in a way that they can't use it because they don't have the tools that they need. And so I think that's something that we do need to have comprehensive solutions from our elected officials. Dr. Monty Pal: Brilliantly stated. I like that analogy a lot. Let's get into the weeds for a second. What would that proposal to Congress look like? What are we trying to put in front of them to help alleviate the drug shortages? Dr. Jason Westin: We could spend a couple hours, and I know podcasts usually are not set up to do that. And so I won't go through every part. I will direct you that there have been a couple of recent publications from ASCO specifically detailing solutions, and there was a recent white paper from the Senate Finance Committee that went through some legislative solutions being explored. So Dr. Gralow, ASCO CMO, and I recently had a publication in JCO OP detailing some solutions, more in that white paper from the Senate Finance. And then there's a working group actually going through ASCO's Health Policy Committee putting together a more detailed proposal that will be published probably around the end of 2026. Very briefly, what needs to happen is for government contracts for purchasing these drugs, there needs to be an outlay for quality, meaning that if you have a manufacturing facility that is able to deliver product on time, reliably, you get a bonus in terms of your contract. And that changes the model to prioritize the quality component of manufacturing. Without that, there's no reason to invest in maintaining your machine or upgrading the technology you have in your manufacturing plant. And so you have bottlenecks emerge because these drugs are cheap, and there's not a profit margin. So you get one factory that makes this key drug, and if that factory hasn't had an upgrade in their machines in 20 years, and that machine conks out and it takes 6 months to repair or replacement, that is an opportunity for that drug to go into shortage and causes a mad dash for big hospitals to purchase the drug that's available, leaving disparities to get amplified. It's a nightmare when those things happen, and they happen all the time. There are usually dozens, if not hundreds, of drugs in shortage at any given time. And this has been going on for decades. This is something that we do need large, system-wide fixes and that investment in quality, I think, will be a key part. Dr. Monty Pal: Yeah, brilliantly said. And I'll make sure that we actually include those articles on the tagline for this podcast as well. I'll talk to our producer about that as well.  I'm really glad you mentioned the time in your last comment there because I felt like we just started, but in fact, I think we're right at our close here, Jason, unfortunately. So, I could have gone on for a couple more hours with you. I really want to thank you for these absolutely terrific insights and thank you for all your advocacy on behalf of ASCO and oncologists at large. Dr. Jason Westin: Thank you so much for having me. I have enjoyed it. Dr. Monty Pal: Thanks a lot. And many thanks to our listeners too. You can find more information about ASCO's advocacy agenda and activities at asco.org. Finally, if you value the insights that you heard today on the ASCO Daily News Podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much. ASCO Advocacy Resources: Get involved in ASCO's Advocacy efforts: ASCO Advocacy Toolkit Crisis of Cancer Drug Shortages: Understanding the Causes and Proposing Sustainable Solutions, JCO Oncology Practice Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Find out more about today's speakers:     Dr. Monty Pal   @montypal   Dr. Jason Westin @DrJasonWestin   Follow ASCO on social media:      @ASCO on X     ASCO on Bluesky    ASCO on Facebook      ASCO on LinkedIn      Disclosures:     Dr. Monty Pal:    Speakers' Bureau: MJH Life Sciences, IntrisiQ, Peerview   Research Funding (Inst.): Exelixis, Merck, Osel, Genentech, Crispr Therapeutics, Adicet Bio, ArsenalBio, Xencor, Miyarsian Pharmaceutical   Travel, Accommodations, Expenses: Crispr Therapeutics, Ipsen, Exelixis   Dr. Jason Westin: Consulting or Advisory Role: Novartis, Kite/Gilead, Janssen Scientific Affairs, ADC Therapeutics, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Celgene/Juno, AstraZeneca, Genentech/Roche, Abbvie, MorphoSys/Incyte, Seattle Genetics, Abbvie, Chugai Pharma, Regeneron, Nurix, Genmab, Allogene Therapeutics, Lyell Immunopharma Research Funding: Janssen, Novartis, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, MorphoSys/Incyte, Genentech/Roche, Allogene Therapeutics

Drs. Audrey Thurm and Latha Soorya join us to discuss key findings from the NIH-funded Natural History Study in Phelan-McDermid syndrome, including intellectual disability profiles, daily living skill growth, regression, and how caregiver input drives research. Learn how these discoveries are guiding clinical trials, behavioral therapy, and everyday care—and why your family's participation makes all the difference.

In this episode, Kathy L. MacLaughlin shares clinical insights and practical wisdom as she examines the public health implications of the only FDA-approved self-screening option for cervical cancer screening. After describing the self-screening process, Dr MacLaughlin shows how this option has the potential to expand access, increase the likelihood of early detection, and better meet the needs of patients who face barriers to traditional screening methods. She also addresses concerns about potential false negatives or invalid samples, while highlighting the positive impact self-screening can have on the future of preventative care.Hosted by Omari A. Hodge, MD, FAAFP and Jay-Sheree Allen Akambase, MDCopyright © Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, 2025Resources:Self-Collected Vaginal Specimens for HPV Testing: Recommendations From the Enduring Consensus Cervical Cancer Screening and Management Guidelines Committee - J Low Genit Tract DisUS Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF)The American Cancer Society Guidelines for the Prevention and Early Detection of Cervical Cancer - American Cancer Society Guest Bio:Dr. Kathy L. MacLaughlin is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Mayo Clinic and a core faculty member of its Family Medicine Residency Program. A clinician researcher and practicing physician, her work focuses on the prevention and early detection of HPV-related cervical cancer, with particular expertise in HPV vaccination, cervical cancer screening, and clinical decision support (CDS) systems. She has served as a co-investigator and principal investigator on multiple NIH- and institutionally funded studies, including trials to increase HPV vaccination uptake and expand access to cervical cancer screening through self-collection methods. Dr. MacLaughlin has contributed to national initiatives as a subject matter expert for the CDC and HRSA and holds key leadership roles with the American Cancer Society's National Roundtable on Cervical Cancer. She has been recognized for her contributions with multiple teaching and research awards, including Family Medicine Teacher of the Year at Mayo Clinic and the MAFP Innovation & Research Award. Her published research spans HPV vaccination, screening disparities, and implementation of CDS tools. Dr. MacLaughlin earned her BA in Philosophy from Luther College and her MD from the University of Minnesota Medical School, completing residency in Family Medicine at Methodist Hospital. Her work reflects a strong commitment to reducing health disparities and advancing evidence-based practices in women's preventive health.Link: https://www.stfm.org/stfmpodcast122025 

In this episode of The Eric Coffey Show, Eric reflects on why he left Florida to plant himself in the heart of federal activity—because real opportunity often sits closest to the fire. Joined by seasoned former senior executives from NIH, USDA, and major federal organizations, the conversation touches on the importance of showing up, investing in community, strengthening your credentials, and positioning yourself inside key socioeconomic and professional groups. Eric pulls back the curtain on why proximity, collaboration, and continuous self-development will determine who thrives as new coalitions and high-level industry connections are formed. Key Takeaways Proximity creates opportunity: Being close to federal decision-makers accelerates relationship-building and access. Sharpen your credentials: Use downtime to update certifications, join associations, and stay active in professional groups. Engage the ecosystem: Chambers, NCMA chapters, and socioeconomic organizations open doors most small businesses never tap into. Learn more: https://federalhelpcenter.com/ https://govcongiants.org/  Watch the full Youtube Live here: https://www.youtube.com/live/c7fV-oJd74k

Find More Great Info From Dr. Melanie Matheu Here: SUBSTACK: https://lilscience.substack.com TIKTOK:https://www.tiktok.com/@laughterinlight YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@LaughterInLight Hawk talks with immunologist Dr. Melanie Matthew about the upcoming flu season and the devastating impact of RFK Jr as HHS Secretary. Australia experienced record-setting influenza deaths this year, with flu killing more people than COVID. The H3N2 variant mutated to evade vaccine protection, leading to unprecedented hospitalizations. Japan declared a flu epidemic five weeks early, and similar patterns are emerging in the United States.Dr. Matthew explains why flu vaccination remains critical despite mutations, reducing hospitalizations by 30-40% in adults and 70-75% in children. The conversation shifts to RFK Jr's anti-vaccine policies at HHS, where he claims no vaccine is safe and effective despite having zero background in immunology or pediatrics. His appointment, along with Marty Makary at FDA and Jay Bhattacharya at NIH, represents a complete rejection of scientific reality in favor of political ideology.The discussion covers RFK Jr's role in 88 child deaths in Samoa from measles, his vitamin A recommendations causing liver damage in Texas children, and how VAERS data is being misrepresented. Dr. Matthew details the exodus of top scientists from NIH, cancelled research grants, and terminated clinical trials that will kill patients. Forever chemicals (PFAS) are being approved for pesticides while vaccine research funding gets slashed.America faces losing measles elimination status, rising preventable disease deaths, and compromised pandemic preparedness. The CDC's COVID vaccine guidance for pregnant women has been offline for months despite evidence linking infection to preterm births and neurological damage. This administration prioritizes grift over public health, with consequences spanning decades. SUPPORT & CONNECT WITH HAWK- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mdg650hawk- Support Hawk's Merch Store: https://hawkmerchstore.com- Connect on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hawkeyewhackamole- Connect on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mdg650hawk.bsky.social- Connect on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@hawkpodcasts ALL HAWK PODCASTS INFO- Additional Podcasts Available Here: https://www.hawkpodcasts.com- Listen to Hawk Podcasts On Your Favorite Platform:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3RWeJfyApple Podcasts: https://apple.co/422GDuLYouTube: https://youtube.com/@hawkpodcastsiHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/47vVBdPPandora: https://bit.ly/48COaTBSimplecast: https://hawk-droppings.simplecast.com- Hawk Podcasts RSS Feed: https://feeds.simplecast.com/pPVtxSNJ

Dr. Nicola Hawley is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, where she also holds a secondary appointment in Anthropology. She serves as Associate Director for Dissemination and Implementation Science at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. Trained as a human biologist, Dr. Hawley is an internationally recognized expert in maternal and child health, with a focus on how early life experiences, from pregnancy through childhood, shape long-term risks for obesity and chronic disease. Her research bridges epidemiology, anthropology, and global health, using community-engaged and culturally grounded approaches to improve health outcomes in under-resourced and Indigenous settings. Much of her work centers in the Pacific, particularly in Sāmoa and American Sāmoa, where she leads NIH- and PCORI-funded studies on gestational and Type 2 diabetes, obesity prevention, and intergenerational health. She's also deeply committed to mentorship, helping train the next generation of global health and maternal-child health researchers. ------------------------------ Find the work discussed in this episode: Heinsberg LW, Loia M, Tasele S, Faasalele-Savusa K, Carlson JC, Anesi S, et al. (2025) Study protocol for the Health Outcomes in Pregnancy and Early Childhood (HOPE) Study: A mother-infant study in American Samoa. PLoS One 20(9): e0326644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326644 ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and the Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Chris Lynn, Co-Host Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly Courtney Manthey, Guest-Co-Host, Website: holylaetoli.com/ E-mail: cpierce4@uccs.edu, Twitter: @HolyLaetoli Anahi Ruderman, SoS Co-Producer, HBA Junior Fellow, E-mail: ruderman@cenpat-conicet.gob.ar

This week, Bobbi Conner talks with MUSC's Dr. Steven Kautz about precision neurorehabilitation and the $6.5 million grant from NIH for research in this specialty area.

