Teams manning government hotlines for reporting adverse events from foods, supplements and cosmetics, and call centers that provide other essential safety information were among the thousands of Health and Human Services Department employees laid off last week.

The big picture: Though the department is hurriedly calling some workers back, the episodes show how information blackouts are becoming a feature of the Trump administration's efforts to reorganize the health bureaucracy.

• "Very important offices that were directly involved with food safety and public health were axed," one FDA employee, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, told Axios.

Zoom in: The Food and Cosmetic Information Center fields tens of thousands of calls annually from consumers and industry representatives about recalls, nutritional information and food business requirements, along with unintended health consequences from using FDA-approved products.

• It also operates a toll-free number for information about the Food Safety Modernization Act, the law that regulates the production and distribution of food.
• Reports about health-related problems with cosmetics, infant formula, meat, poultry, restaurants and more can be made through online portals or over the phone.

But communications and outreach staff within the FDA's Human Foods Program that operates the center were caught up in the workforce cuts that began last Tuesday.

• HHS's reorganization plan includes cutting communications teams across the agency and consolidating them into a central office.
• The FCIC staff were "swooped up with traditional communications," the FDA employee said.

The phone hotline was available to take reports on Friday but the webform and online chats were offline.

• "All employees affected by the reduction in force may be asked to temporarily work until their government service ends on June 2," HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said when asked whether staff had been rehired to manage the hotline.
• "This decision is focused on ensuring that the transition is as seamless as possible, minimizing any disruption to the agency's mission and operations," he added.
• Nixon did not respond to questions about the long-term plan for the center.

HHS also laid off staff overseeing other hotlines that help people who want to quit smoking and new mothers with postpartum depression, per Stat.

What they're saying: "The layoffs were random and arbitrary," said Steven Grossman, president of consulting firm HPS Group and former executive director of the Alliance for a Stronger FDA.

• "FDA functions associated with communications appear to have been heavily targeted because communications is to be centralized at HHS," he said in an email. There's "[n]o evidence anyone would have looked at this and said — specialized function not appropriate for centralization."

Zoom out: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said staff cuts wouldn't compromise core agency functions.

• But some scientific roles were terminated, including at a San Francisco-area lab that supported food inspections and investigations, including testing for dangerous bacteria and heavy metals.
• The lab also analyzed food colorings and additives, which the new administration has said is a priority, per the New York Times.

What to watch: Kennedy said after the layoff notices went out that 20% of terminated HHS staff could be hired back because of "mistakes," the Wall Street Journal first reported.

• Some laid-off HHS employees have been called back to work without their termination notice being rescinded, while others have been more permanently reinstated, NPR reported.
• Confirmation on who still works at the agency is hard to come by — partly because human resource teams are among those who've been laid off, per NPR.

Several members of President Trump's embattled National Security Council have been fired, a U.S. official and a second source familiar told Axios on Thursday.

Why it matters: The firings come a day after conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office and pressed Trump to fire specific NSC staffers. Axios has not confirmed whether the firings were directly linked to that incident, but the source familiar said they were "being labeled as an anti-neocon move."

Driving the news: In a conversation with reporters on Air Force One on Thursday, Trump confirmed the firings at the National Security Council.

• "We're always going to let go of people — people we don't like or people that take advantage of [us] or people that may have loyalties to someone else," he said.
• Trump praised Loomer and said "she makes recommendations ... and sometimes I listen to those recommendations ... I listen to everybody and then I make a decision."
• Trump said Loomer recommended some people for jobs at the White House but denied she had anything to do with the firings.

Behind the scenes: The U.S. official said Loomer was furious that "neocons" had "slipped through" the vetting process for administration jobs, referring to hawkish foreign policy views commonly associated with the Bush administration.

• "She went to the White House yesterday and presented them with her research and evidence," the official said. Loomer's visit was reported earlier by Status and The New York Times. The official suspected that the firings were linked to Loomer's visit but was not certain.
• The U.S. official named three senior NSC members who had been fired, and said it was shaping up to be a "bloodbath." Axios is seeking additional confirmation before naming those people.
• The source familiar said several people had been fired, possibly as many as 10, including senior directors. An NSC spokesperson declined to comment.

State of play: Axios has not confirmed whether any of the individuals let go were in any way connected to the separate controversy about the use of Signal and private email accounts by national security adviser Michael Waltz and NSC staff to discuss sensitive information.

