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Nature publishes too few papers from women researchers — that must change

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Shot of a young female scientist writing notes while working in a lab.

Women and early-career researchers: Nature wants to publish your research.Credit: Getty

Researchers submitting original research to Nature over the past year will have noticed an extra question, asking them to self-report their gender. Today, as part of our commitment to helping to make science more equitable, we are publishing in this editorial a preliminary analysis of the resulting data, from almost 5,000 papers submitted to this journal over a five-month period. As well as showing the gender split in submissions, we also reveal, for the first time, possible interactions between the gender of the corresponding author and a paper’s chance of publication.

The data make for sobering reading. One stark finding is how few women are submitting research to Nature as corresponding authors. Corresponding authors are the researchers who take responsibility for a manuscript during the publication process. In many fields, this role is undertaken by some of the most experienced members of the team.

During the period analysed, some 10% of corresponding authors preferred not to disclose their gender. Of the remainder, just 17% identified as women — barely an increase on the 16% we found in 2018, albeit using a less precise methodology. By comparison, women made up 31.7% of all researchers globally in 2021, according to figures from the United Nations science, education and cultural organization UNESCO (see go.nature.com/3wgdasb).

Large geographical differences were also laid bare. Women made up just 4% of corresponding authors of known gender from Japanese institutions. Of researchers from the two countries submitting the most papers, China and the United States, women made up 11% and 22%, respectively. These figures reflect the fact that women’s representation in research drops at the most senior levels. They also mirror available data from other journals1, although it is hard to find direct comparisons for a multidisciplinary journal such as Nature.

At Cell, which has a life-sciences focus, women submitted 17% of manuscripts between 2017 and 2021, according to an analysis of almost 13,000 submissions2. The most recent data on gender from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the six journals in the Science family, is collected and reported differently. Some 27% of their authors of primary and commissioned content, and their reviewers, are women, according to the AAAS Inclusive Excellence Report (see go.nature.com/3t6yyr8). Nonetheless, all of these figures are just too low.

Another area of concern is acceptance rates. Of the submissions included in the current Nature analysis, those with women as the corresponding author were accepted for publication at a slightly lower rate than were those authored by men. Some 8% of women’s papers were accepted (58 out of 726 submissions) compared with 9% of men’s papers (320 out of 3,522 submissions). The acceptance rate for people self-reporting as non-binary or gender diverse seemed to be lower, at 3%, although this is a preliminary figure and we have reason to suspect that the real figure could be higher, as described below. Once we have a larger sample, we plan to test whether the differences are statistically significant.

Sources of imbalance

So, at what stage in the publishing process is this imbalance introduced? Men and women seem to be treated equally when papers are selected for review. The journal’s editors — a group containing slightly more women than men — were just as likely to send papers out for peer review for women corresponding authors as they were for men. For both groups, 17% of submitted papers went for peer review.

A difference arose after that. Of those papers sent for review, 46% of papers with women as corresponding authors were accepted for publication (58 of 125) compared with 55% (320 of 586) of papers authored by men. The acceptance rate for non-binary and gender-diverse authors was higher at 67%. However, this is from a total of only three reviewed papers, a figure that is too small to be meaningful.

This difference in acceptance rates during review tallies with the findings of a much larger 2018 study of 25 Nature-family journals, which used a name-matching algorithm, rather than self-reported data3. Looking at 17,167 papers sent for review over a 2-year period, the authors found a smaller but significant difference in acceptance rates, with 43% for papers with a woman as corresponding author, compared with 45% for a man. However, they were unable to say whether the difference was attributable to reviewer bias or variations in manuscript quality.

Peering into peer review

How much bias exists in the peer-review process is difficult to study and has long been the subject of debate. A 2021 study in Science Advances that looked at 1.7 million authors across 145 journals between 2010 and 2016 found that, overall, the peer-review and editorial processes did not penalize manuscripts by women4. But that study analysed journals with lower citation rates than Nature, and its results contrast with those of previous work5, which found gender-based skews.

Moreover, other studies have shown that people rate men’s competence more highly than women’s when assessing identical job applications6; that there is a gender bias against women in citations; and that women are given less credit for their work than are men7. Taken together, this means we cannot assume that peer review is a gender-blind process. Most papers in our current study were not anonymized. We did not share how the authors self-reported, but editors or reviewers might have inferred gender from a corresponding author’s name. Nature has offered double-anonymized peer review for both authors and reviewers since 2015. Too few take it up for us to have been able to examine its impact in this analysis, but the larger study in 2018 looked at this in detail3.

Data limitations

There are important limitations to Nature’s data: we must emphasize again that they are preliminary. Moreover, they provide the gender of only one corresponding author per paper, not the gender distribution of a paper’s full author list. Furthermore, they don’t describe any other differences between authors.

There are also aspects of the data that need to be investigated further. For example, we need to look into the possibility that the option of reporting as non-binary or gender diverse is being misinterpreted by some authors with English as a second language. We think that ironing out such misunderstandings could result in a higher acceptance rate for non-binary authors.

Most importantly, these data give no insight into author experiences in relation to race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Although men often have advantages compared with women, other protected characteristics also have a significant impact on scientists’ careers. Nature is participating in an effort by a raft of journal publishers to document and reduce bias in scholarly publishing by tracking a range of characteristics. This is a work in progress and sits alongside Springer Nature’s wider commitment to tackling inequity in research publishing.

So what can Nature do to ensure that more women and minority-gender scientists find a home for their research in our pages?

First, we want to encourage a more diverse pool of corresponding authors to submit. The fact that only 17% of submissions come from corresponding authors who identify as women might reflect existing imbalances in science (for example, it roughly tracks with the 18% of professor-level scientists in the European Union who are women, as reported by the European Commission8).

But there remains much scope for improvement. We know that the workplace climate in academia can push women out or see them overlooked for senior positions9. A 2023 study published in eLife found that women tend to be more self-critical of their own work than men are and that they are more frequently advised not to submit to the most prestigious journals10.

Second, just as prestigious universities should not simply lament their low application numbers from under-represented groups, we should not sit back and wait for change to come to us. To this end, our editors will actively seek out authors from these communities when at conferences and on laboratory visits. We will be more proactive in reaching out to women and early-career researchers to make sure they know that Nature wants to publish their research. We encourage authors with excellent research, at any level of seniority and at any institution, to submit their manuscripts.

