The Forsburg Lab

06/02/2026

Holden Thorp, EiC at Science:

“Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. ….

In any other administration, when Congress appropriates money for science each year, OMB’s job is to make sure that the funds are released in accordance with the law. But in Project 2025, the blueprint used by the Trump administration to overhaul the federal government according to a theory of greater executive power, Vought called for an activist OMB that serves as the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent,’” thereby moving power away from Congress.

The sweeping new regulations proposed by OMB include rendering peer review nonbinding in awarding new grants. This would allow political appointees at funding agencies to override expert judgment of scientific merit without cause. Agencies could end multiyear grants with no due process. They also could use the vague criteria of Trump’s “gold standard science” to identify institutions for preferential treatment. International collaboration with countries identified solely by the administration would be prohibited under the new rules, but more notably, all research that involves the expenditure of funds outside the US would require case-by-case approval. This bureaucratic hurdle would effectively prevent most if not all partnerships from moving forward.

…. It’s tone deaf to be grateful about money while the very values that have defined scientific merit for 80 years are obliterated. For example, curtailing research into the social determinants of health threatens to leave large swaths of university researchers with no prospects of getting a grant. This comes on top of the elimination of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Higher education and its associations need to firmly oppose these changes, which would create a massive morale and financial problem in addition to curtailing important research.

The pharmaceutical business has at least as much to lose as academia. In criticizing the industry for its failure to act, Steve Usdin, an editor at the industry publication BioCentury who has covered policy issues affecting the life sciences sector, reminded pharmaceutical leaders that their silence was “complicity in the destruction of US science.” The global dominance of American pharmaceutical companies has long relied on ready access to the best science in the US and collaborators from around the world—all chosen on the basis of scientific merit, not political ideology. By threatening technology transfer to pharma, the new regulations are out of sync with the administration’s supposed desire to see more industry collaboration and to compete with China. Pharma’s leaders, as Usdin points out, are in the strongest position to get the attention of the White House and urge the administration to change course.

The time to act is now. The scientific community needs to flood OMB with responses during the public comment period, open until 13 July. Universities and associations must speak out as a united front to mobilize Congress and be ready to file lawsuits once the regulations are finalized. I was sympathetic to members of the scientific establishment who played it carefully during last year’s budget negotiations. Getting the budget deal done was crucial. But that was then. The red light is now flashing. All hands, report to stations.””

Although research has bipartisan support in the US Congress, and trust in science is above 75% across the country, the Trump administration seems as determined as ever to mortally wound the nation’s scientific enterprise. After the scientific community persuaded Congress to restore most of the pre...

05/29/2026

This would be the end of science as we know it. Politically approved research only

https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-changes-in-ombs-proposed?

Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

04/27/2026

Scientist Paul Mischel is championing the importance of odd rings of DNA in tumors—and their promise as targets for cancer therapy.

Learn more on : https://scim.ag/4gjWL2d

04/04/2026

AI Isn’t Killing Scientific Credibility – Scientists Are 🧠⚠️
A sobering new analysis in Nature reveals that over 110,000 scholarly papers from 2025 alone may contain completely fabricated, AI‑generated references – citations to studies that simply do not exist.

Key findings:

Fake citations are exploding – At three computer science conferences, hallucinated references jumped from 0.3% of papers (2024) to 2.6% (2025).

“Frankenstein citations” – Real author names + invented titles + existing journals + fake DOIs. Plausible looking, totally false.

Publishers are fighting back – Frontiers and IOP Publishing now use detection tools; one journal rejected 25% of submissions in January for fake references alone.

Root cause = author accountability – LLMs hallucinate by design. Skipping verification isn’t “saving time” – it’s polluting the scientific record.

Bottom line: No tool will fix a culture that doesn’t check its own work. Verify every citation against primary sources. Period.

03/25/2026

Link in comments

"The collapse of NIH-funding announcements is part of a larger pattern I have documented in previous essays: restructuring the agency without congressional authorization.

Congress rejected proposals to consolidate the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers. But if all institutes are restricted to processing generic unsolicited applications through the same centralized approval system, the functional distinction between them disappears. Why maintain 27 separate entities if none of them can independently set research priorities or direct resources toward identified gaps?

The NOFO collapse accomplishes administratively what could not be achieved legislatively. It strips institutes of the autonomy that made them distinct. It centralizes decision-making under political appointees. It eliminates the scientific-stewardship function that program staff have exercised for decades. And it does all of this without a single congressional hearing or recorded vote.

This represents a redefinition of what the NIH does. The agency is being transformed from an institution that actively identifies and addresses research needs into a passive funding mechanism that distributes money to whatever proposals happen to arrive. That transformation has profound implications for every disease that depends on NIH research, every population whose health needs are not currently being addressed by unsolicited grant applications, and every future health crisis that will require a rapid, coordinated research response...

This is not efficiency. This is not streamlining. This is the systematic elimination of scientific stewardship at the world’s largest biomedical-research funder.

And most people have no idea it is happening."

03/20/2026

“The study, which tracked published papers over a 30-year period in 48 journals, found a 68% decrease in the proportion of studies that depended on model organisms. The share of fruit fly and yeast papers dropped by more than 90%.