• Waltz had accidentally added The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Trump allies have labeled a "neocon," to a Signal chat about military strikes in Yemen.
• Trump considered firing Waltz at the height of the "Signalgate" scandal but ultimately decided to keep him and deny his critics a scalp, Axios' Marc Caputo and Mike Allen reported.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with President Trump's comments on Thursday.

The U.S. is freezing research funding, canceling projects, firing thousands of federal scientists and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty that scientists warn could slam the brakes on progress.

Why it matters: America has enjoyed decades of dominance in science and technology — plus the economic boom, medical advancements and global influence that come with it.

• Now, as the U.S.'s global lead is contested and competition for the world's top talent gets stiffer, the Trump administration is disrupting the system that has propelled the country.

"There are some immediate effects. People will be laid off, talent will go elsewhere, some research groups will shut down," says Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona.

• "But over the years it will have a profoundly negative impact. You're creating an opportunity for other countries to happily start moving in, poaching our talent and riding the escalator of scientific progress."

Stunning stat: 40% of U.S.-affiliated Nobel Prize winners in the sciences — physics, chemistry and medicine — between 2000 and 2023 were immigrants.

• Funding resources, top-notch universities, research freedom and a diverse culture that supports innovation are among the factors that have made the U.S. a global magnet for scientists.

Zoom in: Some of those factors are in flux.

• For example, in 2022, the NIH spent 25 times more on grants for health research than the next largest funder, a U.K. charity, according to Nature. But NIH funding has dropped by more than $3 billion since Inauguration Day, compared to the same period last year, as the Trump administration cancels research programs and halts funding, the Washington Post reports.
• Some universities are accepting fewer graduate students amid funding uncertainty, and some professors are performing their own risk calculus to be sure they can support students.
• Changes at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the centralization of peer review for grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, are raising concerns about political interference in federal science-funding decisions.

The stakes: The U.S. could see a two-fold brain drain: fewer foreign scientists coming to America, and American talent heading to other countries.

• Three-quarters of the 1,600 scientists surveyed in a new poll from Nature said they are considering leaving the U.S. due to the disruptions to science caused by the Trump administration's early actions.
• "The developments in the U.S. are a huge opportunity for Germany and Europe. I know that a lot of people are considering leaving." Ulrike Malmendier, a German economist who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Germany's Funke media group.
• France's Aix Marseille University has earmarked millions of dollars to hire U.S. scientists. Université Paris Sciences et Lettres wants to recruit U.S. researchers who work in projects in areas targeted for cuts by the Trump administration, including climate science and gender studies, the N.Y. Times reports.
• The upheaval has also been an opportunity for China and Russia: Both are allegedly trying to recruit former federal scientists.

The other side: White House and DOGE officials argue changes to the system will boost research, not stifle it. For example, they say funding switch-ups, like cutting the dollars NIH provides institutions for overhead costs, will free more funds for science.

• But universities say these administrative costs are a critical piece of conducting research.
• "The Trump Administration is committed to achieving and maintaining unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance," a White House official said.
• "We need fresh approaches to redefine how discovery happens in America to ensure our ecosystem draws talent, celebrates merit, and enables our scientists to focus on meaningful work."

The big picture: Years before the funding freezes and firings, there were indications the U.S. lead in science was shrinking — while China was advancing in AI, biotech, space and other fields.

• The U.S. share of global R&D spending decreased while total spending grew.
• The number of international patents filed from inventors in China surpassed applications from the U.S. in 2021.
• In 2019, China for the first time awarded more doctorate degrees in science and engineering than the U.S.

What to watch: Scientists, CEOs, university leaders and policymakers earlier this year called for updating the U.S. scientific enterprise to compete in the 21st century.

• Recommendations from that group and others include immigration reform, changes in tax credit and code that could spur private sector R&D, reducing the administrative burden on scientists, and increased investment in AI, biotech and other fields.

President Trump has also tasked the newly confirmed head of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, with revitalizing America's science and technology enterprise, referring to a similar task FDR gave to his science adviser, Vannevar Bush.

• Bush advocated for federal investment in basic science, which led to the creation of the National Science Foundation and established the government pillar of the very scientific system that is currently in turmoil.