Third, in an effort to make peer review fairer, Nature’s editors have been actively working to recruit a more diverse group of referees; 2017 data found that women made up just 16% of our reviewers. We need to double down on our efforts to improve this situation and update readers on our progress. In the future, we also plan to analyse whether corresponding authors’ gender affects the number of review cycles they face, and whether there are differences in relation to gender according to discipline and prestige of their affiliated institution. We need to improve our understanding of the sources of inequity before we can work on ways to address them. Nature’s editors will also strive to minimize our own biases through ongoing unconscious-bias training.

Last but not least, we will keep publishing our data on authorship and peer review, alongside complementary statistics on the gender of contributors to articles outside original research. Although today’s data present just a snapshot, Nature remains committed to tracking the gender of authors, to regularly updating the community on our efforts, and to exploring ways to make the publication process more equitable.

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COVID protections eliminated a strain of flu

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Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

General view of a busy road at sunset.

The Nigerian health ministry has been told to investigate reports of deaths in the northeastern state of Gombe (pictured).Credit: Tolu Owoeye/Shutterstock

Nigeria’s National Assembly has instructed the country’s health ministry to investigate a “strange disease” said to have killed more than two dozen people in the northeastern state of Gombe. The World Health Organization says that there have been three deaths, resulting from confirmed cases of meningitis. The case highlights the importance of thorough disease-surveillance systems and the need for timely communication, say researchers.

Nature | 3 min read

The UK science minister Michelle Donelan has apologized and paid damages for accusing two researchers on a UK Research and Innovation panel of “extremist” views on the Israel–Hamas conflict. More than a dozen researchers resigned from the United Kingdom’s national funder after it dissolved the panel in response to the minister’s demand.

The Financial Times | 3 min read

Read more: Researcher resignations from UKRI mount amid Israel–Hamas row (Nature | 5 min read, from November)

For the first time, an influenza virus has been eliminated from the human population through non-pharmaceutical interventions. The public-health protections brought in during the COVID-19 pandemic — such as wearing a mask, social distancing and better ventilation — seem to have eliminated the influenza B/Yamagata lineage; no cases have been confirmed since March 2020. In September, the World Health Organization recommended that countries no longer include Yamagata-lineage antigens in flu vaccines, and US Food and Drug Administration advisors have now voted to remove it from flu jabs in the United States.

CNN | 5 min read

Reference: The Lancet Infectious Diseases editorial

Features & opinion

China has updated its Early Warning Journal List — a list of journals that are deemed to be untrustworthy, predatory or not serving the Chinese research community’s interests. The latest edition includes 24 journals and, for the first time, takes note of misconduct called citation manipulation, in which authors try to inflate their citation counts. Scholarly literature researcher Yang Liying heads up the team that produces the influential list and spoke to Nature about how it’s done.

Nature | 6 min read

Tracking malaria infections in lizards in a rainstorm? Recording beetle species in a dusty cornfield? Sometimes a pencil and notebook still outperform a computer or smartphone in the field. Other data might be immortalized in ledgers crowded with historical handwriting. For those times, Nature has compiled five tips for getting handwritten data digitized into a form that can be analysed.

Nature | 8 min read

In Atlas of the Senseable City, architect-researchers Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti delve into the impact of digital maps on human society. “Ancient Romans had two words for city: ‘urbs’, the physical environment, and ‘civitas’, the community of citizens,” says Ratti. “For the first time, technology allows us to visualize and understand civitas: how people move in space, how they connect, and also how they segregate … Architects and urban planners can now take into account the civitas rather than just the urbs.”

Los Angeles Review of Books | 18 min read

Infographic

figure 1

Figure 1 | Vertebrate adaptations to life on land. a, Approximately 350 million years ago, some animals living in the water were on the verge of evolving to live on land. b, This transition required the innovation of forming hard-shelled eggs that enabled embryos to develop outside an aquatic environment. Other features suited to life on land included protective scales. It is plausible that embryonic skin underwent rapid patterning into spot-like areas corresponding to sites where scales would subsequently form. On hatching, such developing scales probably hardened rapidly by cell differentiation in a manner distinct from that of the surrounding tissue. Embryonic patterning and post-embryonic maturation might give rise to mechanically resilient yet flexible waterproof skin, containing scales and offering protection against damage by ultraviolet light. This hypothetical scenario is supported by observations of highly patterned mini scales in fossilized skin samples, reported by Mooney et al., attributed to 285-million-year-old early land-dwelling vertebrates called amniotes. c, Scales evolved that fully covered the body of early amniotes, such as members of the Varanopid family of amniotes.

The discovery of the oldest fossilized reptile skin ever found sheds light on how scaly skin started to evolve at the dawn of life on dry land. The 285-million-year-old fossils of intricately patterned animal scales show that the innovation came about as aquatic vertebrates adapted for terrestrial survival, writes developmental biologist Maksim Plikus. (Nature News & Views article | 8 min read, Nature paywall — or read the Nature News article from January for free)

Don’t chuck that cheddar or bin that Brie until you’ve read this handy guide to when you should throw out mouldy cheese — the answer is ‘hardly ever’. “Even though we’ve been taught to fear mould, all of cheese is mould,” says cheese specialist Anne-Marie Pietersma in a statement that will forever be burned into my mind. In a nutshell, the harder the cheese, the less you need to worry about just cutting off the bad bits and chowing down.

While I indulge in some gorgeous gorgonzola, why not send me your feedback on this newsletter? Your e-mails are always welcome at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Gemma Conroy

Want more? Sign up to our other free Nature Briefing newsletters:

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The Correctives

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“What was the inspiration behind the app?” Saul asked, his fingers tapping at the air as he opened data files and new channels for their event.

“All of this,” Miho said. She looked up towards the fluorescent blaze of train lines and sky-cars, their holograms obscuring the view of the sky. Behind them, she could see only a few streaks of maroon-coloured cloud, a flock of birds on its way to somewhere else.

Anywhere but here.

“This doesn’t belong to us anymore. It’s out of our control,” Miho said.

“‘That’s not true. The AIs work for us,’ user Lufi95 says.”

“But who runs the AIs? Most of us are content to live our lives in virtual space, but what have we lost in the process?”

“‘We’ve gained more than we’ve lost,’ Arc97 says.”

“OK. Let me ask you this: have heterogeneous communities grown since the advent of AR? I don’t think so. Most of us are running on the hamster wheels of our own provincial beliefs about the world.”

Saul tapped his fingers at the air and scanned the replies, aligning them in the SNS feeds with a blink. “Charybdis 71 says ‘We have the freedom to choose the world we want to live in, and we won’t be alone there. On the other hand, you will be’.”

“I won’t be alone. I’ll just be among a minority that wants to celebrate the world, with all its confrontations and hard truths. I want to be among those who are willing to accept the differences between us. I want to see the world as it is, beyond the catered realities of our algorithms.”