An ODU professor is using AI to help doctors identify glioblastoma, a fast-growing and often recurring cancer, without invasive biopsies.

Our guest today is Dr. Julie Chen, the Chief Medical Officer at Radence.   She previously served as Chief Medical Officer at companies such as Human Longevity and Vitagene. Her research, at the FDA, NIH, National Cancer Institute, USC, and Mount Sinai, has shaped scientific advancement in precision medicine. As a fellowship-trained integrative internal medicine physician, she developed numerous corporate wellness programs in Silicon Valley focusing on whole-systems approach to healthcare. Dr. Chen is a frequent medical expert on major media outlets, including ABC, NBC, FOX, and MSN, and she has been featured in national magazines and podcasts. In 2023, she was named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Biotechnology by Healthcare Technology Report for her leadership in health tech development. Dr. Chen is a member of the Buck Institute's President's Circle, dedicated to advancing research in aging and longevity.   Website and social media: www.radence.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-chen-md-89035b14/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/radencehealth/posts/?feedView=all https://www.instagram.com/radencehealth/   This episode would be a rare opportunity to hear from one of medicine's most forward-looking voices on how personalized science, emerging technologies, and a proactive mindset are reshaping health span.   LEARN MORE ABOUT RADENCE: https://radence.com/insights-lab/redesigning-medicine-from-the-inside-out/

Top Stories for November 29th Publish Date: November 29th PRE-ROLL: SUGAR HILL ICE SKATING From the BG AD Group Studio Welcome to the Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. Today is Saturday, November 29th and Happy Birthday to Vin Scully I’m Peyton Spurlock and here are your top stories presented by Gwinnett KIA Mall of Georgia. Piedmont Oncology Opens Early Detection Pancreatic Cancer Clinic, First of Its Kind in Georgia You can now use a digital driver’s license to buy beer, cigarettes in Georgia Musical events, attractions to get into the magical spirit of the holiday season All of this and more is coming up on the Gwinnett Daily Post podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen daily and subscribe! Break 1: Kia Mall of Georgia STORY 1: Piedmont Oncology Opens Early Detection Pancreatic Cancer Clinic, First of Its Kind in Georgia Piedmont Oncology just opened Georgia’s first Early Detection Pancreatic Cancer Clinic, and honestly, it’s a big deal. Pancreatic cancer is brutal—13% five-year survival rate, no screening test, vague symptoms that sneak up on you. But this clinic? It’s here to change that. Dr. Andrew Page, the clinic’s medical director, says early detection is everything. “Education about risk factors is critical,” he explained. The clinic will focus on genetic counseling, research collaborations with NIH and Mayo Clinic, and, hopefully, developing a much-needed screening test. None of this would’ve happened without donors like Purple Pansies. Their support is saving lives. STORY 2: You can now use a digital driver’s license to buy beer, cigarettes in Georgia Big news for Georgians: you can now use a digital driver’s license to buy alcohol, tobacco, and other age-restricted items. Yep, your phone just got even more useful. The Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) announced the update Monday, calling it a “major step forward” in modernizing IDs. But here’s the catch: it’s up to individual businesses to accept them. No guarantees. Oh, and don’t try using a screenshot—doesn’t count. Retailers need a special mDL reader to scan the license, and staff still have to verify your age. Progress? Sure. Perfect? Not quite yet. STORY 3: Musical events, attractions to get into the magical spirit of the holiday season It’s that time again—holiday magic is everywhere, and Atlanta’s got no shortage of ways to celebrate. From concerts to tree lightings, here’s what’s happening: Holiday Shows at the FOX Theatre: Lauren Daigle’s Behold Christmas Tour (Dec. 4): Grammy-winning magic. Christmas Together (Dec. 6): Amy Grant, Cece Winans, and Michael W. Smith. A Drummer Boy Christmas (Dec. 8): for King + Country’s festive storytelling. Elf the Musical (Dec. 16–20): Buddy’s heartwarming journey. Nutcracker! Magical Christmas Ballet (Dec. 23–24): Ballet meets acrobatics. Festive Attractions: Stone Mountain’s Flight to the North Pole (Nov. 8–Jan. 4): Help Santa save Christmas. Garden of Lights (Nov. 15–Jan. 11): Stroll through dazzling displays. Georgia Aquarium Holidays (Nov. 14–Jan. 2): Twinkling lights, Santa, and sea life. Don’t miss these great events! We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.874.3200 for more info. We’ll be right back Break 2: Ingles Markets - DTL HOLIDAY STORY 4: Student loan change could drain nurse pipeline, Ga. dean warns Nursing is no longer considered a “professional degree” by the U.S. Department of Education, and nurses are, understandably, furious. The change, tied to the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, means nursing students can’t access the $200,000 loan cap reserved for professional programs. Instead, they’re stuck with a $100,000 limit—less than what many need to cover tuition. Linda McCauley, dean of Emory’s Nursing School, didn’t hold back: “In a time when we desperately need more nurses, why make it harder? It feels like they didn’t think this through.” The fallout? Fewer nurses, more debt, and a lot of frustration. STORY 5: Flight delays: Here are your rights when flying over the holidays in 2025 Stuck at the airport? Here’s a tip: if your flight’s delayed more than three hours (domestic) or six hours (international), you’ve got rights. Travel expert Katy Nastro says airlines must offer a refund or rebook you—your choice. But here’s the catch: no double-dipping. You can’t get both. And meal vouchers? Only if the delay’s the airline’s fault, like staffing or mechanical issues. Hotels? Depends on the airline. The Department of Transportation even published a guide for what airlines owe you. Pro tip: screenshots of your license don’t count for ID. Break 3: BUFORD HOLIDAY FESTIVAL STORY 6: Forsyth school board approves use of same alarm system in place at Apalachee High School Forsyth County schools are stepping up safety with a $2.4 million Centegix alarm system, approved by the Board of Education this week. You’ve probably heard of these “panic alarms”—they’re the same system credited with the quick response during the tragic Apalachee High School shooting last year. Teachers and staff wear a button they can press in emergencies, instantly alerting law enforcement without fumbling for a phone. The system also includes color-coded strobe lights for visual alerts, ensuring ADA compliance. The first year’s cost? $420,000, with the rest spread over five years. Safety, it seems, is getting an upgrade. STORY 7: Recall alert: Honda recalls 256K vehicles for loss of power software error Honda’s recalling over 256,000 vehicles—specifically 2023–2025 Accord Hybrids—because of a software glitch that could cause the car to lose power mid-drive. Not ideal, right? The issue? The integrated control module’s CPU might reset itself while you’re cruising along. Dealers will fix it for free, though, so there’s that. Honda says owners will get a heads-up by mail starting Jan. 5, but if you’re the impatient type (or just worried), you can call them at 888-234-2138. Oh, and if you’re curious, the recall number is TN2. Stay safe out there! We’ll have closing comments after this Break 4: THE SUGAR HILL HOLIDAY Signoff – Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at www.gwinnettdailypost.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the BG Podcast Network Show Sponsors: www.ingles-markets.com www.kiamallofga.com 2025 Buford Holiday Festival & Parade All-In-One Flyer Holiday Celebration 2025 – City of Sugar Hill Ice Rink – Downtown Sugar Hill NewsPodcast, CurrentEvents, TopHeadlines, BreakingNews, PodcastDiscussion, PodcastNews, InDepthAnalysis, NewsAnalysis, PodcastTrending, WorldNews, LocalNews, GlobalNews, PodcastInsights, NewsBrief, PodcastUpdate, NewsRoundup, WeeklyNews, DailyNews, PodcastInterviews, HotTopics, PodcastOpinions, InvestigativeJournalism, BehindTheHeadlines, PodcastMedia, NewsStories, PodcastReports, JournalismMatters, PodcastPerspectives, NewsCommentary, PodcastListeners, NewsPodcastCommunity, NewsSource, PodcastCuration, WorldAffairs, PodcastUpdates, AudioNews, PodcastJournalism, EmergingStories, NewsFlash, PodcastConversations See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