The Trump administration wants to spend more federal dollars replicating medical research. A key question will be which studies get repeated and, with limited resources, at what expense.

Why it matters: Many findings can't be replicated — a problem scientists say needs to be addressed. But it could also consume increasingly scarce resources as the administration cuts spending and freezes federal grants.

• And some warn repeating accepted studies into how diseases originate or drugs work could undermine science for political gain.
• "We should ask questions, ensure reproducibility, and grow our evidence base with replication," David Higgins, a practicing pediatrician and health services researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said in an email.
• But that "requires considering many factors," he adds.

Catch up quick: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health director nominee Jay Bhattacharya say they want to make replication a pillar of what the institutes do, pointing to fraud in the research community.

• "The gold standard means real scientific research with replication of studies, which very rarely happens now at NIH," Kennedy said during a Senate confirmation hearing in January.
• "We should be giving at least 20% of the NIH budgets to replication," he added, citing a landmark paper on Alzheimer's disease that was later found to contain doctored images, calling many subsequent studies into question.
• In one early sign of the administration's priorities, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention is reportedly planning a broad study into connections between vaccines and autism, despite substantial evidence disproving any link.
• NIH last year launched a program that invited researchers to nominate their own studies for replication — and promised up to $50,000 plus overhead costs to contract with an outside organization to repeat the work, according to Science. Interest was "modest," the outlet reported.

What they're saying: "CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening" with the increase in autism cases in the U.S., HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told Axios in an email. "The American people expect high quality research and transparency and that is what CDC will deliver."

The big picture: Replication is "expensive, time-consuming and draws resources from other work but if you're interested in improving science, the scientific record and knowledge, it needs to be applied equally and universally," says Ivan Oransky, who teaches journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawals of scientific papers,

• "In a world of endless resources, you should replicate every study," Oransky says.
• But resources are limited and the cost of doing science has "vastly outpaced inflation," he says.
• The White House already is trying to cut billions of dollars in NIH grants for research overhead at universities and medical research centers. The Trump administration has said those savings could be reallocated directly to research. But scientists and university administrators say those indirect costs are crucial for the infrastructure that enables research.

Zoom in: Reports that the CDC will conduct a new large-scale study to look into already unsupported claims of a link between autism and vaccines are raising concern about political influence. Kennedy has for years repeated the debunked theory.

• "We have already done that many times over. It wastes valuable resources to revisit the same question instead of using them to address critical health challenges," Higgins said.
• "More than 20 major studies involving over 10 million children across multiple countries, populations, and decades have found that there is no link between vaccines and autism," according to a new review of studies by Higgins and others.
• Bhattacharya said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he doesn't "generally believe that there is a link" and doesn't want "to disprove a negative" but added that another study might help to convince people who are vaccine hesitant.
• But Higgins says "reexamining settled questions that have already been repeated, replicated, and tested many times is not healthy skepticism; it's cynicism and science denial."

Research, like other investments, can be set on a spectrum of risk, says Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit that supports replication studies, and a psychology professor at the University of Virginia.

• On the low-risk end is replicating studies as closely as one can to verify and validate their results. Nosek says "an investment on the order of single digits of the percent of the budget" at NIH could be helpful.
• In the middle is more incremental science that comprises the bulk of research — and that has drawn the ire of politicians who characterize it as wasteful. "Incrementalism is used pejoratively and I think that is insanity for how science actually makes progress," Nosek says.
• On the opposite end of the spectrum is high-risk — and potentially high-reward — research that "is open-ended and sometimes looks frivolous and impossible" but in some cases may be ultimately groundbreaking, says Stuart Buck, executive director of the Good Science Project.

Between the lines: The deeper issue underlying debates about replication and where science funding should be directed is that scientists have an incentive to build on existing studies, because it's likelier to allow them to publish often, attract more funding and advance their careers.

• Big science bureaucracies tend to fund consensus opinion — not replication studies or groundbreaking ideas, Buck says.
• Bhattacharya has said "a tentativeness to focus on the big ideas" and replicability are among the problems at NIH he'll address if confirmed, and that "no matter what the budget is, I want to reform it in that direction."

Employee buyouts, terminations and uncertainty at multiple federal agencies are sparking warnings about an erosion of scientific and technical expertise at a crucial moment.