Saul nodded, his fingers running down through the responses again. They passed a few parklets and modified cherry trees that seemed frail and defeated beneath the blazing neon of neighbouring buildings. The newly built towers of the square crowded into the scene, as if jealous of whatever was offered there. How easy it was to forget that there was a world beyond it, that this was just a tiny fragment of a city on an island in the Pacific.

“Cthulu88 asks, ‘Aren’t you the one denying reality if you’re choosing to be outside of the consensus?’”

“Denying a force-fed consensus view of the world is not the same as denying reality.”

“‘You used to have a PAIR. When did you decide to get rid of it?’ Ibuki63 asks.”

There was a time when she’d had her own Personal AI Representative — it was true. Back then, she’d been enamoured of the micro-LEDs, her lensed eyes lit up with the same augmented worlds and commercial feeds as the rest of society. It was hard to believe now.

“I got tired of how people stopped caring about the world around them,” she said. She could still remember the morning it all changed. It was during a rare offline moment when she saw a man step over an elderly woman who had fallen, dropping her groceries on the floor of the train. He was too preoccupied with his AR to take notice. Soon after, she watched a man on crutches try to find a seat, while the passengers stared into their curated spaces, impervious to his needs. It made her sick to think she was among them, a fish hanging on the algorithmic hook of an AI-designed reality.

“‘There was an earlier version of this app. Why did you change it?’ Blackhat94 asks.”

In that version of the app, she had merely tried to cover the consensus reality with her own. The icon of the app was a faded comic-book image of Lupin III, a beloved character from her childhood. Behind that default image was a range of characters she could choose to populate the world. The dour, self-absorbed faces on the train might become characters from Sailor Moon, Sherlock Hound or Dragon Ball Z. But that version also had the function of correcting behaviours for the observer, of turning a frown into a smile or a confrontation into a cordial interaction.

“It was a reactionary approach, and I was applying a temporary salve to a much bigger problem,” she said.

Saul acknowledged her response and looked at her with anticipation. “Are we ready for the test run?”

She nodded, while Saul connected her visual feed to those in attendance — some of whom supported her, others of whom were perplexed advocates of AR, but all of whom were curious about the new app.

Standing on the precipice of her community, she watched the neon fade out, the ads dwindling like phantoms in the phosphenes of her eyes. She could see the sky again, its glare cut away to reveal the last few moments of dusk. There in front of her, away from the AI blaze of algorithms and all its hamster wheels, was the place that she called home. Among the gardens and sprawling tents, she watched others like her, building and creating. They were making their own worlds, instead of being used by those that didn’t belong to them.

“Welcome to The Correctives,” she said, leading them into the city with a smile that was her own.

The story behind the story

Preston Grassmann reveals the inspiration behind The Correctives.

Back when Gibson was referring to cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” in Neuromancer (1984), the denizens of dial-up were promoting a vision of the Internet that was powered by its users. They certainly weren’t unified in their thinking, but there was a patrician impulse to minimize the role of big tech and prevent any single company from controlling its content. Moving forward in time, the US Department of Justice is engaged in one of the largest anti-trust trials in history with Google, social media is being leveraged in campaigns of misinformation, and algorithms drive content.

Insofar as any vision of the future is a refraction of its current age, The Correctives came out of a desire to imagine a way out of our current crisis. Perhaps choice is not an illusion, and communities can be established in ways that can improve our situation. But this is possible only through a process of renewal, by cutting away what doesn’t work, and finding a place where a community can form without the manipulations of mediators and their monopolies.

Knowing the difference between our consensual hallucination and the world beyond it might be the first step.

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Got milk? Meet the weird amphibian that nurses its young

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A ringed caecilian amphibian with newborn babies.

The worm-like caecilian Siphonops annulatus is the first amphibian described to produce ‘milk’ for offspring hatched outside its body.Credit: Carlos Jared

An egg-laying amphibian found in Brazil nourishes its newly hatched young with a fatty, milk-like substance, according to a study published today in Science1.

Lactation is considered a key characteristic of mammals. But a handful of other animals — including birds, fish, insects and even spiders — can produce nutrient-rich liquid for their offspring.

That list also includes caecilians, a group of around 200 limbless, worm-like amphibian species found in tropical regions, most of which live underground and are functionally blind. Around 20 species are known to feed unborn offspring — hatched inside the reproductive system — a type of milk. But the Science study is the first time scientists have described an egg-laying amphibian doing this for offspring hatched outside its body.

The liquid is “functionally similar” to mammalian milk, says study co-author Carlos Jared, a naturalist at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

An unusual diet

In the 2000s, researchers showed that in some caecilians, the young hatched with teeth and that they fed on a nutrient-rich layer of their mother’s skin2 around every seven days. “It sounded a little strange — babies eating just once a week,” says Marta Antoniazzi, a naturalist also at the Butantan Institute. “That wouldn’t be sufficient for the babies to develop as they do.”

Antoniazzi, Jared and their colleagues wanted to investigate these young amphibians’ bizarre feeding habits in more detail, so they collected 16 nesting caecilians of the species Siphonops annulatus and their young at cacao plantations in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. The researchers then filmed the animals and analysed more than 200 hours of their behaviour.

The footage revealed that as well as munching on their mother’s skin, S. annulatus young could get their mother to eject a fat- and carbohydrate-rich liquid from her cloaca — the combined rear opening for the reproductive and digestive systems — by making high-pitched clicking noises. The young would also stick their heads into the cloaca to feed.

The finding that S. annulatus is “both a skin feeder and now a milk producer is pretty amazing”, says Marvalee Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. It is probably just one of the caecilians’ many biological quirks. “Most species have not been studied at this level of detail,” says Wake. “So, who knows what else they’re doing.”

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how could they shape research?

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The Sora model text-to-video displayed on a smartphone with the OpenAI logo visible in the background.

Tools such as Sora can generate convincing video footage from text prompts.Credit: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools that translate text descriptions into images and video are advancing rapidly.

Just as many researchers are using ChatGPT to transform the process of scientific writing, others are using AI image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E to cut down on the time and effort it takes to produce diagrams and illustrations. However, researchers warn that these AI tools could spur an increase in fake data and inaccurate scientific imagery.

Nature looks at how researchers are using these tools, and what their increasing popularity could mean for science.

How do text-to-image tools work?

Many text-to-image AI tools, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, rely on machine-learning algorithms called diffusion models that are trained to recognize the links between millions of images scraped from the Internet and text descriptions of those images. These models have advanced in recent years owing to improvements in hardware and the availability of large data sets for training. After training, diffusion models can use text prompts to generate new images.