===== MDJ Script/ Top Stories for November 28th Publish Date:  November 28th    Commercial: From the BG AD Group Studio, Welcome to the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast.    Today is Friday, November 28th and Happy Birthday to Dave Righetti I’m Keith Ippolito and here are the stories Cobb is talking about, presented by Times Journal Flight delays: Here are your rights when flying over the holidays in 2025 Holiday lights on display in metro Atlanta ‘Elf The Musical’ coming to Fox Theatre for the Christmas season Plus, Leah McGrath from Ingles Markets on soy and oat milk All of this and more is coming up on the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen and subscribe!  BREAK: INGLES 2 STORY 1: Flight delays: Here are your rights when flying over the holidays in 2025 Ever been stuck at the airport, staring at the departure board, wondering what your rights are? Turns out, there’s a “magic number” for delays: 3 hours for domestic flights, 6 for international. Hit that threshold, and airlines have to help—refund, rebook, your call. But here’s the catch: no extra compensation in the U.S. Some airlines, like Delta or Alaska, will throw in meal vouchers or even a hotel if it’s their fault (think staffing, not weather). Others? Not so generous. Pro tip: check your airline’s policy before you fly. And pack snacks. Always.  STORY 2: Holiday lights on display in metro Atlanta  The holidays are here, and metro Atlanta is lighting up—literally. Whether you’re cruising through a drive-thru wonderland or strolling under glowing canopies, there’s magic everywhere. Candy Rush at Six Flags (Marietta): A mile of lights, candy canes, and a gingerbread village. Sweet tooth? Satisfied. Nov. 14–Jan. 4. $39.99 per car. Fantasy in Lights at Callaway Gardens: Seven miles, 10 million lights, and Santa. Forbes loves it, and so will you. Nov. 14–Jan. 4. Tickets start at $24.99. Lanier Islands’ Magical Nights of Lights: Six miles of twinkling displays. Pure nostalgia. Nov. 15–Jan. 4. From $25. WildWoods: AGLOW at Fernbank: Glowing gardens, luminous dandelions, and interactive magic. Nov. 14–Feb. 28. From $16.95. Go make some memories! STORY 3: ‘Elf The Musical’ coming to Fox Theatre for the Christmas season Buddy the Elf is in town, and he’s bringing the holiday cheer! “Elf The Musical” is hitting the Fox Theatre stage Dec. 16-21, but Buddy’s not waiting till then to spread some Christmas magic. Catch him around Atlanta this weekend: Friday night at The Blind Elf Parlour Bar (5:30-7:30 p.m.), or Saturday at the Children’s Museum (10 a.m.-noon), the Georgia Festival of Trees (2-4 p.m.), and Atlantic Station’s Light the Station event (4-7:30 p.m.). So, grab your syrup and get ready—it’s gonna be festive! We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.799.6810 for more info.  We’ll be right back. Break: STRAND THEATRE STORY 4: Piedmont Oncology Opens Early Detection Pancreatic Cancer Clinic, First of Its Kind in Georgia  Piedmont Oncology just opened Georgia’s first Early Detection Pancreatic Cancer Clinic (EDC) at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, and honestly, it’s a game-changer. Pancreatic cancer is brutal—only 13% of patients survive five years—but this clinic is here to change that. Why’s it so hard to catch early? No screening test exists, symptoms are vague, and many high-risk patients don’t even know they’re at risk. That’s where the EDC steps in: genetic counseling, cutting-edge research with NIH and Mayo Clinic, and a team laser-focused on early detection. “This is about saving lives,” said Dr. Andrew Page, the clinic’s medical director. STORY 5: More than 4 million expected to pass through Atlanta airport during Thanksgiving season Thanksgiving travel is in full swing, and Hartsfield-Jackson is bracing for over 4 million passengers. “It’s like our Super Bowl,” said General Manager Ricky Smith, half-joking but clearly ready for the chaos. The busiest day? Dec. 1, with 375,000 travelers expected—though that’s slightly down from last year, thanks to folks opting for road trips during the recent government shutdown. Still, the airport’s pulling out all the stops: new info totems, real-time TSA wait times, and extra security (some visible, some not). Smith’s advice? Arrive early, stay patient, and if something feels off, speak up. And now here is Leah McGrath from Ingles Markets on soy and oat milk We’ll have closing comments after this. Break: Ingles Markets 2 Signoff-   Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Marietta Daily Journal Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at mdjonline.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the BG Podcast Network Show Sponsors: www.ingles-markets.com Strand Marietta – Earl and Rachel Smith Strand Theatre See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A couple of weeks ago, the FDA Commissioner published a WSJ oped “The FDA Liberates Women's Hormone Replacement Therapy” (←gift link) and, with other FDA colleagues, a JAMA essay entitled “Updated Labeling for Menopausal Hormone Therapy” (open-access). That change, and the data cited, led to a series of articles in the days that followed, such as at STAT News “FDA reverses decades-old warning on hormone therapy products for menopause. Agency says the treatments o!fer heart, brain, and bone health benefits” and at the Washington Post “The FDA finally corrects its error on menopause hormone therapy. Women have been needlessly scared away from effective treatments.” If you read through these links, you'll be confused. Does MHT have proven cognitive benefits? What about a study from 1991 that showed ~50% reduction of fatal heart events with MHT? Or the 35% decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease? Or the breast cancer increased risk attributed to medroxyprogesterone acetate?I turned to my go-to gynecologist truth teller, Dr. Jen Gunter, to get her review of the evidence. This is a complex topic, with old data from the 2002 Women's Heath Initiative (WHI), new reports since, population level analysis, changes in preparations of MHT including local delivery, and much more.Here is our conversation which isn't just about MHT but includes “Big Wellness” marketing direct to middle aged women, the new FDA approved drug for hot flashes, the $14 million cut of the NIH's Office of Women's Health , marked increase in philanthropic support of women's health research, the Surgeon General nominee, ovarian failure, and a lightning round on proven benefits of MHT.Here's a brief clip on her views of the women's health “wellness” predatorsWe also discussed the reasons for Dr. Gunter's planned move next year back to Canada after practicing gynecology for 3 decades in the United States. I referred to a recent GT I wrote about the WHI and the potential favorable impact of MHT on the immune system, as suggested by new data on organ clocks. That finding, which has been replicated, may be linked to healthy aging, extending healthspan.****************************Thanks to the >190,000 Ground Truths subscribers from every US state and 210 countries. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile.If you found this interesting PLEASE share it!Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered.Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. It enabled us to accept and support 47 summer interns in 2025! We aim to accept even more of the several thousand who will apply for summer 2026.Thank you Debbie Weil, Cynthia Brumfield, Sara Garcia, Harshi Peiris, Ph.D., Liane Moccia, and over 1,000 others for tuning into my live video with Dr. Jen Gunter! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

A practicing addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Umhau directs AlcoholRecoveryMedicine.com, and provides telemedicine treatment for people with alcohol use disorder in Arizona, California, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.For over 20 years Dr. Umhau was a senior clinical investigator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health, (NIH). As a Commander in the United States Public Health Service, he served as Clinical Director for an Indian Health Service Hospital in Whiteriver, Arizona and as a Medical Officer in the Division of Psychiatric Products of the FDA. His scientific interest in nutritional neuroscience is informed by decades of clinical experience.  He is president of the Academy of Medicine of Washington, District of Columbia.In this Episode John delves into nutrition for alcoholics, for the brain and focusses on Omega 3, Vitamin A (retinol) and Vitamin D3.Visit his website if you need help -https://www.alcoholrecoverymedicine.com/

In this episode of "Swallow Your Pride," host Theresa Richard brings together a panel of NIH-funded researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to unpack the complexity of diagnosing and treating motor speech disorders after left-hemisphere stroke. Theresa Richard guides a conversation that demystifies the overlap between apraxia of speech, dysarthria, and aphasia, highlights the challenges clinicians face in acute and subacute care, and introduces innovative assessment tools designed to bring more objectivity and clarity to real-world practice. The team shares emerging findings, practical insights for SLPs across the continuum of care, and a look at how new perceptual and acoustic measures may shape the future of stroke-related speech assessment. Links mentioned in the show: UNC Center for Aphasia and Related Disorder's Lab website (includes information on our research and helpful therapy resources regarding aphasia, communication partner training, and aphasia-friendly print materials): https://www.med.unc.edu/healthsciences/sphs/card/ Tools Available for Speech Therapists for Assessment... Word Information Measure and Moving Average Type Token Ratio (Shiny App): https://unccard.shinyapps.io/WIM_MATTR/ Word Complexity Measure (Shiny App): https://unccard.shinyapps.io/shiny-woRdcomplex-2/ Word Complexity Measure Ratio (Shiny App): https://unccard.shinyapps.io/shiny-wcmRatio/ The post 385 – Navigating the Complexities of Speech Disorders After Stroke: A Deep Dive into Current Research and Practices appeared first on Swallow Your Pride Podcast.

Emily Cadiz is a teacher, musician, mom of three, and founder of Prelude Early Learning, home of Finnegan the Dragon. After a traumatic brain injury left her needing to relearn how to talk and walk, she rebuilt her skills through music and singing—an experience that inspired Prelude's music-based approach to teaching language and pre-reading. With 20+ years in education and master's degrees in education, special education, and music, Emily has created an NIH-supported program that's shown up to 250% growth in early literacy skills. In our talk, Emily dives deep into her accident and her history as an educator. She emphasizes why she advocates for inclusive music in classrooms, rather than traditional speech therapy. She also has some great advice for those transitioning from education to entrepreneurship.For all links and resources mentioned in this episode, head to the show notes: https://www.educatorforever.com/episode163.