Why it matters: No one country now dominates in every scientific field. The U.S. is in a tight competition with China for science and tech leadership as innovation amasses more economic value and geopolitical tensions rise.

• "It doesn't just impact federal employees," said a former National Science Foundation employee. "It will reduce our ability to maintain any leadership in the international landscape."

The big picture: By purging workers as well as enticing people to quit via early retirement, the federal government has cast aside specialists needed to help agencies fulfill their missions.

• Rocket scientists, ecologists, climate scientists, AI experts, chemists and other highly skilled workers have been affected.
• The scientists who remain at agencies are trying to do more with less, while in many cases anxiously awaiting more cuts.

Zoom in: Agencies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are seeing a slew of early retirements plus job cuts that have either been carried out or are likely to come.

• People are "walking away with years of institutional knowledge," one current NOAA scientist said.
• "The door is revolving pretty quickly at NASA right now," one current space agency worker said. "They are losing people with tremendous amounts of experience."

Axios spoke to four current employees, and four who lost their jobs in recent weeks, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution. They expressed concerns about a brain drain and loss of expertise.

Catch up quick: The National Science Foundation on Feb. 18 cut 168 employees — about 10% of its staff.

• Half were probationary employees, many of whom have Ph.D.s in their fields.
• The other half were contract workers who are highly specialized in their fields and who often work full-time jobs at universities and other institutions.

The intrigue: NOAA is bracing for cuts to its probationary workforce, and is already losing employees to the early retirement offer.

• The top climate and weather agency also operates satellites, manages national fisheries and handles marine species protection.
• NASA appears to have avoided immediate and sweeping cuts to its probationary staff — but a wave of high-profile retirements have cast uncertainty over the flagship Artemis Mission to return to the Moon.
• "Everyone is wondering if the other shoe is going to drop or what they're going to hear next week or never. It's terrible," one NASA employee said, adding that it has already driven people away.
• About 5% of NASA's workforce took the administration's deferred resignation buyout deal, NASA stated. The agency said it plans to cut its probationary workforce based on employee performance.

The other side: Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, President Trump trumpeted his general efforts to cut government.

• "We have escorted the radical-left bureaucrats out of the building and have locked the doors behind them," he said. "We've gotten rid of thousands."
• In an earlier post on Truth Social, he praised Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency: "ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE."
• NASA and NSF didn't respond to questions about concerns of loss of expertise.

Between the lines: Probationary employees have typically been in their roles less than one or two years.

• But that doesn't necessarily mean they haven't worked in the government for longer. The probationary clock can sometimes reset when someone is promoted, transferred between agencies or steps into a new role.

The impact: The consequences of losing scientists, engineers, technicians and educators who conduct research, review grant applications, engage with communities across the country and oversee programs and missions will come in waves, several people said.

• "The immediate loss is by removing all the people we brought in to fill critical gaps in ecological modeling, advanced survey statistics, cloud and AI advancements," the current NOAA scientist said.

The main role of NSF is assessing proposals from scientists and engineers for taxpayer-funded research. Its annual budget is roughly $9 billion.

• "We need people who are incredibly smart with the expertise to determine if research is feasible and if it is moving the needle forward," the former NSF employee said.

What to watch: A secondary impact may be on the pipeline of future STEM talent in the U.S.

• The cuts "remove all desire for new workers to look at the government as a realistic option," the NOAA scientist said.
• It is "chopping off the whole younger layer, which any place needs to survive. These are people who know AI and have grown up with this stuff that these old fogies haven't."
• "To move us forward, we need them."

Chinese AI makers have learned to build powerful AI models that perform just short of the U.S.'s most advanced competition while using far less money, chips and power.

Why it matters: American policies restricting the flow of top-end AI semiconductors and know-how to China may have helped maintain a short U.S. lead at the outer reaches of the AI performance curve — but they've also accelerated Chinese progress in building high-end AI more efficiently.

Catch up quick: In late December, Hangzhou-based DeepSeek released V3, an open-source large language model whose performance on various benchmark tests puts it in the same league as OpenAI's 4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

• Those are the most advanced AI models these companies currently offer to the broad public, though both OpenAI and Anthropic have next-generation models in their pipeline.

Stunning stat: Training V3 cost DeepSeek roughly $5.6 million, according to the company.

• OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have reportedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and train their current models, and expect to spend billions in the future.
• AI pioneer Andrej Karpathy called DeepSeek's investment "a joke of a budget" and described the result as "a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints."

