Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world; NPR, October 4, 2025

 Scott Simon, NPR ; Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world

[Kip Currier: Jane Goodall's 1960 keen-eyed field observation of chimpanzees using tools in the wild was a game-changer in how humans think about primates. It's also one of the great moments of scientific research in the past century. We should deeply consider what other scientific insights we are likely to miss when cuts to scientific research are made and the pursuit of knowledge is devalued.]

[Excerpt]

"Outside the Field Museum in Chicago, a bronze sculpture by artist Marla Friedman captures a moment a friendship was made.

It's called "The Red Palm Nut." A young woman sits barefoot on the ground, reaching out her hand to a chimpanzee, who sits about a yard away. And he lightly, seemingly shyly, takes her human fingers into his own. A bright, red palm nut has dropped on the soil between them.

The woman in the sculpture is the great primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, at the moment she first earned the trust of a wild chimp. "He reached out and he took and dropped that palm nut," she later remembered. "But then very gently squeezed my fingers and that's how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment we understood each other without the use of human words, the language of gestures."

Jane Goodall called the silvery-chinned chimp David Greybeard. She met him when she was in her 20s, a former secretary from Bournemouth, England, who saved cash tips she'd earned as a waitress to journey to Africa, where she talked herself into a job as assistant to the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey.

She had no college experience. But Jane Goodall convinced Leakey she would be just the person to live among and study a group of chimpanzees he had discovered on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

And on what she recalled was a rainy morning, November 4, 1960, she saw David Greybeard and other chimps take twigs from a tree, pluck their leaves, and use them as sticks to pierce a termite mound and slurp the insects off the end — almost like how those primates called human beings might lick peanut butter off a spoon.

What she saw and documented was startling: the chimps had made the twigs into tools. When she wrote about it to Louis Leakey, he famously replied, "We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

By the time Jane Goodall died this week, at the age of 91, she'd been honored around the world for her work with chimps and people, and established animal sanctuaries and forest conservation programs.

David Greybeard, I think she'd want us to note, died in 1968. Jane Goodall and her friend saw strangers in a jungle, reached out their hands, and began a friendship that changed how humans understood our place in the world."

RIP American innovation; The Washington Post, May 12, 2025

Bina Venkataraman, The Washington Post; RIP American innovation

"That U.S. businesses have led the recent revolution in artificial intelligence is owed to the decades of research supported by the U.S. government in computing, neuroscience, autonomous systems, biology and beyond that far precedes those companies’ investments. Virtually the entire U.S. biotech industry — which brought us treatments for diabetes, breast cancer and HIV — has its roots in publicly funded research. Even a small boost to NIH funding has been shown to increase overall patents for biotech and pharmaceutical companies...

Giving out grants for what might look frivolous or wasteful on the surface is a feature, not a bug, of publicly funded research. Consider that Agriculture Department and NIH grants to study chemicals in wild yamsled to cortisone and medical steroids becoming widely affordable. Or that knowing more about the fruit fly has aided discoveries related to human aging, Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

For obvious reasons, companies don’t tend to invest in shared scientific knowledge that then allows lots of innovation to flourish. That would mean spending money on something that does not reap quick rewards just for that particular company.

Current business trends are more likely to help kill the U.S. innovation engine. A growing share of the country’s research and development is now being carried out by big, old companies, as opposed to start-ups and universities — and, in the process, the U.S. as a whole is spending more on R&D without getting commensurately more economic growth."

US universities’ faculty unite to defend academic freedom after Trump’s attacks; The Guardian, April 16, 2025

 Maya Yang, The Guardian; US universities’ faculty unite to defend academic freedom after Trump’s attacks

"Faculty members from US universities – including public ones which do not receive endowments – are banding together in attempts to resist the Donald Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedoms.

This month, Indiana University’s Bloomington faculty council followed in the footsteps of Rutgers University in passing a resolution to establish a pact with all 18 universities under the Big 10 academic alliance to defend academic freedoms.

The resolution comes as a result of “recent and escalating politically motivated actions by governmental bodies [which] pose a significant threat to the foundational principles of American higher education including the autonomy of university governance, the integrity of scientific research, and the protection of free speech”.

The 18 universities part of the Big 10 academic alliance include the University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The resolution says the “preservation of one institution’s integrity is the concern of all and an infringement against one member university of the Big Ten shall be considered an infringement against all”."

The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education; The New York Times, March 15, 2025

 The Editorial Board, The New York Times; The Authoritarian Endgame on Higher Education

"When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.

The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. He has fired government watchdogs, military leaders, prosecutors and national security experts. He has sued media organizations, and his administration has threatened to regulate others. He has suggested that judges are powerless to check his authority, writing on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent."

North Carolina, Warned of Rising Seas, Chose to Favor Development; The New York Times, September 12, 2018

John Schwartz and Richard Fausset, The New York Times; North Carolina, Warned of Rising Seas, Chose to Favor Development

[Kip Currier: Food for thought for all stakeholders (--particularly anyone, anywhere, concerned and involved with matters of scientific research, data, modeling, ethics, law, and policy--) as the Carolinas prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Florence.

The article's takeaway insight is in the last three sentences, excerpted and highlighted in bold below.]

"The leading scientific model used to forecast storm surge and its effect on coastal areas, known as Adcirc, was created in large part by Rick Luettich, director of the institute of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina.

In a telephone interview during a break from boarding up the windows of his home in Morehead City, on the coast, Mr. Luettich noted that before 2012, the state pursued progressive policies that put it in the forefront of coastal management. When the legislature pushed back against the clear scientific evidence underlying climate change, he said, “it came as a shock.”

There is a lesson in that, he said.

[Bold and red added for emphasis] “The process of converting scientific research into policy is one that we take for granted at times,” Mr. Luettich said. “What we learned is that you can’t take that for granted. We need to have a closer dialogue with policymakers, to make sure we’re on the same page.”