In this episode, Kelly Brownell speaks with Jerold Mande, CEO of Nourish Science, adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and former Deputy Undersecretary for Food Safety at the USDA. They discuss the alarming state of children's health in America, the challenges of combating poor nutrition, and the influence of the food industry on public policy. The conversation explores the parallels between the tobacco and food industries and proposes new strategies for ensuring children reach adulthood in good health. Mande emphasizes the need for radical changes in food policy and the role of public health in making these changes. Transcript So, you co-founded this organization along with Jerome Adams, Bill Frist and Thomas Grumbly, as we said, to ensure every child breaches age 18 at a healthy weight and in good metabolic health. That's a pretty tall order given the state of the health of youth today in America. But let's start by you telling us what inspired this mission and what does it look like to achieve this in today's food environment? I was trained in public health and also in nutrition and in my career, which has been largely in service of the public and government, I've been trying to advance those issues. And unfortunately over the arc of my career from when I started to now, particularly in nutrition and public health, it's just gotten so much worse. Indeed today Americans have the shortest lifespans by far. We're not just last among the wealthy countries, but we're a standard deviation last. But probably most alarming of all is how sick our children are. Children should not have a chronic disease. Yet in America maybe a third do. I did some work on tobacco at one point, at FDA. That was an enormous success. It was the leading cause of death. Children smoked at a higher rate, much like child chronic disease today. About a third of kids smoked. And we took that issue on, and today it's less than 2%. And so that shows that government can solve these problems. And since we did our tobacco work in the early '90s, I've changed my focus to nutrition and public health and trying to fix that. But we've still made so little progress. Give us a sense of how far from that goal we are. So, if the goal is to make every child reaching 18 at a healthy weight and in good metabolic health, what percentage of children reaching age 18 today might look like that? It's probably around a half or more, but we're not quite sure. We don't have good statistics. One of the challenges we face in nutrition is, unfortunately, the food industry or other industries lobby against funding research and data collection. And so, we're handicapped in that way. But we do know from the studies that CDC and others have done that about 20% of our children have obesity about a similar number have Type 2 diabetes or the precursors, pre-diabetes. You and I started off calling it adult-onset diabetes and they had to change that name to a Type 2 because it's becoming so common in kids. And then another disease, fatty liver disease, really unthinkable in kids. Something that the typical pediatrician would just never see. And yet in the last decade, children are the fastest growing group. I think we don't know an exact number, but today, at least a third, maybe as many as half of our children have a chronic disease. Particularly a food cause chronic disease, or the precursors that show they're on the way. I remember probably going back about 20 years, people started saying that we were seeing the first generation of American children that would lead shorter lives than our parents did. And what a terrible legacy to leave our children. Absolutely. And that's why we set that overarching goal of ensuring every child reaches age 18 in good metabolic health. And the reason we set that is in my experience in government, there's a phrase we all use - what gets measured gets done. And when I worked at FDA, when I worked at USDA, what caught my attention is that there is a mission statement. There's a goal of what we're trying to achieve. And it's ensuring access to healthy options and information, like a food label. Now the problem with that, first of all, it's failed. But the problem with that is the bureaucrats that I oversaw would go into a supermarket, see a produce section, a protein section, the food labels, which I worked on, and say we've done our job. They would check those boxes and say, we've done it. And yet we haven't. And if we ensured that every child reaches age 18 at a healthy weight and good metabolic health, if the bureaucrats say how are we doing on that? They would have to conclude we're failing, and they'd have to try something else. And that's what we need to do. We need to try radically different, new strategies because what we've been doing for decades has failed. You mentioned the food industry a moment ago. Let's talk about that in a little more detail. You made the argument that food companies have substituted profits for health in how they design their products. Explain that a little bit more, if you will. And tell us how the shift has occurred and what do you think the public health cost has been? Yes, so the way I like to think of it, and your listeners should think of it, is there's a North star for food design. And from a consumer standpoint, I think there are four points on the star: taste, cost, convenience, and health. That's what they expect and want from their food. Now the challenge is the marketplace. Because that consumer, you and I, when we go to the grocery store and get home on taste, cost, and convenience, if we want within an hour, we can know whether the food we purchased met our standard there. Or what our expectations were. Not always for health. There's just no way to know in a day, a week, a month, even in a year or more. We don't know if the food we're eating is improving and maintaining our health, right? There should be a definition of food. Food should be what we eat to thrive. That really should be the goal. I borrowed that from NASA, the space agency. When I would meet with them, they said, ' Jerry, it's important. Right? It's not enough that people just survive on the food they eat in space. They really need to thrive.' And that's what WE need to do. And that's really what food does, right? And yet we have food, not only don't we thrive, but we get sick. And the reason for that is, as I was saying, the marketplace works on taste, cost and convenience. So, companies make sure their products meet consumer expectation for those three. But the problem is on the fourth point on the star: on health. Because we can't tell in even years whether it's meeting our expectation. That sort of cries out. You're at a policy school. Those are the places where government needs to step in and act and make sure that the marketplace is providing. That feedback through government. But the industry is politically strong and has prevented that. And so that has left the fourth point of the star open for their interpretation. And my belief is that they've put in place a prop. So, they're making decisions in the design of the product. They're taste, they gotta get taste right. They gotta get cost and convenience right. But rather than worrying what does it do to your health? They just, say let's do a profit. And that's resulted in this whole category of food called ultra-processed food (UPF). I actually believe in the future, whether it's a hundred years or a thousand years. If humanity's gonna thrive we need manmade food we can thrive on. But we don't have that. And we don't invest in the science. We need to. But today, ultra-processed food is manmade food designed on taste, cost, convenience, and then how do we make the most money possible. Now, let me give you one other analogy, if I could. If we were CEOs of an automobile company, the mission is to provide vehicles where people can get safely from A to point B. It's the same as food we can thrive on. That is the mission. The problem is that when the food companies design food today, they've presented to the CEO, and everyone gets excited. They're seeing the numbers, the charts, the data that shows that this food is going to meet, taste, cost, convenience. It's going to make us all this money. But the CEO should be asking this following question: if people eat this as we intend, will they thrive? At the very least they won't get sick, right? Because the law requires they can't get sick. And if the Midmanagers were honest, they'd say here's the good news boss. We have such political power we've been able to influence the Congress and the regulatory agencies. That they're not going to do anything about it. Taste, cost, convenience, and profits will work just fine. Couldn't you make the argument that for a CEO to embrace that kind of attitude you talked about would be corporate malpractice almost? That, if they want to maximize profits then they want people to like the food as much as possible. That means engineering it in ways that make people overeat it, hijacking the reward pathways in the brain, and all that kind of thing. Why in the world would a CEO care about whether people thrive? Because it's the law. The law requires we have these safety features in cars and the companies have to design it that way. And there's more immediate feedback with the car too, in terms of if you crashed right away. Because it didn't work, you'd see that. But here's the thing. Harvey Wiley.He's the founder of the food safety programs that I led at FDA and USDA. He was a chemist from academia. Came to USDA in the late 1800s. It was a time of great change in food in America. At that point, almost all of families grew their own food on a farm. And someone had to decide who's going to grow our food. It's a family conversation that needed to take place. Increasingly, Americans were moving into the cities at that time, and a brand-new industry had sprung up to feed people in cities. It was a processed food industry. And in order to provide shelf stable foods that can offer taste, cost, convenience, this new processed food industry turned to another new industry, a chemical industry. Now, it's hard to believe this, but there was a point in time that just wasn't an industry. So these two big new industries had sprung up- processed food and chemicals. And Harvey Wiley had a hypothesis that the chemicals they were using to make these processed foods were making us sick. Indeed, food poisoning back then was one of the 10 leading causes of death. And so, Harvey Wiley went to Teddy Roosevelt. He'd been trying for years within the bureaucracy and not making progress. But when Teddy Roosevelt came in, he finally had the person who listened to him. Back then, USDA was right across from the Washington Monument to the White House. He'd walk right over there into the White House and met with Teddy Roosevelt and said, ' this food industry is making us sick. We should do something about it.' And Teddy Roosevelt agreed. And they wrote the laws. And so I think what your listeners need to understand is that when you look at the job that FDA and USDA is doing, their food safety programs were created to make sure our food doesn't make us sick. Acutely sick. Not heart disease or cancer, 30, 40 years down the road, but acutely sick. No. I think that's absolutely the point. That's what Wiley was most concerned about at the time. But that's not the law they wrote. The law doesn't say acutely ill. And I'll give you this example. Your listeners may be familiar with something called GRAS - Generally Recognized as Safe. It's a big problem today. Industry co-opted the system and no longer gets approval for their food additives. And so, you have this Generally Recognized as Safe system, and you have these chemicals and people are worried about them. In the history of GRAS. Only one chemical has FDA decided we need to get that off the market because it's unsafe. That's partially hydrogenated oils or trans-fat. Does trans-fat cause acute illness? It doesn't. It causes a chronic disease. And the evidence is clear. The agency has known that it has the responsibility for both acute and chronic illness. But you're right, the industry has taken advantage of this sort of chronic illness space to say that that really isn't what you should be doing. But having worked at those agencies, I don't think they see it that way. They just feel like here's the bottom line on it. The industry uses its political power in Congress. And it shapes the agency's budget. So, let's take FDA. FDA has a billion dollars with a 'b' for food safety. For the acute food safety, you're talking about. It has less than 25 million for the chronic disease. There are about 1400 deaths a year in America due to the acute illnesses caused by our food that FDA and USDA are trying to prevent. The chronic illnesses that we know are caused by our food cause 1600 maybe a day. More than that of the acute every day. Now the agency should be spending at least half its time, if not more, worrying about those chronic illness. Why doesn't it? Because the industry used their political power in Congress to put the billion dollars for the acute illness. That's because if you get acutely ill, that's a liability concern for them. Jerry let's talk about the political influence in just a little more detail, because you're in a unique position to tell us about this because you've seen it from the inside. One mechanism through which industry might influence the political process is lobbyists. They hire lobbyists. Lobbyists get to the Congress. People make decisions based on contributions and things like that. Are there other ways the food industry affects the political process in addition to that. For example, what about the revolving door issue people talk about where industry people come into the administrative branch of government, not legislative branch, and then return to industry. And are there other ways that the political influence of the industry has made itself felt? I think first and foremost it is the lobbyists, those who work with Congress, in effect. Particularly the funding levels, and the authority that the agencies have to do that job. I think it's overwhelmingly that. I think second, is the influence the industry has. So let me back up to that a sec. As a result of that, we spend very little on nutrition research, for example. It's 4% of the NIH budget even though we have these large institutes, cancer, heart, diabetes, everyone knows about. They're trying to come up with the cures who spend the other almost 50 billion at NIH. And so, what happens? You and I have both been at universities where there are nutrition programs and what we see is it's very hard to not accept any industry money to do the research because there isn't the federal money. Now, the key thing, it's not an accident. It's part of the plan. And so, I think that the research that we rely on to do regulation is heavily influenced by industry. And it's broad. I've served, you have, others, on the national academies and the programs. When I've been on the inside of those committees, there are always industry retired scientists on those committees. And they have undue influence. I've seen it. Their political power is so vast. The revolving door, that is a little of both ways. I think the government learns from the revolving door as well. But you're right, some people leave government and try to undo that. Now, I've chosen to work in academia when I'm not in government. But I think that does play a role, but I don't think it plays the largest role. I think the thing that people should be worried about is how much influence it has in Congress and how that affects the agency's budgets. And that way I feel that agencies are corrupted it, but it's not because they're corrupted directly by the industry. I think it's indirectly through congress. I'd like to get your opinion on something that's always relevant but is time sensitive now. And it's dietary guidelines for America. And the reason I'm saying it's time sensitive is because the current administration will be releasing dietary guidelines for America pretty soon. And there's lots of discussion about what those might look like. How can they help guide food policy and industry practices to support healthier children and families? It's one of the bigger levers the government has. The biggest is a program SNAP or food stamps. But beyond that, the dietary guidelines set the rules for government spending and food. So, I think often the way the dietary guidelines are portrayed isn't quite accurate. People think of it in terms of the once (food) Pyramid now the My Plate that's there. That's the public facing icon for the dietary guidelines. But really a very small part. The dietary guidelines are meant to help shape federal policy, not so much public perception. It's there. It's used in education in our schools - the (My) Plate, previously the (Food) Pyramid. But the main thing is it should shape what's served in government feeding programs. So principally that should be SNAP. It's not. But it does affect the WIC program- Women, Infants and Children, the school meals program, all of the military spending on food. Indeed, all spending by the government on food are set, governed by, or directed by the dietary guidelines. Now some of them are self-executing. Once the dietary guidelines change the government changes its behavior. But the biggest ones are not. They require rulemaking and in particular, today, one of the most impactful is our kids' meals in schools. So, whatever it says in these dietary guidelines, and there's reason to be alarmed in some of the press reports, it doesn't automatically change what's in school meals. The Department of Agriculture would have to write a rule and say that the dietary guidelines have changed and now we want to update. That usually takes an administration later. It's very rare one administration could both change the dietary guidelines and get through the rulemaking process. So, people can feel a little reassured by that. So, how do you feel about the way things seem to be taking shape right now? This whole MAHA movement Make America Healthy Again. What is it? To me what it is we've reached this tipping point we talked about earlier. The how sick we are, and people are saying, 'enough. Our food shouldn't make us sick at middle age. I shouldn't have to be spending so much time with my doctor. But particularly, it shouldn't be hard to raise my kids to 18 without getting sick. We really need to fix that and try to deal with that.' But I think that the MAHA movement is mostly that. But RFK and some of the people around them have increasingly claimed that it means some very specific things that are anti-science. That's been led by the policies around vaccine that are clearly anti-science. Nutrition is more and more interesting. Initially they started out in the exact right place. I think you and I could agree the things they were saying they need to focus on: kids, the need to get ultra-processed food out of our diets, were all the right things. In fact, you look at the first report that RFK and his team put out back in May this year after the President put out an Executive Order. Mostly the right things on this. They again, focus on kids, ultra-processed food was mentioned 40 times in the report as the root cause for the very first time. And this can't be undone. You had the White House saying that the root cause of our food-caused chronic disease crisis is the food industry. That's in a report that won't change. But a lot has changed since then. They came out with a second report where the word ultra-processed food showed up only once. What do you think happened? I know what happened because I've worked in that setting. The industry quietly went to the White House, the top political staff in the White House, and they said, you need to change the report when you come out with the recommendations. And so, the first report, I think, was written by MAHA, RFK Jr. and his lieutenants. The second report was written by the White House staff with the lobbyists of the food industry. That's what happened. What you end up with is their version of it. So, what does the industry want? We have a good picture from the first Trump administration. They did the last dietary guidelines and the Secretary of Agriculture, then Sonny Perdue, his mantra to his staff, people reported to me, was the industries- you know, keep the status quo. That is what the industry wants is they really don't want the dietary guidelines to change because then they have to reformulate their products. And they're used to living with what we have and they're just comfortable with that. For a big company to reformulate a product is a multi-year effort and cost billions of dollars and it's just not what they want to have to do. Particularly if it's going to change from administration to administration. And that is not a world they want to live in. From the first and second MAHA report where they wanted to go back to the status quo away from all the radical ideas. It'll be interesting to see what happens with dietary guidelines because we've seen reports that RFK Jr. and his people want to make shifts in policies. Saying that they want to go back to the Pyramid somehow. There's a cartoon on TV, South Park, I thought it was produced to be funny. But they talked about what we need to do is we need to flip the Pyramid upside down and we need to go back to the old Pyramid and make saturated fat the sort of the core of the diet. I thought it meant to be a joke but apparently that's become a belief of some people in the MAHA movement. RFK. And so, they want to add saturated fat back to our diets. They want to get rid of plant oils from our diets. There is a lot of areas of nutrition where the science isn't settled. But that's one where it is, indeed. Again, you go back only 1950s, 1960s, you look today, heart disease, heart attacks, they're down 90%. Most of that had to do with the drugs and getting rid of smoking. But a substantial contribution was made by nutrition. Lowering saturated fat in our diets and replacing it with plant oils that they're now called seed oils. If they take that step and the dietary guidelines come out next month and say that saturated fat is now good for us it is going to be just enormously disruptive. I don't think companies are going to change that much. They'll wait it out because they'll ask themselves the question, what's it going to be in two years? Because that's how long it takes them to get a product to market. Jerry, let me ask you this. You painted this picture where every once in a while, there'll be a glimmer of hope. Along comes MAHA. They're critical of the food industry and say that the diet's making us sick and therefore we should focus on different things like ultra-processed foods. In report number one, it's mentioned 40 times. Report number two comes out and it's mentioned only once for the political reasons you said. Are there any signs that lead you to be hopeful that this sort of history doesn't just keep repeating itself? Where people have good ideas, there's science that suggests you go down one road, but the food industry says, no, we're going to go down another and government obeys. Are there any signs out there that lead you to be more hopeful for the future? There are signs to be hopeful for the future. And number one, we talked earlier, is the success we had regulating tobacco. And I know you've done an outstanding job over the years drawing the parallels between what happened in tobacco and food. And there are good reasons to do that. Not the least of which is that in the 1980s, the tobacco companies bought all the big food companies and imparted on them a lot of their lessons, expertise, and playbook about how to do these things. And so that there is a tight link there. And we did succeed. We took youth smoking, which was around a 30 percent, a third, when we began work on this in the early 1990s when I was at FDA. And today it's less than 2%. It's one area with the United States leads the world in terms of what we've achieved in public health. And there's a great benefit that's going to come to that over the next generation as all of those deaths are prevented that we're not quite seeing yet. But we will. And that's regardless of what happens with vaping, which is a whole different story about nicotine. But this idea success and tobacco. The food industry has a tobacco playbook about how to addict so many people and make so much money and use their political power. We have a playbook of how to win the public health fight. So, tell us about that. What you're saying is music to my ears and I'm a big believer in exactly what you're saying. So, what is it? What does that playbook look like and what did we learn from the tobacco experience that you think could apply into the food area? There are a couple of areas. One is going to be leadership and we'll have to come back to that. Because the reason we succeeded in tobacco was the good fortune of having a David Kessler at FDA and Al Gore as Vice President. Nothing was, became more important to them than winning this fight against a big tobacco. Al Gore because his sister died at a young age of smoking. And David Kessler became convinced that this was the most important thing for public health that he could do. And keep in mind, when he came to FDA, it was the furthest thing from his mind. So, one of it is getting these kinds of leaders. Did does RFK Jr. and Marty McCarey match up to Al Gore? And we'll see. But the early signs aren't that great. But we'll see. There's still plenty of time for them to do this and get it right. The other thing is having a good strategy and policy about how to do it. And here, with tobacco, it was a complete stretch, right? There was no where did the FDA get authority over tobacco? And indeed, we eventually needed the Congress to reaffirm that authority to have the success we did. As we talked earlier, there's no question FDA was created to make sure processed food and the additives and processed food don't make us sick. So, it is the core reason the agency exists is to make sure that if there's a thing called ultra-processed food, man-made food, that is fine, but we have to thrive when we eat it. We certainly can't be made sick when we eat it. Now, David Kessler, I mentioned, he's put forward a petition, a citizens' petition to FDA. Careful work by him, he put months of effort into this, and he wrote basically a detailed roadmap for RFK and his team to use if they want to regulate ultra-processed stuff food. And I think we've gotten some, initially good feedback from the MAHA RFK people that they're interested in this petition and may take action on it. So, the basic thrust of the Kessler petition from my understanding is that we need to reconsider what's considered Generally Recognized as Safe. And that these ultra-processed foods may not be considered safe any longer because they produce all this disease down the road. And if MAHA responds positively initially to the concept, that's great. And maybe that'll have legs, and something will actually happen. But is there any reason to believe the industry won't just come in and quash this like they have other things? This idea of starting with a petition in the agency, beginning an investigation and using its authority is the blueprint we used with tobacco. There was a petition we responded, we said, gee, you raised some good points. There are other things we put forward. And so, what we hope to see here with the Kessler petition is that the FDA would put out what's called an advanced notice of a proposed rulemaking with the petition. This moves it from just being a petition to something the agency is saying, we're taking this seriously. We're putting it on the record ourselves and we want industry and others now to start weighing in. Now here's the thing, you have this category of ultra-processed food that because of the North Star I talked about before, because the industry, the marketplace has failed and gives them no incentive to make sure that we thrive, that keeps us from getting sick. They've just forgotten about that and put in place profits instead. The question is how do you get at ultra-processed food? What's the way to do it? How do you start holding the industry accountable? Now what RFK and the MAHA people started with was synthetic color additives. That wasn't what I would pick but, it wasn't a terrible choice. Because if you talk to Carlos Monteiro who coined the phrase ultra-processed food, and you ask him, what is an ultra-processed food, many people say it's this industrial creation. You can't find the ingredients in your kitchen. He agrees with all that, but he thinks the thing that really sets ultra-processed food, the harmful food, is the cosmetics that make them edible when they otherwise won't I've seen inside the plants where they make the old fashioned minimally processed food versus today's ultra-processed. In the minimally processed plants, I recognize the ingredients as food. In today's plants, you don't recognize anything. There are powders, there's sludges, there's nothing that you would really recognize as food going into it. And to make that edible, they use the cosmetics and colors as a key piece of that. But here's the problem. It doesn't matter if the color is synthetic or natural. And a fruit loop made with natural colors is just as bad for you as one made with synthetics. And indeed, it's been alarming that the agency has fast tracked these natural colors and as replacements because, cyanide is natural. We don't want to use that. And the whole approach has been off and it like how is this going to get us there? How is this focus on color additives going to get us there. And it won't. Yeah, I agree. I agree with your interpretation of that. But the thing with Kessler you got part of it right but the main thing he did is say you don't have to really define ultra-processed food, which is another industry ploy to delay action. Let's focus on the thing that's making us sick today. And that's the refined carbohydrates. The refined grains in food. That's what's most closely linked to the obesity, the diabetes we're seeing today. Now in the 1980s, the FDA granted, let's set aside sugar and white flour, for example, but they approved a whole slew of additives that the companies came forward with to see what we can add to the white flour and sugar to make it shelf stable, to meet all the taste, cost, and convenience considerations we have. And profit-making considerations we have. Back then, heart disease was the driving health problem. And so, it was easy to overlook why you didn't think that the these additives were really harmful. That then you could conclude whether Generally Recognized as Safe, which is what the agency did back then. What Kessler is saying is that what he's laid out in his petition is self-executing. It's not something that the agency grants that this is GRAS or not GRAS. They were just saying things that have historical safe use that scientists generally recognize it as safe. It's not something the agency decides. It's the universe of all of us scientists generally accept. And it's true in the '80s when we didn't face the obesity and diabetes epidemic, people didn't really focus on the refined carbohydrates. But if you look at today's food environment. And I hope you agree with this, that what is the leading driver in the food environment about what is it about ultra-processed food that's making us so sick? It's these refined grains and the way they're used in our food. And so, if the agency takes up the Kessler petition and starts acting on it, they don't have to change the designation. Maybe at some point they have to say some of these additives are no longer GRAS. But what Kessler's saying is by default, they're no longer GRAS because if you ask the scientists today, can we have this level of refined grains? And they'd say, no, that's just not Generally Recognized as Safe. So, he's pointing out that status, they no longer hold that status. And if the agency would recognize that publicly and the burden shifts where Wiley really always meant it to be, on the industry to prove that there are foods or things that we would thrive on, but that wouldn't make us sick. And so that's the key point that you go back to when you said, and you're exactly right that if you let the industry use their political power to just ignore health altogether and substitute profits, then you're right. Their sort of fiduciary responsibility is just to maximize profits and they can ignore health. If you say you can maximize profits, of course you're a capitalist business, but one of the tests you have to clear is you have to prove to us that people can thrive when they eat that. Thrive as the standard, might require some congressional amplification because it's not in the statute. But what is in the statute is the food can't make you sick. If scientists would generally recognize, would say, if you eat this diet as they intend, if you eat this snack food, there's these ready to heat meals as they intend, you're going to get diabetes and obesity. If scientists generally believe that, then you can't sell that. That's just against the law and the agency needs them to enforce the law. Bio:   Jerold Mande is CEO of Nourish Science; Adjunct Professor of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University. Professor Mande has a wealth of expertise and experience in national public health and food policy. He served in senior policymaking positions for three presidents at USDA, FDA, and OSHA helping lead landmark public health initiatives. In 2009, he was appointed by President Obama as USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety. In 2011, he moved to USDA's Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, where he spent six years working to improve the health outcomes of the nation's $100 billion investment in 15 nutrition programs. During President Clinton's administration, Mr. Mande was Senior Advisor to the FDA commissioner where he helped shape national policy on nutrition, food safety, and tobacco. He also served on the White House staff as a health policy advisor and was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Occupational Health at the Department of Labor. During the George H.W. Bush administration he led the graphic design of the iconic Nutrition Facts label at FDA, for which he received the Presidential Design Award. Mr. Mande began his career as a legislative assistant for Al Gore in the U.S. House and Senate, managing Gore's health and environment agenda, and helping Gore write the nation's organ donation and transplantation laws.  Mande earned a Master of Public Health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor of Science in nutritional science from the University of Connecticut. Prior to his current academic appointments, he served on the faculty at the Tufts, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and Yale School of Medicine.