Between the lines: In an interview last year, DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng said, "Money has never been the problem for us; bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem."

• The V3 model was trained on Nvidia H800 chips, a less-powerful version of a chip the U.S. banned for export to China in 2022. Export of the H800 was then prohibited when the U.S. tightened controls again the following year.

The big picture: Some U.S. officials have argued for restricting China's access to advanced AI chips even further in hopes of slowing the country's development of the technology.

• On Monday, the Biden administration announced another big round of export controls aimed at choking the supply of chips to China via third-party countries.

What's next: Advances like V3 and OpenAI's powerful new "reasoning" model, o3, have lent weight to recent claims by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other industry leaders who predict the industry is closing in fast on artificial general intelligence (AGI). (Plenty of other observers remain skeptical.)

• AGI — or AI that can solve problems and perform tasks at a human or beyond-human level — is a holy grail for AI researchers, and many in the industry and U.S. government believe the technology's first developer will win a massive economic, scientific and security edge.
• Biden's latest export controls have led some observers to conclude the government shares the growing sense that AGI is close.
• "This is a 'break in case of emergency' policy, and the Biden administration identified that the emergency is that AGI is just a few years away," Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells Axios.

Yes, but: AGI is also not well-defined, and both optimists and pessimists have complained that it's become a moving goalpost.

The Biden administration is readying dramatic last-minute steps to preserve a crucial advantage in its AI arms race with China: supply of the world's most advanced chips.

Why it matters: The chips needed to develop cutting-edge AI are the most valuable pieces of hardware on Earth, and the best chips Chinese firms can produce lag about five years behind the top end of the market.

Driving the news: A pending executive order could cap sales of AI chips to countries all over the world, not just China, per the WSJ — with a particular focus on Southeast Asia and the Gulf.

• Biden has already imposed limitations on the advanced chips that companies like Nvidia can export to China, but there are concerns that Chinese firms are able to buy or access them in other countries or from smugglers. There's a thriving black market for Nvidia chips in China.
• The new order would attempt to close that back door. It could also further divide the world along technological lines, with some countries likely getting unfettered access to U.S. tech and others facing limitations.
• Details of the rule, which is pending regulatory review, according to OMB's website, haven't been made public. But U.S. chipmakers and tech firms have been waging an intense behind-the-scenes campaign to prevent more restrictions.

State of the race

The fact that Chinese firms would "opt into a supply chain that involved putting chips in suitcases and smuggling them" is a clear sign of the Western edge in chipmaking, says Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts and author of "Chip War."

• The CEO of one of China's leading AI firms, DeepSeek, said this month that his primary constraint was not the vast sums needed for AI development, but access to high-end chips, Miller notes.

Breaking it down: The chips used to power AI development are mostly designed in the U.S. and fabricated in Taiwan, with chipmaking tools built in the U.S., Japan and the Netherlands.

• Beijing has declared its determination to leapfrog the West in every facet of the semiconductor supply chain. For now, it's locked out.
• The most advanced chips made by SMIC, the largest Chinese chip manufacturer, are on par with the top-end chips Taiwan's TSMC produced five years ago, Miller says.
• The Western advantage in chipmaking tools (such as the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines built by Dutch firm ASML) is so vast that China has little chance of narrowing it over the next five years, says Miller.
• "Everything depends on what type of equipment the West is going to be willing to sell to China. If the restrictions are tight and get tighter, I have high confidence that the West retains its chipmaking lead," Miller contends.

Yes, but: Other experts argue that cutting off access will hamper Chinese firms in the short term, but give them an extra incentive to out-innovate Western competitors in the longer term.

• Beijing is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into that objective.

The Trump factor

The chip wars have been heating up during the Biden-Trump transition.

• China fired a warning shot earlier this month after Biden's latest export controls were announced by opening an antitrust investigation into Nvidia, causing the $3.3 trillion behemoth's stock to wobble.
• That came a week after China announced it was banning exports to the U.S. of key minerals used in chipmaking.
• The tit-for-tat could continue to accelerate in Trump's second term, given that Biden has been tightening export controls that began during Trump's first term.

The intrigue: While Trump's administration-in-waiting is packed with China hawks, some incoming officials (including Trump himself) have indicated they also want to cut deals with Beijing. One piece of leverage in any such negotiations could be access to chips.