What are researchers using them for?

Some researchers are already using AI-generated images to illustrate methods in scientific papers. Others are using them to promote papers in social-media posts or to spice up presentation slides. “They are using tools like DALL-E 3 for generating nice-looking images to frame research concepts,” says AI researcher Juan Rodriguez at ServiceNow Research in Montreal, Canada. “I gave a talk last Thursday about my work and I used DALL-E 3 to generate appealing images to keep people’s attention,” he says.

Text-to-video tools are also on the rise, but seem to be less widely used by researchers who are not actively developing or studying these tools, says Rodriguez. However, this could soon change. Last month, ChatGPT creator OpenAI in San Francisco, California, released video clips generated by a text-to-video tool called Sora. “With the experiments we saw with Sora, it seems their method is much more robust at getting results quickly,” says Rodriguez. “We are early in terms of text-to-video, but I guess this year we will find out how this develops,” he adds.

What are the benefits of using these tools?

Generative AI tools can reduce the time taken to produce images or figures for papers, conference posters or presentations. Conventionally, researchers use a range of non-AI tools, such as PowerPoint, BioRender, and Inkscape. “If you really know how to use these tools, you can make really impressive figures, but it’s time-consuming,” says Rodriguez.

AI tools can also improve the quality of images for researchers who find it hard to translate scientific concepts into visual aids, says Rodriguez. With generative AI, researchers still come up with the high-level idea for the image, but they can use the AI to refine it, he says.

What are the risks?

Currently, AI tools can produce convincing artwork and some illustrations, but they are not yet able to generate complex scientific figures with text annotations. “They don’t get the text right — the text is sometimes too small, much bigger or rotated,” says Rodriguez. The kind of problems that can arise were made clear in a paper published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology in mid-February, in which researchers used Midjourney to depict a rat’s reproductive organs1. The result, which passed peer review, was a cartoon rodent with comically enormous genitalia, annotated with gibberish.

“It was this really weird kind of grotesque image of a rat,” says palaeoartist Henry Sharpe, a palaeontology student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. This incident is one of the “biggest case[s] involving AI-generated images to date”, says Guillaume Cabanac, who studies fraudulent AI-generated text at the University of Toulouse, France. After a public outcry from researchers, the paper was retracted.

Figure 1 illustration from the retracted paper of an AI-generated rat and spermatogonial stem cells from rat testes.

This now-infamous AI-generated figure featured in a scientific paper that was later retracted.Credit: X. Guo et al./Front. Cell Dev. Biol.

There is also the possibility that AI tools could make it easier for scientific fraudsters to produce fake data or observations, says Rodriguez. Papers might contain not only AI-generated text, but also AI-generated figures, he says. And there is currently no robust method for detecting such images and videos. “It’s going to get pretty scary in the sense we are going to be bombarded by fake and synthetically generated data,” says Rodriguez. To address this, some researchers are developing ways to inject signals into AI-generated images to enable their detection.

Why has there been a backlash from some fields?

Last month, Sharpe launched a poll on social-media platforms including X, Facebook and Instagram that surveyed the views of around 90 palaeontologists on AI-generated depictions of ancient life. “Just one in four professional palaeontologists thought that AI should be allowed to be in scientific publications,” says Sharpe.

AI-generated images of ancient lifeforms or fossils can mislead both scientists and the public, he adds. “It’s inaccurate, all it does is copy existing things and it can’t actually go out and read papers.” Iteratively reconstructing ancient lifeforms by hand, in consultation with palaeontologists, can reveal plausible anatomical features — a process that is completely lost when using AI, Sharpe says. Palaeoartists and palaeontologists have aired similar views on X using the hashtag #PaleoAgainstAI.

How are publishers adapting to the popularity of these tools?

Journals differ in their policies around AI-generated imagery. Springer Nature has banned the use of AI-generated images, videos and illustrations in most journal articles that are not specifically about AI (Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher, Springer Nature). Journals in the Science family do not allow AI-generated text, figures or images to be used without explicit permission from the editors, unless the paper is specifically about AI or machine learning. PLOS ONE allows the use of AI tools but states that researchers must declare the tool involved, how they used it and how they verified the quality of the generated content.

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Meet the real-life versions of Dune’s epic sandworms

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The film Dune: Part Two might feature human actors Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, but the biggest stars — at least literally — are the sandworms. The sandworms are central to the desert ecosystem of the fictional planet Arrakis, the film’s main setting, and to the culture of its inhabitants, the Fremen. Sandworms live underground and excrete a substance that becomes the all-important drug called the spice, and the Fremen ride them like giant sandy freight trains. In the film’s first glamour shot of a sandworm, a house-sized mouth ringed with teeth erupts out of the sand to swallow a whole platoon of soldiers.

To find out whether the fictional worms in Dune have anything in common with real worms, Nature spoke to palaeontologist Luke Parry at the University of Oxford, UK. He studies worms from the Cambrian and Ordovician periods, which together lasted from roughly 540 million to 444 million years ago.

Dune’s sandworms can grow to at least 450 metres long, about 15 times the size of the longest blue whale. How big do real-life worms get?

There are annelid worms that get up to several metres in length called eunicid worms, a type of bristle worm. They’re pretty gnarly — they have big jaws, they look a bit like Graboids from the 1990 film Tremors. Some of them are ambush predators. They eat octopuses, squid, vertebrates.

There are some earthworms that get really big, as well. Megascolides reaches up to 2 metres. The biggest ones are from Australia.

A worm with iridescent pale body, lots of appendages and wide jaws emerges from sediment.

The ambush predator called the bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois) can reach 3 metres long.Credit: Constantinos Petrinos/Nature Picture Library

Do any of them have teeth?

The worms in Dune have lots of teeth around their mouths, and that’s what the Fremen use to make their crysknives. There are worms like that, called priapulids. These are the sorts that were making the first complex burrows in the early Cambrian. They use all of these teeth, called scalids, on a proboscis to drag themselves through burrows. Alitta worms — sandworms — and ragworms have teeth for catching prey. Some leeches have teeth.

The sandworms in Dune have totally changed their planet by excreting the valuable drug called the spice, making the weird blue liquid called the Water of Life and more. Have worms on Earth changed our planet?

Worms on Earth were responsible for burrowing into sediments over half a billion years ago and changing marine ecosystems forever. It’s part of what we call the Cambrian explosion, one of the most profound changes on the planet.

Before the advent of worms, the sea floor would have been smothered with what are called microbial mats. All the sediment would have been anoxic, without oxygen. If you’ve ever gone swimming in a river or a lake and it’s muddy and you plunge your foot into it, and it’s smelly and anoxic, that’s basically what the entire sea-floor environment would have been around the world.

