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Showing posts sorted by date for query NSF. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Presidential memo shuts down all government grants (now including NSF)

 A Presidential memo issued yesterday is shutting down all government grants, including e.g. those from the NSF.  

Here's the memo:

MEMORANDUM FOR HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES
FROM: Matthew J. Vaeth, Acting Director, Office of Management and Budget
SUBJECT: Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs 

" The use of Federal resources to advance  Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of  taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. "

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Here's the story from NPR:

National Science Foundation freezes grant review in response to Trump executive orders, By Jonathan Lambert January 27, 2025 

"The National Science Foundation canceled all of its grant review panels this week, as the organization works to align its grantmaking process with new executive orders from the Trump administration. 

...

"More than 60 of those meetings were scheduled for this week, all of which were abruptly canceled Monday morning."

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And here's a broader view from the Washington Post:

White House pauses all federal grants, sparking confusion. Trillions of dollars could be on hold, according to an Office of Management and Budget memo. By Jeff Stein, Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies, January 27, 2025

 "The White House budget office is ordering a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, according to an internal memo sent to agencies Monday, creating significant confusion across Washington.

"In a two-page document, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.” The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, also calls for each agency to perform a “comprehensive analysis” to ensure its grant and loan programs are consistent with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, which aimed to ban federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and limit clean energy spending, among other measures.

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And here's the view from Science:

Trump’s shutdown of federal diversity office at NSF breaks law that created it. CHIPS and Science Act established position to broaden participation in science  ByJeffrey Mervis

"President Donald Trump’s order yesterday shutting down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices was part of a slew of presidential directives from the new administration that apply to every federal agency. But for the National Science Foundation (NSF), following the White House’s order required it to ignore a mandate from Congress, and the lawmakers behind it are ticked off.

“Trump’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts across the federal government is just plain wrong,” said the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’s science committee, Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA). “For years, the committee has been working in a bipartisan effort to create a STEM workforce that more accurately represents the rich diversity and intellectual capacity of our nation. Trump has made hypocrites of the Republicans who joined us in spearheading diversity and equity efforts.”

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   "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
    "Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
    "Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
    "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

    —Martin Niemöller
 


Monday, January 20, 2025

Emerging Technologies to Stop Biological Time: The Ethics of Refrigeration

 Here's a special issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, exploring the promise and peril of refrigeration (as applied e.g. to organ transplantation). 

Here's how the introduction to the issue begins:

" Human beings depend on biological materials for survival — everything from food to medical interventions such as organ transplantation, to the environments in which we live. So it is no surprise that techniques to avoid the deterioration of biological materials have been used since ancient times.Reference Knorr and Augustin1 Cooling is one of the oldest techniques. Indeed, most of us now live with a cooling machine — a refrigerator — in our kitchens. But the function of those machines is primarily to retard the spoilage of materials that are already in the process of disintegrating: fruit that has already been harvested, meat from beef and chickens already slaughtered, and milk already derived from cows.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, scientists began to develop techniques for cryopreservation with more ambitious goals in mind. Instead of merely slowing the deterioration of biological materials, techniques could be developed to preserve living materials for prolonged periods of time and then allow their revival and use at a future time and place. An early application was cryopreservation of sperm (both human and animal), allowing sperm banking and later use.Reference Walters, Pacey and Tomlinson2 Yet conventional cryopreservation had its limits. Prolonged preservation of solid organs for transplantation was among the applications that proved elusive."

Emerging Technologies to Stop Biological Time: The Ethical, Legal & Policy Challenges of Advanced Biopreservation   Volume 52 - Issue 3 - Fall 2024
Latest issue of Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 

Introduction

Symposium Articles

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Earlier post (on what turns out to have been a seminal paper: "Since Giwa and colleagues reviewed the emerging field of biopreservation in biomedicine in 2017, progress has been swift."):

Monday, June 12, 2017 Organ preservation could bring big changes to transplantation