We are fearful that this is a prototype for other studies. The US could fund global studies with the similar ethical concerns as the Tuskegee experiment five or 10 or 100 times a year. It could be extraordinarily deadly.
A decade ago, we and others launched a tool for clarifying the roles of each author of a research paper. The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) includes 14 types of contribution, from conceptualization to software and data curation. It was designed to prevent questionable authorship practices and make it easier for researchers to demonstrate the diversity of their contributions to science, among other benefits.
China increased its investment in science by more than 3,800% between 1996 and 2023, says Bilal Demirel, who studies science and innovation at the Rathenau Institute in The Hague, the Netherlands, and is now coming close to matching what the United States spends. With China currently increasing its annual R&D budget by 7% - while US funding looks set to fall under President Donald Trump - there is every chance China will lead on research investment in the coming years.
Scientists moved a step closer to understanding the complex causes of autism this week. Although all of the headlines went to US President Donald Trump's poorly evidenced statements that the painkiller acetaminophen is linked to the neurodevelopmental condition, his White House autism event brought welcome - and largely overlooked - news to scientists: the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is investing US$50 million in an unusual autism-research effort.
The new policies are the agencies' first response to two White House executive orders that directed agencies to put political appointees in charge of decisions about science funding and integrity. The policies could shape the work of the nearly 300,000 scientists and engineerswho work for federal agencies and the almost US$200 billion of science funded by the US government.
In the version of the article originally published, there were calculation and transcription errors in the data for Fig. 5g, Extended Data Fig. 7c,g and Extended Data Fig. 8e. The corrected data has led to minor changes in the graphs.
The Metascience Alliance is a coalition of more than 25 funders, academic groups, companies and other institutions that pursue metascience: the use of scientific methods to understand and improve science itself.
"Arriola's name does not appear on the original publication in the 20 most recent entries on his profile and a university professor confirmed he was not involved."
