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how science is harmed by the bullying and harassment rumour mill

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Illustration showing two scientists secretly passing a message with a read speech bubble on it.

Illustration: Fran Pulido

Misconduct aftermath

Misconduct allegations and findings can tear academic communities apart, and university disciplinary processes can amplify the harm. This two-part series explores the community fallout from harassment and bullying misconduct, beginning with the ripple effects of secrecy surrounding disciplinary processes. A second article will investigate how changes to institutional responses could benefit academia.

In August 2023, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) revised its code of conduct in response to complaints about the online hounding of astronomers who had collaborated with alleged or known harassers. “We knew of several astronomers around the world who were being ostracized from the astronomical community,” Debra Elmegreen, president of the Paris-based organization, told Nature at the time. Examples included researchers having papers rejected and being excluded from conferences.

The IAU’s revised guidance raised a fierce debate and ethical questions from its members about how to respond when a colleague is accused of harassment. Should researchers collaborate with a known or suspected harasser? And if allegations are found to be true, should offenders be cited as authors, invited to write opinion pieces or be employed at another institution?

There are currently no universally accepted guidelines to help the scientific community respond to such situations, leaving people and organizations to muddle through on their own, which can compound the harm.

Academia continues to struggle with bullying and harassment, despite social protest movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter drawing attention to it. According to Nature’s 2021 global salary and job satisfaction survey, 27% of the 3,200 self-selecting respondents said they had observed or experienced discrimination, bullying or harassment in their present position, up from 21% in 2018. In Nature’s 2022 graduate student survey, 18% said that they had personally experienced bullying, down from 21% in 2019. And in last year’s survey of postdoctoral researchers, 25% reported experiencing discrimination and harassment.

These behaviours create unsafe spaces in academia — particularly for women and minority groups — that reinforce inequalities1, drive researchers out of academia and can even put people at risk of physical harm2.

Because misconduct investigations are usually shrouded in secrecy, colleagues are often left to base their responses on rumours and hearsay, and unsure how to interact with an accused peer.

There are also several good reasons for closed investigations, including various competing interests around privacy and due process, many of them employment-law protections. Furthermore, survivors of harassment might not want their cases publicized, and those accused might want to defend their case without being tried in the court of public opinion first.

“Harassment is actually not an individual issue,” says Anna Bull, who is based in York, UK, and is the director of research at the 1752 Group, a UK organization that studies and advocates against sexual misconduct. “It is a community issue.”

Community strife

Faced with information vacuums, researchers and communities often take matters into their own hands by refusing to cite or collaborate with certain people (including both accusers and the accused in harassment and bullying allegations), not inviting them to conferences or into partnerships and excluding them from social events.

A 2022 study3 found that article citations dropped — by more than 5% — if an author was publicly found to have committed sexual misconduct. Most people learn about allegations through their peer community, says co-author Marina Chugunova, a behavioural and experimental economist at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany. “We’re in a very social profession, and their network matters a lot.”

But this study looked only at known and published cases of misconduct.

Portrait of Marina Chugunova

Marina Chugunova, a behavioural and experimental economist at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany, has studied harassment’s downstream effects.Credit: Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition

“Secrecy is the real problem,” says Sarah Batterman, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. In 2021 Batterman joined other women who spoke out about sexual misconduct at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama City. Batterman, who remains a research associate at the STRI, still does not know whether the person who she filed a complaint against resigned or was fired. He remains active in her field of research.

“There are so many cases where people just get removed from positions and go on to another institution. It’s ‘pass the harasser’ and they just get to keep on behaving in their bad way because no one knows,” says Batterman.

Joshua Tewksbury, who took over as director at the STRI in 2021, says that “reports of harassment and investigations are treated with strict confidentiality to safeguard the privacy and integrity of those who come forward. Our primary focus is on supporting those affected while ensuring that investigations are fair and thorough.” The institute has since overhauled many of its practices for handling misconduct cases.

Some funders, including the US National Institutes of Health and the US National Science Foundation, require disclosure if grant recipients are disciplined for harassment. This enables such organizations to decline requests for a principal investigator to transfer a grant to another institution, or request that an institution find a replacement principal investigator. Some organizations will ask prospective employees whether they have been disciplined for harassment. However, institutions can often be oblivious of an employee’s past.

Also, an alleged harasser might resign before being dismissed, Tewksbury told a Nature podcast last year. “We are not in a position of sort of making a blanket public statement. In fact, legally, we can’t [get] around those issues, particularly if someone quits,” he said.