Then, all of a sudden, some animals evolve a wormy body plan that allows them to move in three dimensions. They start burrowing into sediments, and that means that oxygen can get into the sediments and complex animal life can live there. It opens up new ways of making a living. Worms are part of this fundamental restructuring of the world.

When the Fremen in Dune want to ride a sandworm, they summon one with a device called a thumper that drums the ground. Do real worms sense vibrations?

Yeah, a common thing that birds do for catching earthworms is drumming on the ground, to bring them to the surface of the soil. Seagulls do it. Unfortunately, I don’t think the seagulls ride around on them.

If you were the right size to ride on a worm, do you think it would be similar to riding a sandworm in Dune?

It depends what sort of worm it was and where it was going. There are lots that crawl around on the surface of sediments — maybe you could ride those around. For worms that burrow, I think you’d find it quite uncomfortable and confining.

Any other favourite worm facts?

There are about 30 animal body plans — what we call the animal phyla, the big groups that we chop up animal diversity into — and more than half of them are worms. It’s a really good, versatile way of making a living. Lots of things that didn’t start off as worms just become worms. There are groups of lizards that lose their limbs, like snakes and amphisbaenians, worm lizards. There are worms that live in hydrothermal vents in the deep sea.

How do you feel about having the organisms you study portrayed on screen?

I think it’s awesome. Although there’s nothing like the worm in Dune that’s alive today, some of the things that it does, or some of the ways it looks, are actually like some of these really unfamiliar organisms that we find in the ocean. If a handful of people find out about those animals as a result of watching Dune, I think that’s awesome, because these things are — life is — amazing and diverse.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Could the gut give rise to alcohol addiction?

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A monochrome illustration showing a person’s shadow on a bar, when the shadow overlap a beer bottle where the person gut is it turns colourful.

Illustration: Sam Falconer

Andrew Day, a molecular microbiologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, is four years sober. His journey to this point inspires his work, which he hopes might help others who are struggling with alcohol.

Nature Outlook: The human microbiome

There are many risk factors associated with alcohol-use disorder (AUD), including mental-health conditions and genetics. But Day is eyeing a more unusual contributor: the gut.

Over the past decade, research has begun to highlight a link between the gastrointestinal microbiome — the microorganisms that live inside our digestive tract — and addiction. Researchers including Day suggest that an imbalance in the intestinal microbiota, known as dysbiosis, might cause the gut to send signals to the brain that promote addiction behaviours. If correct, the gut could become a treatment target for people with AUD. “I could find something that might make it easier for people who might not be as fortunate to maintain sobriety,” says Day, who is studying the theory that high levels of the fungus Candida albicans in the gut contributes to increased alcohol consumption in mice as part of his PhD.

This is a sharp departure from conventional medical approaches to treating addiction. Most drugs for AUD and substance-use disorder (SUD) focus on brain chemistry. Many of them are not very effective. Medications for AUD approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) include naltrexone and acamprosate. In addition, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved nalmefene. Acamprosate modulates brain receptors such as those that bind γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an inhibitory neurotransmitter thought to have a role in withdrawal, craving and impulsive behaviour. Nalmefene and naltrexone modulate opioid receptors, nalmefene reduces alcohol cravings, and naltrexone blocks euphoric sensations associated with alcohol.

According to the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, only 42% of people who receive treatment for any kind of SUD complete that treatment1. Between 40% and 60% of people with an SUD will relapse, and it can take years — sometimes decades — of see-sawing between abstinence and relapse before someone achieves sustained remission. Clearly, there is room for improvement. “We’ve missed the target for 50 years,” says Benjamin Boutrel, a neurobiologist at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland. “Mostly because it’s not only a matter of the brain — it’s possibly a matter of the guts, too.”

The gut–brain axis

It is now well known that there is complex communication between the gut and the brain, through the vagus nerve as well as through the endocrine and immune systems. This gut–brain signalling has been suggested to influence addiction-related behaviours in two main ways.

Rear view of white male wearing protective gloves holding up an agar plate

Andrew Day hopes his research will help others who have alcohol-use disorder.Credit: Dr. Carol Kumamoto

The first involves a condition known as leaky gut. Stress, poor diet, food allergies, chemotherapy and other medication, conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease and — perhaps crucially — overuse of alcohol can damage the layer of epithelial cells that line the intestines. This can make the intestinal wall permeable to food particles and bacteria, which can then sneak into the circulatory system.

When this happens, immune cells secrete inflammatory mediators such as cytokines. These proteins can then reach the brain, either through the vagus nerve or by crossing weak areas in the blood–brain barrier, a layer of cells meant to protect the brain from damage.

The subsequent inflammation can affect the brain in several ways that could promote addiction. Cytokines deplete tryptophan, which can lead to reduced production of the mood-regulating hormone serotonin. The brain’s amygdala might sense a threat in the body and increase its activity in response to inflammation. The ventral striatum — the area of the brain related to reward anticipation — might also be ignited. The anterior cingulate cortex — the part of the brain involved in inhibitory control and compulsive behaviour — can also activate during inflammation.

Second, the molecules that gut microbes produce could influence addiction. Some of these are important for brain functioning. The gut bacteria Lactobacillus, for example, can produce GABA; Enterococcus can produce serotonin; and Bacillus can make dopamine. Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) released when dietary fibre is fermented by bacteria in the gut also have neuroactive properties.

Gut dysbiosis, and its subsequent impact on GABA, serotonin, dopamine and tryptophan, could, therefore, make a person more susceptible to addiction and mean that they experience more severe withdrawal symptoms than would someone with a healthy gut microbiome.

“The gut microbiome is really important for some organs, including the brain,” says Drew Kiraly, a psychiatrist and physician at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Kiraly has observed associations between dysbiosis and addictive behaviour to stimulants and opioids in rats. He has used antibiotics to deplete rats’ beneficial gut microbes, resulting in “aberrant responses to drugs”. The animals had increased intake of cocaine and fentanyl, he says. “And after withdrawal, they relapse and have higher fentanyl-seeking behaviour.”

Addictive personality

Even before first contact with alcohol or drugs, pre-existing dysbiosis could make someone more vulnerable to addiction, Boutrel says. The imbalance could give rise to traits such as impulsivity, boredom, susceptibility to stress or anxiety, and sensation seeking. “Those who get thrilled with poker playing, with pathological sex, they all need something,” Boutrel says. “There is a vulnerability there that, once that first contact is made, will trigger repetition — and finally, addiction.”

White female wearing white lab coat is standing in front of a woman seated at a computer screen.