Harvard president Alan Garber and National Institutes of Health head Jay Bhattacharya are two main characters at the heart of the national fight over the future of academia. Alan Garber has been cast as the defender of academic freedom and democracy; Jay Bhattacharya is Donald Trump's pick to lead the NIH, the agency withholding billions of dollars in research grants from Harvard. Oddly enough, the two men go way back: Garber was Bhattacharya's undergraduate thesis advisor and mentor in the late 1980s. This episode tells the story of how the two men found themselves adversaries — and what it means for the future of science. Find more On the Media every week, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This episode dives into the unraveling of America's public health infrastructure as political interference reshapes the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Jonathan and Wendy walk through the CDC's new vaccine-autism messaging, the chaos and infighting inside the FDA, cuts to critical NIH trials, and Jay Bhattacharya's controversial "pandemic plan" built on personal responsibility instead of public health action. With outbreaks of measles, pertussis, and flu rising, they explore how misinformation, censorship, and agency dysfunction are putting the country at risk. Connect with us further on https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/author/jonathanhoward/  The Fine Print The content presented in the "We Want Them Infected" Podcast and associated book is intended for informational and educational purposes only.  The views and opinions expressed by the speakers, hosts, and guests on the podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of the creators, producers, or distributors. The information provided in this podcast should not be considered as a substitute for professional medical, scientific, or legal advice. Listeners and readers are encouraged to consult with relevant experts and authorities for specific guidance and information. The creators of the podcast and book have made reasonable efforts to ensure that the information provided is accurate and up to date. However, as the field of medical science and the understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to evolve, there may be new developments and insights that are not covered in this content. The creators are not responsible for any errors or omissions in the content or for any actions taken based on the information provided. They disclaim any liability for any loss, injury, or damage incurred by individuals who rely on the content. Listeners and readers are urged to use their judgment and conduct their own research when interpreting the information presented in the "We Want Them Infected" podcast and book. It is essential to stay informed about the latest updates, guidelines, and recommendations related to COVID-19 and vaccination from reputable sources, such as government health agencies and medical professionals. By accessing and using the content, you acknowledge and accept the terms of this disclaimer. Please consult with appropriate experts and authorities for specific guidance on matters related to health, science, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shaun will NOT bow down to the Democrats demands! PLUS, Dr. Nick and Leah Wilson, authors of the upcoming book Reclaim Vitality: A Guide to Exit Conventional Medicine and Live Naturally, tells Shaun about the whole genome sequencing program the NIH is rolling out to collect every baby's entire genome sequence, funneling kids into biotech therapies, and their fight to shape public health policies so people can stand for their own health freedoms. And The Heritage Foundation's Dr. EJ Antoni discusses the possible implications of BlackRock owning both the meat packing and pharmaceutical industries, Obamacare subsidies, and Trump's meeting with NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us a textA vaccine built for a virus might be whispering a powerful message to cancer care. We dig into a new Nature paper suggesting that mRNA COVID shots could enhance the effectiveness of checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy—especially in non‑small cell lung cancer and melanoma—by acting as an immune alarm that sharpens anti‑tumor responses. The data is retrospective, not causal, so we break down why the signal is exciting, where confounders can hide, and what the next generation of trials must test: timing, vaccine type, biomarkers, and who stands to benefit most.From there, we switch gears to the first weeks of a dog's life. A small but detailed study of Australian breeders maps nine practical socialization steps—novel objects, varied surfaces, calibrated sound exposure, hands‑on handling, human visitors, other animals, off‑site trips, car rides, and rotating environments—that build confident, adaptable companions. We compare three rearing strategies, from uniform protocols to individual puppy plans, and connect these choices to fewer fear issues, better training outcomes, and smoother vet and grooming visits down the line.Journalist and author Melanie Kaplan joins us to share Hammy's story—a beagle rescued from a research lab—and the deeper reporting behind her book, Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research. We talk about why beagles became the default lab dog, the emotional toll and resilience of retired animals, and the promising rise of non‑animal alternatives like organs‑on‑chips, human cell models, and computational toxicology. With FDA and NIH signaling support for methods that are more humane and more predictive, there's a real path to better science with less harm.If this conversation moved you or made you think, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves science and animals, and leave a quick review to help others find us.Links to Melanie's Book and SocialsHere is the link to all our socials and stuff!!!Support the showFor Science, Empathy, and Cuteness!Being Kind is a Superpower. All our social links are here!