The result “is pretty damning” about the state of model organism work, says Nicholas Tolwinski, a biologist who studies aging and Drosophila at the Duke-NUS Medical School and wasn’t involved with the preprint. “The publication trend is very damaging” to continued research on the organisms.

…

Nicolas Gompel, senior author on the preprint and a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Bonn, says the research started because of a chance observation about his model organism of choice, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, while he was serving as a judge for an imaging contest on the insect. As Gompel sifted through journals such as Science and Cell for potential entries, he noticed the number of fly papers was far lower than he expected. “That came as a shock,” he says.

Gompel and colleagues focused their study on eight model organisms, including the house mouse Mus musculus, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana. They tallied model organism papers published between 1995 and 2024 in 48 general science or biology publications, including Science, Cell, Nature, Evolution, Immunity, PLOS Biology, and The EMBO Journal. The number of papers on the eight species climbed over the 30-year period, the team determined, but their overall share of the scientific literature fell dramatically because the number of papers that didn’t involve the creatures rose much faster.

The proportion of model organism papers declined for journals with the highest impact factors and for lower tier publications, suggesting the trend was universal and not just a shift in where the studies ended up. And the shrinkage didn’t appear to result from a reduction in the number of scientists who study the organisms, the researchers found when they analyzed conference attendance.

….

“It looks like model organisms are losing their original identity as the systems to discover fundamental properties of life,” says Gompel, who calls the apparent change “really bad.” Tolwinski worries the decline could make top journals more reluctant to publish papers on these species, leading to funding reductions and “eventually the complete loss of [model organism] labs.” Gompel says he doesn’t have a solution for the problem, except to emphasize to funders, policymakers, and the public the organisms’ importance for biological research.

… She notes that model organism papers today may be more likely to appear in specialized journals that focus on topics such as stem cells and neurobiology and were not included in the analysis. To document a decline, she says, researchers need to dig deeper into how scientists are using the organisms in the lab.“

https://www.science.org/content/article/research-fruit-flies-and-other-model-organisms-may-be-declining?

Analysis of published papers on eight widely studied species suggests work on them is fading, but not everyone is worried

03/03/2026

“here’s what nobody tells you about AI-generated citations: they’re often more believable than real ones.

ChatGPT doesn’t lie, exactly. It patterns matches. When you ask for a “cited article about remote work productivity,” it knows what citations look like. Author name, year, compelling title, respectable journal. It assembles these patterns into something that feels right. Like a dream where everything makes sense until you wake up.

The tell isn’t that fake citations look wrong. It’s that they look too right. Too convenient. Too perfectly aligned with whatever point the AI is making.

Real academic citations are messy. The study about productivity actually measured something adjacent and you’re extrapolating. The date is from 2019, not last month. The journal name is awkwardly long with a colon and subtitle nobody remembers. The author’s name is hard to spell. Real research is inconvenient.

AI citations are suspiciously convenient. They appear right when you need them, saying exactly what you need them to say.

In library school, they taught us something called “citation chaining,” but I’ve adapted it for the age of AI hallucinations. Think of it as three increasingly paranoid levels of verification.

Layer One: The Existence Check
Does this source exist at all? Not “does it sound real” but actually exist. Google the exact title in quotes. Check the journal’s website. Search the author’s name with the institution they supposedly work at. About 40% of AI citations fail this basic test.

I watched a colleague do this with a “Harvard Business Review” article that ChatGPT cited. The title sounded perfect. The year was recent. HBR definitely publishes articles on that topic. But that specific article? Never existed. The AI had created a highly plausible ghost.

Layer Two: The Content Check
So the source exists. Great. Does it actually say what the AI claims it says? This is where things get weird. I’ve seen ChatGPT cite real articles but completely fabricate their findings. It’s like it remembers the article exists but not what it actually argued.

Last month, someone cited a real MIT study about algorithmic bias. The study existed. The authors were real. But the AI claimed it showed algorithms reducing bias by 73%. The actual study? It warned about algorithms amplifying bias. Complete opposite conclusion.

Layer Three: The Context Check

This is the librarian special. Even if the source exists and says what’s claimed, is it being used appropriately? Is this a preliminary study being treated as definitive? Is this one contrarian researcher being positioned as consensus? Is this correlation being presented as causation?

The AI doesn’t understand academic weight. It treats a conference paper, a journal article, a blog post, and a Nobel laureate’s research with equal authority if they contain the right keywords.”

How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian By Hana Lee Goldin, 30 Dec 2025 Last Tuesday, a client sent me their “thoroughly researched” white paper on workplace automation. It had 47 citations. Looked bulletproof. Every claim backed by a study, every statistic sourced to a journal....

02/24/2026

https://www.chronicle.com/article/peer-review-is-breaking-under-its-own-weight

The system is operating at a scale and speed it wasn’t designed to support.

02/24/2026

I haven't posted this one in awhile - but yeah, that's the feeling right there

02/20/2026

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nih-research-cuts-trump/

The government has pulled back from massive cuts to the NIH, but it’s still destroying scientific research. So why are some groups appeasing the president?