• Meanwhile, Trump's former national security adviser Robert O'Brien argued Tuesday that Biden's looming executive order would "cede the AI market to China" and "drive a wedge between the U.S. and our partners."
• A Trump transition spokesperson did not say whether Trump agrees with O'Brien. The White House referred Axios' questions about the pending executive order to the Commerce Department, which declined to comment.

Beijing's toolbox

For now, China has three main points of leverage:

1. Its massive market:

• U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia and Intel have designed chips for sale to China that fall just within the current regulations, a sign of their intent to continue to fight for market share in China.
• But in addition to the new Nvidia probe, China has announced an investigation into Intel and unveiled a partial ban last year on Micron, the Idaho-based memory chip giant.

2. Its concentration of some of the elementary inputs for chips:

• China cutting off supply of those minerals would have drastic implications for the global economy — but could be hard to execute without hurting China itself, give the global nature of semiconductor supply chains.

3. Its proximity to Taiwan:

• The world's most advanced chips are made almost exclusively on an island around 100 miles off the Chinese mainland, which Beijing has vowed to bring under its control — potentially by military force.
• Taiwan's TSMC claims to make 99% of the world's AI accelerator chips.

What to watch: TSMC is building a fabrication facility in Phoenix and has two more planned in the U.S. as part of a Biden push to onshore semiconductor production.

• For now, though, "all AI progress depends on TSMC production in Taiwan remaining online," Miller says.

President-elect Trump's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health has drawn scorn for his views on herd immunity and COVID, but Jay Bhattacharya's arrival would put renewed focus on why a research institution with a nearly $48 billion budget doesn't have more breakthroughs.

Why it matters: The controversial Stanford professor could rattle the scientific establishment and turf-conscious lawmakers in Congress, but also satisfy skeptics' calls for a serious look under the hood at how NIH works.

• There's generally less risk-taking today that pushes science in new directions, in part because of economic incentives and the higher likelihood that research confirming earlier work will pay off.
• "Getting science right is arguably the single-most important thing we can do in society," says Caleb Watney, co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress.

Catch up quick: Trump last month nominated Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist, to run the NIH and its nearly 19,000 employees across 27 institutes and centers.

• Bhattacharya was a polarizing figure during the pandemic, criticizing COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and pushing the idea of protecting vulnerable populations like the elderly while letting others resume their lives.
• Ex-NIH director Francis Collins dismissed it as fringe thinking and a diversion from mainstream science. He and others said it was dangerous.
• Collins, who retired at the end of 2021, has more recently expressed some remorse for not considering the full effects of the government's pandemic policies.

What's received less attention is Bhattacharya's work analyzing aspects of NIH funding and calls for revamping the agency.

• He's floated the idea of setting term limits for NIH officials, reevaluating the agency's process for reviewing grant proposals, rethinking how the NIH measures novelty and success so it can take on more risk, and developing other ways to spur and support novel ideas, or what's known as "edge science."
• Bhattacharya "will be a critical asset to bring in needed outside perspectives to re-evaluate the NIH's operations and processes to restore the organization's former gold standard of medical research and better address America's health challenges," Kush Desai, spokesperson for the Trump-Vance transition team, told Axios in an email.

The big picture: Bhattacharya is far from the first to identify how the NIH and other agencies struggle to support risk-taking. (The agency has set up "high-risk, high-reward" programs to support innovative science.)

• And beyond biomedical science, there's an ongoing debate about why the rate of scientific progress appears to be slowing down despite an increase in the number of scientists, amount of funding for their work, and the quantity of papers they publish.
• Some researchers believe the low-hanging fruits of discovery have simply already been plucked, meaning scientists have to work harder and more money needs to be invested to get what remains.
• Others, including Bhattacharya, argue something has gone institutionally wrong with how science is funded — including with taxpayer dollars — and evaluated and are looking for ways to correct the course.

Along with economist Mikko Packalen, his former student who is now an economist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Bhattacharya has found NIH is overall supportive of novel scientific ideas.

• But their analysis showed the funding of innovative ideas at the agency skews toward basic science rather than clinical research. They argue the NIH should double down on novel and incremental research in basic science that the private sector doesn't have an incentive to fund.
• They acknowledge, though, that the agency, as a taxpayer-supported institution, is under pressure to deliver results.
• Other researchers have put forth a range of ideas for spurring innovative science, including adopting a model of funding people not projects — an approach taken by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — or offering prizes as incentives.