Broadcast from KSQD, Santa Cruz on 11-20-2025: Dr. Dawn discusses GLP-1 inhibitors like Zepbound and semaglutide showing unexpected benefits for addiction treatment beyond diabetes and weight loss. Patients in rehab report these drugs mute cravings for alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes. Multiple studies show reduced substance abuse rates in users, with VA and NIH conducting trials examining brain activity and responses to triggers. With 80,000 annual drug overdose deaths and 48 million Americans having substance abuse disorders, these medications may revolutionize addiction treatment by dampening brain reward circuitry, though costs threaten healthcare budgets. A Stanford twin study found those twins assigned a vegan diet had substantially lower cholesterol, insulin, and body weight compared to their omnivore twins after several months, with LDL dropping 15mg, four pounds more weight loss, and 20% lower insulin. Dr. Dawn explains how a fungal disease decimating Central American frog populations caused 500% malaria increases in some areas. The fungus kills frogs by blocking skin electrolytes until hearts stop, eliminating tadpoles that eat mosquito larvae. Ecosystem collapses followed with algae blooms and snake population drops. She provides other examples showing how species losses affect human health, emphasizing the "one health" movement recognizing ecosystem health as fundamental to human wellbeing. An Australian study found people aged 70+ who listen to or play music regularly had 39% lower dementia rates, though causation remains uncertain. Princeton research shows music activates multiple brain regions simultaneously. Learning instruments increases gray matter, and musical memory remains intact in advanced dementia since it's stored separately from other memories. A caller discusses how modern screen-based activities provide less multisensory engagement than past social experiences like dances. Another caller describes Grover's disease causing persistent itchy skin with no known cause. Dr. Dawn recommends an elimination diet removing common allergens for one month, then reintroducing individually to identify food sensitivities triggering immune responses. Dr. Dawn explains xenotransplantation advances with genetically edited pigs beginning full-scale kidney transplant trials. Companies use CRISPR to disable genes causing immune rejection and insert human genes promoting immune tolerance. With only 10% of global kidney patients receiving organs, these could provide unlimited supply. Other innovations include kidneys with thymus tissue to teach immune tolerance and external pig liver systems as transplant bridges. She concludes noting research showing female dogs remember and prefer humans who demonstrate competence at tasks, while male dogs show no preference.