Shining a light

Disciplinary processes are considered a human resources (HR) matter, and most HR information is confidential, explains Georgina Calvert-Lee, a barrister and employment-law and equality specialist at Bellevue Law in London. People have “a right to private life and a family life”, she says, and this is explicitly protected by employment law.

Calvert-Lee says confidentiality regarding investigations protects the fairness of the process on both sides and the evidence that witnesses give. Disclosing investigation findings also comes with pitfalls, she adds. A sacked employee could sue for wrongful dismissal and a former employer could be liable for damaging the individual’s reputation if the circumstances of their departure were in the public domain. Ultimately, UK employment law does not require universities to disclose such findings and so most institutions would not risk being sued, Calvert-Lee says.

Portrait of Georgina Calvert-Lee

Employment-law and equality specialist Georgina Calvert-Lee says that confidentiality around investigations protects the fairness of misconduct investigations on both sides.Credit: Laura Shimili Mears

In 2016, Julie Libarkin, a geologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, became frustrated at how harassment cases in US academia were being reported in the media. She describes high-profile misconduct allegations as “bursts of light that then fade away”, adding, “It means we don’t shine a light on the problem.” So, she trawled the Internet for US harassment cases, finding 30 in one day. She then set up the open-access Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, which has more than 1,200 entries and includes only publicly documented US cases.

There are no definitive statistics on either the prevalence or the extent of confirmed findings of harassment and discrimination in academia. But, in a 2018 report that summarized studies on sexual harassment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimated that more than half of female faculty members and staff have encountered or experienced sexual harassment. In a 2022 survey of more than 4,000 self-selected early- and mid-career researchers in Brazil, 47% of women had experienced harassment at work. Only a small fraction of reported incidents will result in formal disciplinary action. Of those that result in a finding of misconduct, an even smaller number will be made public.

Most institutions encourage informal resolution first, says Libarkin. Even if a person acknowledges their wrongdoing and agrees to undertake counselling or training, there is no paper trail, she says. “There’s no requirement that informal processes be reported anywhere.” These cases are not in her database.

For cases serious enough to find their way into the public spotlight and onto her list, “there’s rarely one victim and there’s rarely one incident”, she says. And yet US institutions are not required to keep information illustrating a pattern of behaviour, and often the information is not made public. Some universities, such as University College London (UCL), allow formal warnings to expire, so that a few years after a finding of misconduct, it is disregarded in future disciplinary action. Furthermore, many institutions ask complainants to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as part of the disciplinary process, which prevents them from speaking out about what happened to them.

Astrophysicist Emma Chapman who is now at the University of Nottingham, UK, campaigned to ban NDAs following a two-year sexual harassment investigation by UCL, which was initiated by a complaint she filed during her time there as a PhD student. “I insisted on a confidentiality waiver,” she says, so that she could talk about some part of what happened. “You can’t fix the problem without exposing the problem.” The waiver requires her to give the institution two days’ notice ahead of talking about her case. In 2019, four years after Chapman’s initial complaint, UCL ended the use of confidentiality clauses or NDAs in settlement agreements with individuals who have complained of sexual misconduct.

After Chapman first went public about her experience, women reached out to her from all over the world to share theirs. “People were like, ‘I was raped, but I can’t say anything’ or ‘I was sexually assaulted, and I couldn’t say anything’, ‘I had to leave’, and ‘I’m under an NDA’,” she remembers. “And I realized that my case was deeply, deeply upsetting and shocking and — normal.”

Transparency is tricky

Total transparency about bullying and harassment cases can also be problematic, because many survivors might not want to disclose what happened to them, says Mark Dean, chief executive of Enmasse, a workplace behaviour-change consultancy company in Melbourne, Australia.

“There’s a reasonable chance that an unwanted announcement will further traumatize an individual,” he says, adding that respecting a survivor’s wishes is fundamental, and should inform any action. The complainant might want to put the matter behind them or they might fear other forms of career-damaging retaliation. Although many colleagues might guess who the complainant is after a suspected harasser leaves, this can be less traumatic than a public announcement, Dean says.

There are legal and employment restrictions that protect a person’s privacy. “Quite often we see organizations hamstrung by a range of conflicting interests as to whether they announce to the world that someone has been found guilty of misconduct,” Dean says. “They are subject to a whole range of employment privacy requirements.”

In the United Kingdom, disciplinary findings are seen as the personal data of the person accused, says Bull. That means it is illegal to share the findings, including the sanctions against the individual, with professional bodies and even prospective employers without the individual’s permission.

Calvert-Lee says that there are exceptions to the law when there is a legitimate purpose for sharing the information. If an employer asked for a reference, for example, a former institution could state that the person had been dismissed for misconduct. As things stand, neither party is required to request or provide such information and the new institution might not know to ask for such information, unprompted.