Sophie Leclercq is one of few researchers able to study theories about the gut microbiome in people with alcohol-use disorder.Credit: Sophie Leclercq

In 2018, Boutrel and his colleagues put a group of 59 rats through a number of tests designed to assess their vulnerability to AUD2. First, the rodents were trained to self-administer alcohol by pressing a lever. The researchers then tried to gauge the rats’ self-control by introducing a delay to the reward delivery. Some rats pressed the button once, realized that they had to wait, and went about their business. But some would continue pressing over and over, attempting to make the alcohol arrive more quickly — an indication of addiction.

The final test, which Boutrel thinks is most telling, introduced a deterrent — an uncomfortable foot shock every time the animals took the alcohol. For most of the rats, this discouragement was sufficient and they stopped pressing the lever. However, a sizable minority “just didn’t care”, Boutrel says. “They could not stop pressing the lever and accessing the reward, even when they got a punishment.” In total, about 30% of the rats demonstrated vulnerability to AUD.

Having identified a group of vulnerable rats, Boutrel and his colleagues removed alcohol from the rats environment for three months, and then compared the brains and gut microbiomes of the vulnerable rats with those of rats that had proven more resistant to AUD. The team found that the vulnerable rats had more efficient dopamine 1 receptors (which trigger increased reward-seeking and motivation) and less efficient dopamine 2 receptors (which cause impulsivity, and an increased need for immediate rewards and drug administration). They also found differences in the bacterial content of the vulnerable-rat guts — most notably, changes in Lachnospiraceae, Syntrophococcus and other bacteria associated with reductions in dopamine 2 receptors. This, the researchers suggest, is an indication that gut microbiota could affect brain circuits associated with addiction.

Alcohol and other drugs

Sophie Leclercq, a biomedical scientist at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, was an early advocate of the theory about an AUD gut–brain origin, and one of the first to test it in people3. Her aim was to find out whether intestinal permeability was related to character traits that might make people more susceptible to alcohol dependence.

Pink, worm-like structure on a textured blue and black background

Lactobacillus gut bacteria can produce the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA.Credit: BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images

Leclercq and her colleagues tested the intestinal permeability of 60 people with AUD two days after they began withdrawal. The researchers found that 26 (43%) had high intestinal permeability. At the beginning of the study, everyone with AUD had higher scores of depression, anxiety and craving than did people in the control group. At the end of three weeks of abstinence, the scores of people with low intestinal permeability returned to levels equal to those of the control group. People with high intestinal permeability, however, still scored highly in tests of depression, anxiety and craving, which are directly related to the urge to drink and have a major role in whether people can abstain after detoxification.

“We wanted to see if there was some connection between the gut microbiota and the psychology of AUD, and, indeed, we found that there is a very strong association between dysbiosis, the alteration of the gut microbiota composition, and symptoms like depression, anxiety or grief,” Leclercq says.

Although much of this research is related to people with AUD, Kiraly says that they’ve seen similar results in people who misuse opioids, and cocaine and other stimulants. “Depletion [of microbiota] seems to dysregulate these networks that underlie behavioural changes,” he says.

In 2023, Kiraly and his colleagues looked at whether rats’ microbiomes affected the animal’s drug-seeking behaviours4. In one experiment, rats were given either clean water or water containing the antibiotics neomycin, vancomycin, bacitracin and pimaricin, all of which would deplete their gut microbiota. They were then let into a chamber in which they could push a lever that lit up and provided 0.8 milligrams of cocaine. Later, researchers altered how the lever behaved — now it would light up when pushed, but would have to be pushed more times for the rats to receive cocaine. Researchers found that the rats with depleted gut microbiota were much more likely to press the lever repeatedly to receive cocaine than were the rats given only water.

In a second experiment, both groups of rats were able to self-administer cocaine for two weeks, then detoxed for 21 days. When the rats returned to the cages in which cocaine was available, those receiving antibiotics headed to the lever that originally dosed cocaine twice as quickly as the other rats did. These rats also pressed the lever much more frequently than the control rats did.

“We wanted to study a model of relapse and we saw that microbiome-depleted animals work harder for a drug-related cue than the others did,” Kiraly said. “Lots of people use drugs and not all get to the stage of problematic use. It could be that your microbiome predisposes you.”

Treatment questions

There is still a lot of research that needs to be done before any microbiome-targeted treatment could be offered to people with AUD or another SUD. Researchers don’t yet know, for example, which microbiota are most important, and which gut–brain pathways they need to target. “People have asked me, ‘Can someone just eat yogurt and cure their addiction?’” Kiraly says. “It’s going to be much, much more complicated than that.”

Kiraly would like to see whether probiotics or other treatments could have potential for people with early problematic use but who have not yet progressed to AUD. For instance, some rats in Kiraly’s study were administered SCFAs alongside their antibiotics. Compared with rats that received only antibiotics, those also given SCFAs seemed to retain more Firmicutes and less Proteobacteria (many of which are pathogenic). Strikingly, when the post-detox rats were given the chance to consume cocaine again, those who had received SCFAs behaved like rats with normal gut flora.

Leclercq thinks that 30–40% of cases of AUD might have a gut-related component that could be targeted for treatment. A key challenge is determining exactly which components to target — it is as yet unclear what constitutes a ‘good’ microbiome. Day’s analysis suggests that bacteria such as Lactobacillus, were in abundance in people with AUD, whereas Akkermansia and some others were low.

There is also uncertainty regarding what would be the most effective and easiest part to target of the chain of communication between the gut and brain. Areas such as the nervous system, blood stream or the system surrounding the gut are all candidates.

It is also tricky to find people with AUD who are willing to not only abstain from drinking, but also take part in research, including providing samples of their gut microbiome. Leclercq is one of few researchers able to work with people, instead of rats, because she is affiliated with a hospital with a detoxification clinic. But even she can find it difficult to get enough volunteers for studies. In work assessing the effects of a prebiotic on people with AUD, the number of people with dysbiosis was around half that of those who had healthy guts, making comparisons between the two difficult. Leclercq’s analysis of this aspect of the study is yet to be published.

Despite these issues, Leclercq is moving forward with her research, and is now looking at nutrition as a way to improve the gut microbiome. She is starting a study on polyunsaturated fatty acids — such as those abundant in rapeseed and maize (corn) oils, walnuts, tofu and fatty fish, including salmon and mackerel — and hopes to have results in about two years. She’s also working to correlate which metabolites from food are related to depression, anxiety and craving, and trying to find funding for a study to test these particular nutritional compounds in people.