Zoom in: Bhattacharya and many others have homed in on the grant review process as an arena for reform.

• Bhattacharya has called for more younger scientists — who have been found to be more innovative than their older counterparts — to be involved in the process.
• Other researchers have suggested changing how grant proposals are scored or using a modified lottery to select grants after those that clearly aren't viable are removed from the pool.
• "Everyone complains about peer review," one former senior NIH official said. But "picking the winners isn't that easy in science."

And any changes could be slow in coming since the NIH director doesn't have the undisputed final word.

• Committees at the NIH and across agencies are bound by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, of 1972.
• Changes instituted under former President George W. Bush's NIH director Elias Zerhouni in 2006 took an act of Congress.

Others argue the root of the risk-taking problem runs far deeper and beyond the bounds of the NIH.

• Harold Varmus, who led the NIH under former President Clinton, says the real problem is hypercompetition. "Too many good people are looking for support and the result of high-level competition is a tendency to look for the most secure ideas to pursue."
• "When the success rate of a grant being funded is 10% or 20%, scientists look for a safe route."

Between the lines: Another big question is how much high-risk science the NIH — or any agency's — portfolio should have, and what level of risk is acceptable for public funding.

What to watch: Bhattacharya's supporters — and those who expressed cautious optimism about his nomination — say he could run some experiments to test these ideas in the high-risk, high-reward programs where the director does have more direct discretion.

• "There is so much to do. None of this glamorous," says Pierre Azoulay, an economist at MIT who was a co-investigator on a grant with Bhattacharya before the pandemic.
• He says its also important not to lose sight of the fact that the NIH "still funds a lot of great research" and "you can imagine some reforms doing more harm than good."
• But he says, "it leaves me hopeful that there is a nominee ... who has thought about the scientific enterprise using the scientific method — that is a complete first."

Editor's note: The story has been updated to include Collins' more recent reflections on the COVID pandemic response.

The world's two richest men and biggest space entrepreneurs both believe humanity's survival depends on life beyond Earth — for very different reasons.

• Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained this week that his vision is to move all polluting industries into space to preserve Earth.
• His rival Elon Musk envisions inhabiting space as a way for humanity to live on beyond Earth, if a cataclysm strikes our planet.

Why it matters: Both are pouring tens of billions of dollars into space travel with those endgames in mind.

• "These are visions of potential futures, and there is a long gap between achievement and vision," John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, tells Axios.

Bezos' vision is for Blue Origin to lay the groundwork such that "the next generation, or the generation after that, will be able to move polluting industry off Earth, and then this planet will be maintained as it should be," he said Wednesday at the NYT's DealBook conference.

• In Bezos' view, human civilization needs to continually use more and more energy in order to advance, but Earth's resources are finite and must also support many forms of life beyond humans. That means tapping natural resources beyond Earth.
• "There is no plan B. We have to save Earth. We've sent robotic probes to all of the planet solar system. This is the good one, and we must save it," Bezos said.
• Bezos has also previously spoken about his dream of building enormous space stations (known as O'Neill cylinders) in relative proximity to Earth's orbit, to allow people to travel back and forth.

Musk's SpaceX, meanwhile, is actively drawing up plans for what life could look like on Mars, including specialized spacesuits and domed habitats, per the NYT.

• Musk has repeatedly argued that a mass extinction event on Earth, such as an asteroid strike, is inevitable. "Either become a spacefaring civilization or die," he posted on X in September. "Those [are] the two choices."
• Ultimately, he envisions transforming Mars to turn the Red Planet green (one tool he has floated: nuclear detonations).
• He has admitted in the past that developing a martian civilization could take centuries, but reportedly claimed earlier this year that one million people will move to Mars within two decades.

Reality check: Few believe that timeline is anywhere close to realistic. Even in the longer term, "I don't know why a million people would want to go to Mars," Logsdon says. "What would the economics of that be?"

• Other experts have noted that when pondering the survival of the species, preserving human life on Earth is quite a bit simpler than developing it on Mars.
• The obstacles to Bezos' vision of a network of colossal space stations — such as maintaining a supply of food and water in an entirely artificial environment — are hardly less daunting.