Bull’s 1752 Group is urging universities to try to remedy this problem by joining an initiative called the Misconduct Disclosure Scheme. The scheme, which is currently implemented by more than 250 organizations worldwide, aids the sharing of misconduct data between employers.

The lack of such open, transparent data makes researching harassment and discrimination difficult, too, says Chugunova. “From surveys, we know it is a huge problem, but the data is just not there.” Her 2022 research paper used data from the Academic Sexual Misconduct Database, and so was limited to cases in the United States. Social scientists have been saying for decades that there is no data, she says. “In 20 years, nothing has changed.”

Difficult discussions ahead

“Astronomy was at the front of the #MeToo movement in STEM by far, and now right at the front of the backlash as well,” says Chapman, pointing to the issue of harassment of alleged harassers and their allies, which the IAU was trying to address with its initial code-of-conduct revision. “And the things we see happening in astronomy are going to start happening in other fields as well in the next year or so. We have the opportunity right now to be the guinea pigs for academia and for higher education by having this very difficult discussion,” says Chapman.

In October last year, the IAU revised its code of conduct again to emphasize that “any form of physical or verbal abuse, bullying, or harassment of any individual, including complainants, their allies, alleged or sanctioned offenders, or those who work with or have worked with them, is not allowed”. Many members pointed out that this addition merely reinforced that harassment was prohibited — which had already been the organization’s policy.

Portrait of Emma Chapman

Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham, UK, campaigned to ban non-disclosure agreements as part of disciplinary processes.Credit: Emma Chapman

Chapman, who was critical of the initial changes, says that at least the IAU is trying to engage the problem. “There is no easy answer, but that doesn’t mean that we default to having no answer,” she says.

Ultimately, institutions and professional bodies need policies that are proactive rather than reactive, says Chapman. For example, conference organizers should have codes of conduct that lay out whether researchers who have been found guilty of misconduct can present at their event. “That way, you’re more legally protected. What’s not OK is, for example, to say ‘so-and-so can’t be part of this community’ and be vague about it,” she says.

Calvert-Lee says that excluding people from events is legally “tricky”. It could be defamatory to deny people access to events on the basis of rumours or allegations. But if an individual is found to have harassed or bullied others, an organizer could argue that excluding that individual reduces the risk to other attendees.

Professional societies such as the IAU have an important part to play. “What matters is the field — if you don’t have agreement across the field, it is kind of useless having an agreement in one university, or even one country,” says Chapman.

Calvert-Lee suggests that institutions should ask former employers to disclose the number of misconduct findings against a potential employee, or whether there were any outstanding investigations when the person left. In her experience, most UK universities supply “a very short two-liner, which says that a person worked here in this capacity from this date to that date, full stop” and would not voluntarily disclose extra information for fear of litigation.

Because academia is an extremely mobile community, Batterman suggests that academics should have a worldwide professional certification process. “Doctors and lawyers get professionally certified, and there’s an ethical review. If they violate their community norms, they can lose their licence. It should be the same in academia, whether it’s sexual harassment, sexual assault or bullying,” she says. But national efforts would be a valuable start, she adds, with various disciplines collectively deciding what actions would result in permanent expulsion from the academic community.

Dean advocates that organizations should take a hard line on sexual harassment and reclassify it as serious misconduct and thus a fireable first-time offence. He also urges institutions to report their anonymized statistics. They could regularly publish the number of findings on sexual misconduct and the number of exits under that policy, without naming survivors or their harassers, he says.

It’s a level of semi-transparency that could help communities to move forwards from harassment findings without causing the field or the individuals involved more harm. “Over time, people will see that the rumour mill starts, then there is a finding and then someone is no longer there,” Dean says. It also wouldn’t violate the competing employment and privacy laws.

“It is a workaround,” he admits. But importantly, it would allow people to see the consequences of such behaviour.

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Citizenship privilege harms science

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Imagine you want to attend a research conference in the United States this autumn. If you are from most nations in the global north, there’s probably still plenty of time to make arrangements. But, according to our analysis, citizens from 132 of the 134 countries in the global south need a visa to visit the United States, whereas this is true for people from only 20 of the 61 countries in the global north. (See Supplementary information for how we designated global south countries.) And obtaining those visas is not straightforward: as of 4 April, the next available appointment at the US consulate in New Delhi, India, is not until October. It’s February 2025 at the consulate in Cotonou, Benin, and March 2026 in Bogotá, Colombia.

