From Destruction to Rebuilding: Hope in Science’s Down Cycle

Those are some of the emotions I’ve felt as the attacks on science and academia have unfolded recently.

Last week, I came across a quote from a prominent scientist—whose name escapes me—who said, paraphrasing, that he "thinks the whole way science has been funded since World War II is likely to end."

I agree with him that there are problems. I agree that it’s going to change. However, I think going so far as to declare its death, is prematurely giving up.

It is a sign of linear thinking that plagues all humans everywhere, and doesn’t spare scientists, because after all, we’re still human. It is a linear thinking that takes what’s happening at a given time, and projects it forward into a future, making conclusions about those projections like the one that science funding as we’ve known it is headed for the graveyard.

In my nearly six decades of life, I've found that a cyclical model better reflects reality. Fads, trends, and fashions come and go. Things are destroyed and rebuilt—often emerging in entirely new forms.

It is clear we are in a destruction phase. And though it is so very painful to watch the human toll this phase is taking on all of us, in many ways, this transformation seemed inevitable.

I'm not talking about "how" we would undergo this cycle of creative destruction. What we're seeing now is unprecedented—a chaotic process marked by a striking lack of compassion, planning, or coordination. It's like a spiteful wrecking ball swinging wildly, striking indiscriminately. This is, to put it mildly, deeply unfortunate.

Yet when we consider the "why," some form of reset seemed inevitable. From a cyclical perspective, we've enjoyed an extraordinary run: from the Clinton-era NIH budget doubling in the late 1990s until now—nearly 30 years of growing budgets and expanding enterprise. Could such expansion really continue indefinitely without significant disruption?

I was searching for a metaphor or analogy for this, and I recalled the widely circulated story of the Biosphere 2, where it was reported that trees growing with a lack of wind ended up collapsing because the lack of stress. Then I encountered an article that dug into this story, and found it to be untrue (https://www.learningandthebrain.com/blog/when-analogies-go-wrong-the-benefits-of-stress/). So much for good analogies.

So perhaps a better metaphor is a very public human endeavor that has a clear, quantitative measure of its functioning: the stock markets. No stock market in history goes linearly upward, without interruptions, pullbacks, and even crashes. Among investors, seasoned ones understand that market downturns are inevitable, even if their timing and severity can't be predicted. Less experienced investors often make the mistake of expecting perpetual linear growth. While markets do tend to rise over time on average, these averages mask the real impact on individuals—like when people lost over half their retirement savings during the Dow Jones's 53% plunge in 2008.

To extend beyond the stock market metaphor, this seems to be true of all human efforts - politics, societies, cities, industries all have cycles of ups and downs.

Viewing this as a down cycle in science and research—a period of creative destruction making way for something new—rather than "the end," can give us hope. It can help us understand what is going on, and determine what it takes to survive the down cycle while waiting for the next up cycle.

It is this: the biomedical and scientific research progress made in the US -- and worldwide since WW II -- has dramatically improved human lives in so many ways. Yet as all humans everywhere seem wont to do, we forget. We don’t see how far we’ve come, and don’t realize how much better we have it. Instead, we romanticize an idyllic past when "everything was better," rather than recognizing that better is here and now. We simply need to take advantage of it—though many of us, myself included, don't. We work ourselves to exhaustion and engage in other dysfunctional behaviors we don't *need* to pursue, yet choose to anyway.

“You’re going to miss me when I’m gone” is a universal human experience, along with its cousin, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” When the cures, advances, and competitiveness here in the US slow or stop, people that took these for granted will notice their absence more than they noticed their presence. This will cause a rebound of interest and energy.

While nobody can predict exactly what that will look like, or how soon it will happen, a cyclical model of life tells us it will happen in some way.

It will favor those who have weathered the down time, without giving up. It will smile upon those who continued to develop their own skills, abilities, and possibilities. It will support those who develop more resilient communities.

The key to both surviving the down, and being ready for the subsequent up, is going back to basics. It is understanding and further developing the fundamental skills that are timeless for any scientist, anywhere, in any environment.

Some of those include:

This all sounds like work. It is. And I believe the down times are perfect opportunities that life presents us to develop such skills, readying ourselves, strengthening ourselves, improving our resilience.

The people who best survive - and even thrive - in any environment - are those who see challenges as opportunities. They are opportunities to grow, learn, and get better.

We are facing one big mother of a challenge right now, which means we are also presented with one big opportunity as well.

The only question, for each and every one of us is, to stay stuck in worry and fear over the unwanted challenge, or to embrace it as the difficult growth opportunity that it is?

I know how I must answer that, because any other option means to give up and do something else.

How will you answer that question? I would love to hear from you.

And when you’re ready to embrace that challenge of growing in your advocacy and communication skills, we are here. The Grant Foundry Accelerator is our 1:1 program working with you to develop your grant skills - and your advocacy skills - to a higher level, by focusing deeply on the part of the grant writing process that no AI is going to replace: your thinking and clarity about your science. And, to encourage those who are ready to take this opportunity, we are doing a temporary, substantial tuition drop, along with a payment plan, to make it easier to personally afford to develop this skill. If you’d like to speak to my team about it, you can schedule your call here.

Meanwhile, don’t lose hope. Keep working, keep developing, and derive whatever even small gains and opportunities you can from these current difficult times.