Between the lines: Both billionaires could make an astronomical amount of money from their space ventures even if their dreams of building space civilizations don't come to fruition.

• SpaceX is considering selling shares at a whopping $350 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported this week. That's because its Starlink satellite system and Starship mega-rocket — developed to fund and power Musk's Mars ventures — are already so valuable to governments and militaries here on Earth.
• Blue Origin is growing more slowly, but Bezos argued Wednesday that it will ultimately be more profitable than Amazon.

LONDON — Top researchers this week said scientific discoveries using AI, like new drugs or better disaster forecasting, offer a way to win people's trust in the technology, but they also cautioned against moving too fast.

Why it matters: Public trust in AI is eroding, putting the technology's wide adoption and potential benefits at risk.

Driving the news: At a forum in London hosted by Google DeepMind and the Royal Society, a roster of renowned scientists described how AI tools are transforming and turbocharging science.

• Efforts range from the search for beneficial new materials to the quest to build a quantum computer to the potential for self-driving labs.

Between the lines: In industry, the buzz around AI has largely centered on the technology's capacity to streamline business — along with the possibility that it might advance toward artificial "superintelligence."

• Experts at the London event highlighted AI as a scientific tool and argued that the scientific method will best serve researchers seeking to leverage advanced AI models and fathom their complexity.

But, the painstaking, thorough work of science can be at odds with the "move fast break things" ethos of the tech industry that is driving AI's development.

• Scientists in the U.S. also face a tide of skepticism about their work.

What they're saying: "I think the scientific method is, arguably, maybe the greatest idea humans have ever had," DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told the London gathering.

• "More than ever we need to anchor around the method in today's world, especially with something as powerful and potentially transformative as AI," he said, adding that he thinks neuroscience techniques should be used to analyze AI "brains."
• "I feel we should treat this more as a scientific endeavor, if possible, although it obviously has all the implications that breakthrough technologies normally have in terms of the speed of adoption and the speed of change."

Zoom in: A slew of recent papers show how scientists are trying to put AI to work on some of nature's most complex problems.

• Scientists from the Arc Institute built an AI model trained on the DNA sequences of microbes rather than words and sentences of text.
• This "genomic foundation model" can predict how a DNA change affects an organism and generate realistic genomes from scratch, which could one day help scientists to engineer biology with more ease and precision.
• Researchers have also developed an AI model of the chemical modifications that turn genes on and off.

An ambitious AI-driven effort is underway to map the human body's 37.2 trillion cells.

• It has yielded discoveries — including insights into the development of the human skeleton and the immune system — that were published last week in more than 40 papers from the Human Cell Atlas consortium.

"It's just dizzying. I've never seen anything like it in my life," Eric Topol, founder and director of Scripps Research Translational Institute, said at the event.

Yes, but: "We're moving so fast, we've got to be careful," said Alison Noble, a professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford University.

• "It's great to hear about all the excitement" around AI, she said, but researchers in the field need to re-commit to the basics of the scientific method, like being able to reproduce results from experiments.
• Scientists have expressed concern that some AI tools are being used without understanding the nuances of their abilities and their limits — and creating a reproducibility crisis that could undermine trust in the both the science and the tools.

There also needs to be a shift in how AI-enabled discoveries are described, Denis Newman-Griffis of the Centre for Machine Intelligence at Sheffield University told Axios.

• Statements like "AI discovered new protein structures" ignore that people designed the algorithms, chose the data to train models, interpreted the AI's output, and "built the entire research system those tools are operating in," they said.
• "[W]e cede all the agency that we have" and paint a picture of AI as "nebulous, difficult to control, impossible to understand, and so directly opposite to the things that would make its use trustworthy."

The big picture: Google's top executives in attendance — Hassabis and James Manyika, senior vice president of research, technology and society — said they're trying to increase trust in AI by using it to solve practical problems, including forecasting floods and predicting wildfire boundaries.

• "What could be a better use of AI than curing diseases? To me, that seems like the number one most important thing anyone could apply AI to," Hassabis said.

What's next: Next month, Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper will collect their Nobel Prize for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that can predict the structure of proteins and is used for drug discovery and other problems.

• The challenge "is a lot of those things, as useful as they are, people may not immediately think of them as AI," Manyika said.