Are you still confused (or totally terrified) about hormone therapy because of what you heard that it causes cancer? Do you have breast cancer and have been told you cannot take hormone therapy, but still question if this is true? Then this episode is for you. Today I sit down with cancer survivor Dr. Lindsey Berkson, one of the most outspoken, evidence-driven voices in hormone science. She has been on the front lines for more than 40 years, challenging misinformation, teaching clinicians, and calling out the myths that have held women back from lifesaving care. We cover: What really happened in the 2002 WHI study and why the press release created global panic Why estrogen may be breast-protective…even for breast cancer patients What the 2024 NIH study of 10 million women revealed about HRT Why not ALL estrogen is proliferative The discovery of ER-beta and how it reframed estrogen's role in cancer biology What 25 human trials show about HRT use in ER+ breast cancer survivors What is oxytocin and how does this hormone help women in menopause   Dr. Lindsey Berkson is a pioneer in hormone and nutritional health with over four decades of clinical and research experience. She's triple board-certified in nutrition, a hormone scholar at Tulane University's estrogen think tank, and one of the first practitioners to bridge endocrinology, nutrition, and gut health into an integrated approach to healing. She's also the author of more than 20 books, including Hormone Deception and Healthy Digestion the Natural Way, and has developed physician-formulated nutraceutical lines and patented bioidentical hormone applications.   New book: Oxytocin Medicine https://amzn.to/3JWdDAm Recommended Reading: Hormones 101 by Dr. Jeffrey Dash Courses: https://drlindseyberkson.com/courses/ Contact Dr. Lindsey Berkson Website: https://drlindseyberkson.com/ Instagram: @dlberkson https://www.instagram.com/dlberkson/ Facebook: @Dr.LindseyBerkson https://www.facebook.com/Dr.LindseyBerkson/ Give thanks to our sponsors: Try Vitali skincare. 20% off with code ZORA here - https://vitaliskincare.com Get Primeadine spermidine by Oxford Healthspan. 15% discount with code ZORA ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - http://oxfordhealthspan.com/discount/ZORA Get Mitopure Urolithin A by Timeline. 20% discount with code ZORA at https://timeline.com/zora Try Suji to improve muscle 10% off with code ZORA at TrySuji.com - https://trysuji.com Try OneSkin skincare with code ZORA for 15% off https://oneskin.pxf.io/c/3974954/2885171/31050   Join the Hack My Age community on: YouTube: https://youtube.com/@hackmyage Facebook Page: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@⁠Hack My Age⁠     Facebook Group: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@⁠Biohacking Menopause⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠   Biohacking Menopause Private Women's Only Support Group: https://hackmyage.com/biohacking-menopause-membership/ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@⁠HackMyAge⁠    Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HackMyAge.com⁠    For partnership inquiries: https://www.category3.ca/  For transparency: Some episodes of Hack My Age are supported by partners whose products or services may be discussed during the show. The host may receive compensation or earn a minor commission if you purchase through affiliate links at no extra cost to you. All opinions shared are those of the host and guests, based on personal experience and research, and do not necessarily represent the views of any sponsor. Sponsorships do not imply medical endorsement or approval by any healthcare provider featured on this podcast.  

What if your erection could tell you something deeper about your health—something even your doctor might miss?In this exclusive episode, Dr. Arthur Burnett, one of the leading experts in urology and a key figure in the science behind Viagra, joins the conversation. Together, we explore the real connection between erectile dysfunction, prostate cancer, and overall prostate health. We dive into what's fact, what's fiction, and why ED might be your body's first warning sign of something much bigger. Whether you're dealing with performance issues or concerned about your prostate, this episode is for you.Hit play now. Your health, and your future, may depend on it.--------------About Dr. Arthur BurnettDr. Arthur Burnett is a world-renowned urologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he holds the prestigious Patrick C. Walsh Professorship in Urology. As Director of the Male Consultation Clinic and Vice Chair for faculty development at the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute, he brings decades of groundbreaking expertise in erectile dysfunction, prostate cancer, and reconstructive urology.A pioneer in the discovery of nitric oxide's role in erections, Dr. Burnett's research was instrumental in the development of Viagra. He has performed over 3,000 nerve-sparing radical prostatectomies and authored more than 500 peer-reviewed publications. With honors from the NIH, FDA, and the American Urological Association, Dr. Burnett continues to lead the field in advancing male sexual and prostate health.Want to connect with Dr. Arthur Burnett? Visit the Johns Hopkins Urology website or find his books on Amazon to learn more about his work in men's health.--------------Resources mentioned:Modern Man CribMediterranean DietGood Morning Wood Smoothie--------------Curious about how you can boost your bedroom game and build lasting confidence? Check out the course at getwoodnow.com and start your journey to feeling like yourself again!--------------If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more and get more tips, subscribe to The Modern Man newsletter for exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox! https://dranne.co/themodernman--------------Follow Me On:InstagramTwitterFacebookTikTokYouTube--------------For all links and resources mentioned on the show and where to subscribe to the podcast, please visit

Full Show Notes: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/drandrew Dr. Andrew Koutnik is a research scientist whose career bridges cutting-edge science, elite performance, and personal experience living with type 1 diabetes for over 17 years. His work focuses on how nutrition, metabolism, and lifestyle can be leveraged to maximize human health, performance, and resilience across diverse conditions—from chronic disease to extreme environments. Dr. Andrew Koutnik earned his Ph.D. in Medical Sciences (Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology) from the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine. Prior to joining FSU, Dr. Andrew Koutnik served as a Faculty/Principal Investigator at Sansum Diabetes Research Institute and Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. His research has spanned over $70,000,000 in research funding, including NASA missions, U.S. Special Operations Command, Defense Advanced Research Projects, Office of Naval Research, Department of Defense, and NIH-funded clinical trials Episode Sponsors: LVLUP Health: I trust and recommend LVLUP Health for your peptide needs as they third-party test every single batch of their peptides to ensure you’re getting exactly what you pay for and the results you’re after! Head over to lvluphealth.com/BGL and use code BEN15 for a special discount on their game-changing range of products. Ketone-IQ: Ketones are a uniquely powerful macronutrient that can cross the blood-brain barrier and increase brain energy and efficiency. With a daily dose of Ketone-IQ, you'll notice a radical boost in focus, endurance, and performance. Save 30% off your first subscription order of Ketone-IQ at Ketone.com/BENG. CAROL Bike: The science is clear—CAROL Bike is your ticket to a healthier, more vibrant life. And for a limited time, you can get $100 off yours with the code BEN. Don't wait any longer, join over 25,000 riders and visit carolbike.com/ben today. Sunlighten: Sunlighten's patented infrared sauna technology delivers the highest quality near, mid, and far infrared wavelengths to reduce inflammation, boost mitochondrial function, enhance detox pathways, and optimize recovery—backed by 25+ years of clinically proven, non-toxic innovation. Save up to $1,400 at Sunlighten.com/BEN with code BEN. Gameday Men’s Health: Gameday Men's Health offers science-backed, physician-led men's health optimization with personalized protocols for testosterone, peptide therapy, ED treatment, and more—helping you perform at your best whether you're training hard or keeping up with life. Visit gamedaymenshealth.com/bengreenfield for a free testosterone test and consultation at a clinic near you. Boundless Bar: If you’re ready to fuel workouts, sharpen your focus, and support whole-body vitality, grab your Boundless Bars now at boundlessbar.com —and save 10% when you sign up for a Boundless Bar subscription.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Rachel Gatlin entered neuroscience with curiosity and optimism. Then came chaos. She started her PhD at the University of Utah in March 2020—right as the world shut down. Her lab barely existed. Her advisor was on leave. Her project focused on isolation stress in mice, and then every human on earth became her control group. Rachel fought through supply shortages, grant freezes, and the brutal postdoc job market that treats scientists like disposable parts. When her first offer vanished under a hiring freeze, she doubled down, rewrote her plan, and won her own NIH training grant. Her story is about survival in the most literal sense—how to keep your brain intact when the system built to train you keeps collapsing.RELATED LINKS• Dr. Rachel Gatlin on LinkedIn• Dr. Gatlin's Paper Preprint• Dr. Eric Nestler on Wikipedia• News Coverage: Class of 2025 – PhD Students Redefine PrioritiesFEEDBACKLike this episode? Rate and review Out of Patients on your favorite podcast platform. For guest suggestions or sponsorship email podcasts@matthewzachary.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The city Finance Committee voted down Mayor Johnson's revenue plan, dealing a significant blow to his 2026 budget. Crain's politics reporter Justin Laurence discusses with host Amy Guth.Plus: Hines eyes Boeing's West Loop tower after scuttled Sterling Bay deal, Big Ten's $2.4 billion deal talks extended after pushback, FTC drops fight for injunction blocking GTCR's Surmodics deal and a study finds NIH grant cuts leave hundreds of clinical trials, 74,000 patients in limbo. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What happens when a powerhouse research enterprise, a statewide health system, and a relentless push for access all meet at the same table? Our conversation with Dr. David Miller, CEO of Michigan Medicine, opens the door to a candid look at how precision care, digital tools, and financial reality collide—and how smart leadership turns that collision into progress.We dig into the new map of Michigan Medicine: the academic medical center in Ann Arbor, integrated hospitals in Lansing and West Michigan, and partnerships that extend specialty expertise across the state. Then we follow the research-to-care pipeline, from NIH-backed labs to clinical trials to real-world therapies. You'll hear how next-generation sequencing is making targeted cancer treatments more accessible, and why histotripsy—a noninvasive, ultrasound-based approach to treating liver tumors—is a model for bringing breakthroughs from engineering benches to exam rooms.Technology is more than a buzzword here. Dr. Miller explains how generative AI is cutting documentation time with ambient notes, speeding routine approvals, and supporting clinical decisions, all while keeping a human in the loop. We talk training the next wave of physicians to be technology fluent, and how virtual visits and remote monitoring expand access without trading away empathy. On payment and policy, we confront the hard parts: Medicaid churn, prior authorization friction, and the need for value-based insurance design that lowers barriers to high-value care. The throughline is simple and urgent—make it easier for patients to get the right care at the right time, and align incentives so innovation actually reaches people.If you care about healthcare that is precise, humane, and actually reachable, this conversation will give you a practical, hopeful blueprint. Subscribe, share with a friend who's navigating care, and leave a review to help more listeners find the show. Your feedback keeps this community sharp—and pushes the system toward what works.Support the showEngage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!