“Pharmaceutical companies have tried to target GABA, dopamine and serotonin, and these treatments aren’t very efficient because the relapse rate is very high in this disease,” she says. For people with AUD whose guts are contributing to their condition, nutritional interventions, probiotics and prebiotics could eventually improve the odds of success.

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Communication barriers for a Deaf PhD student meant risking burnout

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Megan Majocha signing next to a microscope in the lab

Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology researcher in the laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says Deaf researchers shouldn’t have to spend time developing sign language for their science.Credit: NIH

Sign language in science

The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education and research careers inaccessible for deaf people and those with hearing loss. Meet the scientists, sign-language specialists and students working to add scientific terms and concepts to sign languages. In the third of four articles showcasing their efforts, Megan Majocha, a tumour-biology PhD student at Georgetown University in Washington DC, who is part of the Georgetown–National Institutes of Health Graduate Partnerships Program, describes how she worked with interpreters to develop the signed scientific lexicon necessary to conduct her research.

I am from a third-generation Deaf family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I went to a primary school for Deaf children and then to a mainstream secondary school at the age of 12. My parents thought it would be a good idea for me to learn how to work with interpreters in the mainstream, hearing world while I was at school, so that I had exposure to both worlds.

I worked with the same interpreter for six years from grade 7 (age 12) until the end of secondary school. We collaborated to develop signs for scientific terms — asking each other, “Would this sign make sense for this specific term,” and that kind of thing. It was a lot of work for me in my early teens, to try to develop these scientific signs as well as learning the subject content.

I started my PhD in August 2019 at Georgetown University in Washington DC. I am in my fifth year and I expect to defend my thesis in the next few months. Speaking to a few other Deaf scientists during my PhD, I learnt that we all have different signs for scientific terms: even though they have the same meaning in English, we all sign them differently because we have all developed our own separate ways of signing terms that aren’t in the American Sign Language (ASL) dictionary.

I had to develop my own team of interpreters for my first-year graduate school courses. They worked with me Monday to Friday for each course I took and in the laboratory. It is beneficial to have that consistency for both me and my interpreting team, because we can develop signs together and the interpreters can become familiar with my work and the content of the course for each class.

Adding scientific signs to Indian Sign Language will create a more inclusive field for deaf students

By law, US universities are required to provide and pay for interpreters, so both my institutions, Georgetown University and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, provide interpreters at no cost to me.

I have to be conscious of how an interpreter might voice my research and scientific ideas to my colleagues, collaborators and prospective mentors. I’d be hesitant to pick an interpreter whom I didn’t know to speak on my behalf, especially for a formal presentation — partly because some scientific terms share the same sign. For example, the signs for the words ‘dye’ and ‘stain’ are the same in ASL — on both hands the index finger and thumb are touching, the other fingers are extended with the palms facing down, and the hands move up and down to represent dipping a material into a dye. Although it’s the same sign, the English words have completely different meanings in the scientific field. If I’m doing a presentation and the interpreter uses the wrong word, that can make me look like I’m not knowledgeable and that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Having an interpreter who’s motivated to learn these nuances is really important. For example, the interpreters here at the NIH watch the lab team do experiments and ask questions about our research, which is helpful. When I have to stop to explain things, I try not to think of it as wasting my time, when I could be doing my own work. Sometimes I have to take a few minutes to explain a process or concept while I do an experiment, but that can be beneficial in the long run.

Progress and burnout

I’ve focused on developing signs that work for me and my interpreters. But ASL has specific grammar rules for each sign, which a lot of the signs my interpreters and I have created probably don’t follow. That’s one of our many challenges: to develop signs for all Deaf scientists that follow the official ASL grammar rules.

Three other Deaf people work in my lab. One is a biologist who has worked here for more than 20 years. He’s developed a spreadsheet of scientific words and an explanation of how you sign each one. For example, the sign I use for metastasis starts with both hands facing each other with the fingers bent and moving in a zigzag motion, which indicates disorder, then both hands are extended forward simultaneously, moving apart to represent the cells spreading out.

What’s the sign for ‘centrifuge’? How we added scientific terms to Indian Sign Language

But this is not necessarily the best way to preserve a visual, signed language. Therefore, we are trying to develop a way to film the signs so that interpreters watching the videos can learn them. That would be a much better resource.

All of this has been a lot of work. I would love to have the chance to focus solely on my research, but I’ve been juggling my time between research, creating signs, working with my network of interpreters and everything else. The COVID-19 pandemic added to the problem. Before COVID-19, interpreters worked on site all the time. But now many of them prefer to work remotely. However, interpreting through a video call is not as useful as having an interpreter in the lab. We need them on site for spontaneous conversations when we’re troubleshooting protocols. This has made it even harder to find interpreters who can work at this level of science.

I am feeling burnt out from all this legwork. My energy should be invested in my research and my coursework, not making sure each interpreter understands what’s going on. It’s so much to manage, sometimes I feel like I have earned a PhD in linguistics, too. Continuing research after my PhD is still one of my options, but I’m also looking into project management or consultant jobs that use the knowledge and skills that I have developed.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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How sacked whistle-blower Susanne Täuber’s career fared after she spoke out

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Portrait of Susanne Täuber in front of a university building.

A district court judge ruled on Susanne Täuber’s dismissal on International Women’s Day last year.Credit: Susanne Täuber

I began a position as a gender-equality researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in 2009, achieving tenure in 2015. I was studying factors that undermine the effective implementation of policy into practice. In 2018, after being passed over for promotion, I lodged an official complaint about gender bias. The following year, I argued that the university’s gender-equity policy jarred with my actual experiences at work1.

I was dismissed on 7 October 2022. On 8 March last year — International Women’s Day — a district court judge ruled that my dismissal was justified. The ruling referred to a “permanently disturbed working relationship”, but also stated that the university “played an important, if not a decisive role” in creating it.

My Court of Appeal hearing was in November 2023, and I found out in January that I had lost. For me, the appeal was important in getting clarity, for thousands of academics in the Netherlands, as to whether or not they can safely publish their research, especially if it is critical of their institutions.

Sadly, the verdict provides no closure on the protection of academic freedom. But, because my case drew so much attention at the time — including a sit-in by students and a petition signed by more than 3,600 academics around the world calling for my reinstatement — I can now draw on a global network of colleagues who have gone through similar experiences. A fundraiser organized on my behalf by Stichting Inclusive Action North, a Groningen-based social-justice alliance, was an immense relief. I wish that every person affected by bullying had access to such a financial lifeline.

