859: Chaos Graph
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It's This American Life, I'm Hannah Joffey Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. I've been talking to someone here and there over the last couple months about a situation she's in. And I think she typifies the thing we're going to try to do in this episode, so I'd like you to meet her. Her name is Annika Barber. She's a scientist, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, a runner, she's got purple hair, and a particular way of organizing the world around her. Her books organized topically and then by height, her lab color-coded labels. I also track how many days of the year my husband eats pizza, and I make a chart of it. He's really into pizza. So sometimes I just like to have him. Wait, wait, wait. Why do you do that? So my husband really can't go 24 hours without talking about pizza. So last year I accused him of talking about pizza every day, and he swore he didn't. And I was like, I really think you do. And so starting in January of this year, I said that for 2025 I was going to log every day that I heard him say the word pizza, as well as every time he ate pizza for the year. He actually eats less pizza than I would expect for the amount he talks about pizza. Like the consumption to discussion ratio is not what I expected it would be. She's only had pizza 14 times this year. Lately, Annika has been trying to get her mind around a new situation that is deeply confusing for her and lots of people. She's tracking scientific meetings that are not happening. When President Trump was inaugurated, he put a freeze on research grants. This meant the meetings where scientists like Annika get together at the National Institutes of Health to assess new research. They're called NIH study sections. Those meetings were off. Then a judge said the administration couldn't pause all research grants, so the meetings were theoretically back on. They were listed on an NIH website as scheduled, but Annika says they did not seem to be happening. The website showed they were, but scientists were saying they weren't. Scientists who had submitted grants literally had no idea if their grant had been reviewed and moved on to the next step of the funding process. And Annika learned there was a place you could get a way better picture of whether a meeting was going to happen or had already happened. I had never even heard of the federal register in my American-taxing voting life. What is the federal register? The federal register is where all notices of open public meetings that may be happening in the federal government are required to be posted. And for some reason, NIH study sections do have to be posted to the federal register at least 15 days before they meet. And if they're not posted to the federal register, they cannot meet. It's a strange feeling, knowing you're in the middle of an upending, knowing that something fundamental to the way that you live is changing. But you can't understand or see the scale of change as it's happening. You just can't. You have to wait.
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