What if blockbuster weight-loss drugs and a broken food system are two sides of the same story? We sit down with Dr. David Harlan—physician, researcher, and former NIH diabetes branch chief—to trace the unlikely path from the “incretin effect” to GLP-1 therapies that are transforming care for type 2 diabetes and obesity. Along the way, we ask harder questions about incentives, access, and why lifestyle still matters even when the medicine is powerful.Dr. Harlan breaks down how GLP-1 receptor agonists amplify insulin release, quiet cravings, and drive meaningful weight loss—often alongside better blood pressure, improved A1C, and fewer heart events. He explains the Gila monster connection, why weekly injections replaced multiple daily shots, and what the latest safety data actually shows. We get candid about what happens when people stop these drugs, why genetics complicate the “just try harder” narrative, and how brain chemistry shapes appetite, compulsion, and energy.Then we zoom out to the policy level: the rise of food deserts, cheap ultra-processed calories, and the paradox of publicly funding both the problem and the fix. We explore practical steps that work in the real world—SKU-controlled health savings accounts, everyday movement campaigns, healthier default options in public spaces, and community gardens and sidewalks that make active living normal again. The throughline is simple and human: use the science to help people now, and rebuild the environment so fewer need the medicine later.If you care about diabetes, obesity, prevention, or the economics shaping our plates and prescriptions, this conversation offers clarity and a path forward. Support the show by subscribing, sharing with a friend, and leaving a review with the one insight you'll apply this week.Support the showEngage the conversation on Substack at The Common Bridge!

About this episode: Between lawsuits, layoffs, and lags in funding, NIH has undergone significant changes in how it reviews and approves grant proposals for critical research. In this episode: Jeremy Berg, a former NIH leader, talks about what's changed and what's to come for indirect cost reimbursements, funding approvals, and the scientific research ecosystem as a whole. Guests: Jeremy M. Berg, PhD, is a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also the Associate Senior Vice Chancellor of Science Strategy and Planning. He previously served as the Director of the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at NIH. Host: Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Show links and related content: Appeals court judges seem skeptical of Trump administration's defense of capping NIH overhead payments—STAT Trump order gives political appointees vast powers over research grants—Nature Life-saving medicines begin in the basic research DOGE wants to stop funding—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Transcript information: Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel. Contact us: Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website. Follow us: @‌PublicHealthPod on Bluesky @‌JohnsHopkinsSPH on Instagram @‌JohnsHopkinsSPH on Facebook @‌PublicHealthOnCall on YouTube Here's our RSS feed Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.

Pre-Order The Forever Strong PLAYBOOK and receive exclusive bonuses: https://drgabriellelyon.com/playbook/Want ad-free episodes, exclusives and access to community Q&As? Subscribe to Forever Strong Insider: https://foreverstrong.supercast.comIn this fascinating episode, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon talks with neuroscientist Dr. Ben Rein, PhD (author of Why Brains Need Friends), about the science of social connection, emotion, and cognitive health. Dr. Rein, an expert in neurobiology and psychedelic research, reveals the cutting-edge studies that explain why loneliness is as damaging as smoking and how our digital world is affecting our brain's ability to connect.They discuss the neurochemistry of love, the controversial use of MDMA in therapy, and whether AI can ever truly replace human intimacy. This conversation provides an essential look at the biological drivers of happiness, performance, and long-term brain health.Chapter Markers:0:00 - MDMA (Molly): The History & Therapeutic Benefits 5:59 - The Legal Status of MDMA for PTSD 6:44 - The Safety and Effectiveness of MDMA in Clinical Trials 8:29 - PTSD (The Amygdala Alarm) 9:41 - How MDMA Soothes the Amygdala to Access Memory 11:42 - Is There an Alternative to MDMA? (Ketamine's Mechanism) 13:16 - Ketamine and Neuroplasticity for Depression 15:48 - Botox and Empathy: 18:12 - The Problem of Volume: How Screens Depersonalize Interaction 19:48 - The Virtual Disengagement Hypothesis Explained 25:00 - Defining Cognitive and Emotional Empathy 29:43 - MDMA's Link to Serotonin & Social Reward 31:04 - Do SSRIs Have Pro-Social Effects? 36:10 - The Science of Likability and "Easy to Read" Faces 40:10 - Top 3 Ways to Be More Likable49:49 - The Likability Gap: Why You Underestimate How Well-Liked You Are 56:59 - The Neurobiology of Oxytocin, Dopamine, and Serotonin1:09:23 - The Goldilocks Zone of Empathy 1:15:58 - Narcolepsy 1:18:16 - Alcohol: Why the Neurotoxin is Bad for Brain Health 1:21:47 - Exercise and Neurogenesis1:22:27 - Sex, Orgasm, and Oxytocin Release 1:25:06 - Oxytocin During Childbirth Who is Ben Rein:Dr. Ben Rein is an award-winning neuroscientist and Chief Science Officer of the Mind Science Foundation, where he supports early-career researchers in neuroscience. He earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University, publishing over 20 peer-reviewed papers on autism, empathy, MDMA, and digital behavior. Recognized by the NIH, the Society for Neuroscience, and Sigma Xi, he also serves as a scientific advisor to more than 20 organizations. With over one million followers and 75 million video views, Dr. Rein is celebrated for making neuroscience accessible to the public and has been featured by outlets such as Good Morning America, ABC News, and PopularMechanics.Thank you to our sponsors:BodyHealth: Use code LYON20 to get 20% off your first order https://www.bodyhealthaffiliates.com/73L4QL3/7XDN2/BON CHARGE Holiday Sale https://boncharge.com for 25% off Pique 20% off for life: https://Piquelife.com/DRLYONFind Ben Rein at: Website: https://www.benrein.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.benrein/#TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.benrein?lang=enFacebook:

Millions of dollars in federal grants have been terminated, throwing cutting-edge research at American universities into crisis. On this week's On the Media, meet the two men at the center of the fight over the future of academia.[0:00] Harvard president Alan Garber and National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya are at the heart of the national fight over the future of academia. Alan Garber has been cast as the defender of academic freedom and democracy; Jay Bhattacharya is Donald Trump's pick to lead the NIH, the agency withholding billions of dollars in research grants from Harvard. Oddly enough, the two men go way back: Garber was Bhattacharya's undergraduate thesis adviser and mentor in the late 1980s. This episode tells the story of how the two men found themselves adversaries — and what it means for the future of science.  On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

Milk has long been sold as the key to strong bones, but research challenges that claim: many people don't tolerate dairy, calcium needs are lower than advertised, and higher milk intake doesn't necessarily prevent fractures. Politics and industry marketing helped set “three glasses a day,” even though healthy bones depend more on overall diet and lifestyle—things like vitamin D, movement, and avoiding soda, excess sugar, and stress that drive calcium loss. Dairy may be helpful for some diets, but it can also trigger bloating, acne, congestion, or digestive issues. The good news is that strong bones and good nutrition are still very doable without cow's milk—think leafy greens, sardines, almonds, chia, and sunshine for vitamin D. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. David Ludwig and Dr. Elizabeth Boham why bone health depends more on diet, lifestyle, and nutrient balance than on dairy. David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, is an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children's Hospital, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He co-directs the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center and founded the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) program, one of the nation's largest clinics for children with obesity. For over 25 years, Dr. Ludwig has studied how diet composition affects metabolism, body weight, and chronic disease risk, focusing on low glycemic index, low-carbohydrate, and ketogenic diets. Called an “obesity warrior” by Time Magazine, he has championed policy changes to improve the food environment. A Principal Investigator on numerous NIH and philanthropic grants, Dr. Ludwig has published over 200 scientific articles and three books for the public, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Always, Hungry? Dr. Elizabeth Boham is Board Certified in Family Medicine from Albany Medical School, and she is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and the Medical Director of The UltraWellness Center. Dr. Boham lectures on a variety of topics, including Women's Health and Breast Cancer Prevention, insulin resistance, heart health, weight control and allergies. She is on the faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes can be found here:Why Most Everything We Were Told About Dairy Is Wrong Is It Okay To Eat Cheese And What Types Of Dairy Should You Avoid? Is Lactose Intolerance Causing Your Gut Issues?