Raising awareness

I have worked with academics from around the world to conceive of ways to tackle the censorship and related problems that are increasingly faced by academics. I participated in the Academic Freedom Under Attack webinar series last September, organized by higher-education researcher Carlos Azevedo at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and critical-management scholar Ronald Hartz at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany. Hartz was among a group of academics made redundant in 2021 by the University of Leicester, UK. I have also been invited by the Radboud Gender & Diversity Studies and the Radboud Women Professors Network in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, to deliver the keynote speech for International Women’s Day this year. Alongside such public events, I regularly meet with people who have been targets of discrimination, harassment and power abuse in academia, and I try to support others who are going through similar experiences.

Academia is a system that desperately clings onto preserving the power and privilege of a happy few. Since my dismissal, I have not done paid work. I doubt that moving to another European country to seek employment would do the trick. All over Europe, academics face the same problems. The factors that undermine academic freedom are present everywhere: the steep hierarchy and power differentials, the dearth of tenured positions, the structural workload being handed down to precariously employed, underpaid and undervalued academics, the intellectual and labour exploitation of the most-vulnerable academics and the push by universities to silence criticism.

Some movements over the past few years reflect the widespread nature of these problems. The German #IchBinHanna (‘I am Hanna’) movement fought against precarious-employment laws for scientists. The Danish #PleaseDontStealMyWork initiative exposed the intellectual extractivism faced by scholars, especially younger and dependent ones. And the 21 Group in the United Kingdom fights widespread bullying in academia.

The aftermath

At the time of my Court of Appeal hearing, I was recognized as an official whistle-blower by the Dutch Whistleblowers Authority, an independent administrative body based in The Hague. Questions concerning my case have already been raised by members of the Dutch House of Representatives, and I expect more to come. At the hearing, I was given a round of applause by supporters. It made me realize that I feel weirdly liberated by my experiences. What happened to me taught me more about my area of expertise than any amount of books and articles could ever have. My case was also mentioned last month when the European Parliament published its 2023 Academic Freedom Monitor of European Union Member States. The monitor notes “concerns for a potential chilling effect on academics wishing to address issues of management or other controversial issues”.

My advice for others would be to take a long hard look at the academic environment they’re in and to trust their gut feeling. I doubted my experiences and the accounts of other victims for years, always thinking, “it cannot be that bad, it cannot be that biased”. This self-doubt was more taxing than what came after — the crystal-clear realization that this is a rigged system. So, if you can: don’t waste time doubting yourself. Walk away and take your bright mind to a place where it will be valued.

This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Argentinian researchers protest as president begins dismantling science

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Three months after Javier Milei took office as the new president of Argentina, scientists there say that their profession is in crisis. As Milei cuts government spending to bring down the country’s deficit and to lower inflation — now more than 250% annually — academics say that some areas of research are at risk. And they say that institutes supported by Argentina’s main science agency, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), might have to shut down. Researchers have been expressing their anger and discontent on social media and protesting in the streets.

‘Extremely worrying’: Argentinian researchers reel after election of anti-science president

The far-right Milei administration has decided that the federal budget will remain unchanged from that in 2023 — which means that, in real terms, funding levels are at least 50% lower this year because of increasing inflation. CONICET, which supports nearly 12,000 researchers at about 300 institutes, has had to reduce the number of graduate-student scholarships it awards from 1,300 to 600. It has also stopped hiring researchers and giving promotions, and it has laid off nearly 50 administrative staff members.

Yesterday, 68 Nobel prizewinners in chemistry, economics, medicine and physics delivered a letter to Milei expressing concerns about the devaluation of the budgets for Argentina’s national universities and for CONICET. “We watch as the Argentinian system of science and technology approaches a dangerous precipice, and despair at the consequences that this situation could have for both the Argentine people and the world,” it says.

“It is vital to increase the budget for CONICET,” says Nuria Giniger, an anthropologist at the CONICET-funded Center for Labor Studies and Research in Buenos Aires, who is also secretary of the union organizing the protests. She says that, if things don’t change in the next two months, some institutions will have to shut down. “We can’t afford basic things like paying for elevator maintenance, Internet services, vivariums [enclosures for animals and plants] and more.”

Some say that although Milei hasn’t outright shut down CONICET, as he pledged during his presidential campaign, he is keeping his promise by making it impossible for some laboratories to stay open. “By promoting budget cuts in science and technology, the government is dismantling the sector,” says Andrea Gamarnik, head of a molecular-virology lab at the Leloir Institute Foundation in Buenos Aires, which is supported by CONICET.

Daniel Salamone, the head of CONICET, who was appointed by Milei, contends that the government’s actions don’t signal a lack of support for science. “We gave raises and maintained CONICET’s entire staff of researchers and support professionals,” says Salamone, a veterinarian who specializes in cloning. He emphasizes that the country has severe economic problems. “It would seem unfair to assume a critical stance [by Milei towards science] without considering that the country is going through a deep crisis,” he adds, pointing out that more than 50% of the population is living in poverty.

Sending a message

CONICET isn’t the only science-based agency affected by Milei’s cuts. His administration has not yet appointed a president to the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation, which had a budget of about US$120 million in 2023 and which helps to finance the work of local researchers by channeling international funding to them. This means that the agency has not been operating since last year, putting the 8,000 projects it runs in jeopardy .

Argentina election: front runner vows to slash science funding

“The government is giving a message to society that science is not important” and is sending a negative message about scientists, Gamarnik says. For instance, Milei has liked and shared posts on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter) suggesting that researchers funded by CONICET are lazy and don’t earn their pay.

Milei has also seemed to undermine science in other ways: on taking office, he dissolved the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which oversaw agencies including CONICET, downgrading it to a secretariat with a smaller budget and less power. The head of the secretariat he appointed is Alejandro Cosentino, an entrepreneur and former bank manager who funded a financial-technology company but has no scientific background. “With so many areas under his control, there are no priorities set, nor coordination or planning,” says Lino Barañao, a biochemist who was the minister for science for 12 years under two previous administrations. “This is serious.”

Contacted by Nature, a spokesperson for the science secretariat denies that science is not a priority for the Milei administration. “CONICET is in the same budgetary situation as the rest of the national public administration,” that is, it is under the same budget as last year, just like the rest of the government, they said. Closing CONICET institutes is not the intention, they added. And counter to Milei’s comments during the campaign about shutting down or privatizing the agency, the government wants to “build and expand scientific policy” with a special focus on bringing back Argentinian scientists from abroad, they said.

But researchers worry that, instead, young scientists will be driven away from Argentina because of the new administration’s actions. “For the younger scientists, it is a great discouragement to continue,” says Gamarnik. “Our work requires motivation and a lot of commitment. If there are no scholarships and budget, people will start looking for other options.”

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