It’s not just trips to the United States that are problematic. Scholars from the global south face obstacles when travelling to many hotspots for scientific research, which include Canada, Japan and most European countries. By contrast, citizens from more than 80% of countries in the global north need no visa to go to Germany or Japan.

Visa costs are higher for people in economically weak countries than for those living elsewhere1. Citizens of southern Asia must pay almost US$59, on average, for a tourist visa to another country — equivalent to 2 weeks of work for an average earner in this region. Those in sub-Saharan Africa pay $52, equating to 3 weeks’ work. Yet citizens in Western Europe pay less than $18, on average, which could be equivalent to less than an hour’s work.

On arrival in some countries, people travelling from the global south might also have to show months of financial statements and prove that they have received particular vaccinations. They might be denied entry despite meeting these requirements.

Citizenship privilege is an asset experienced by citizens of the global north, simply because of the country they were born in (see ‘Unearned advantages’). As with other forms of privilege, people without it can experience safety concerns and feelings of distress, anxiety, uncertainty and inadequacy2 — in addition to the bureaucratic difficulties. This inequity affects many researchers. It’s time that academics take action to rebalance the scales.

Unearned advantages

As a US-born citizen, one of us (T.J.) is privileged by her citizenship. The other (M.C.), born in the global south, lacks this privilege. Here are four of many privileges — or the lack thereof — that neither of us has earned (see go.nature.com/3vjkmbu).

• I am (not) able to travel to most countries on short notice.

• I do (not) need to provide evidence of my intent to return home, my travel history dating back ten years or the fact that I have the financial means to support myself.

• I do (not) have to fear being deported by border control because of my race, ethnicity, language differences, travel history, other cultural barriers or concerns that I am a national-security threat.

• I do (not) have to worry about travelling to my home country to renew or extend my lawful visa status, or about how visa rejection might hamper my career.

Mobility opens up careers

The expectation that researchers will travel and work internationally is baked into academia. For example, a study of more than 40,000 advertisements for research positions on a European job platform showed that more than 60% listed mobility as a desirable attribute3. This preference stems from the idea that mobile researchers are more productive and have better skills and networks than their less-mobile counterparts, making them more competitive in a fierce job market4,5. Governments, funding agencies and research universities promote mobility in the hope that it will build research capacity and boost economies6.

The pressure to move abroad to build a competitive career is often highest for early-career researchers4. Consider short-term postdoctoral fellowship awards from prestigious organizations, such as the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the Human Frontier Science Program and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). These all require applicants to leave the country where they earned their PhD and take a position elsewhere, but the chances for citizens of the global south to work in another global south country are limited. Applicants must instead typically move to the United States or particular European countries.

Most international meetings are located in the same few countries. An analysis of global health conferences held between 1997 and 2019, for instance, found that 71% took place in high-income countries, with 31% in the United States alone7.

Aerial view of people waiting in line to go through a security checkpoint at Ronald Reagan National Airport

Travel and migration are beneficial for researchers’ careers, but many jobs and meetings are based in the global north.Credit: Zach Gibson/Getty

Together, these factors make travel and migration beneficial for researchers’ careers — especially if that movement is to or between global north countries. Indeed, one study indicates that 82% of researchers who move between countries for their first postdoc are destined for the global north8. The United States is the most common destination, but the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland are also popular8,9.

Even after a move, academics from the global south remain at a disadvantage. Foreign researchers are more likely to face bullying and harassment from mentors than are domestic researchers, and they are less likely to report it because of the threat that their visa will not be renewed. Visa inequity can cause anxiety, stress and depression10. All foreign nationals on visas are vulnerable, but scholars who have identities that make them susceptible to encountering intersecting forms of discrimination are at a greater disadvantage and thus in a more precarious position.

Close the gaps

Six steps can help to redress the balance.

Universities should educate their employees about citizenship privilege, to help reduce hiring biases. Institutional leaders should advocate for change and ensure that their human-resource and international-service offices are staffed by people who understand citizenship privilege and the lived experiences of immigrants. This would help immigrant scholars facing language barriers, financial pressures, homesickness and cultural shock11.

Academic institutions should help students and researchers to offload visa paperwork to trained administrative staff. Too often, institutions assist incoming international scholars with visa sponsorships, but leave academics who are already in a post to fend for themselves when it comes to visa renewals or complications. Institutions should establish safeguarding frameworks to prevent bullying. And they should lobby for and adopt visa types that provide researchers with stability, flexibility and safety — skilled-worker visas instead of short-term ones, for example.

Conference organizers should hold international meetings in global south countries where visas are not needed, or where visa processing is fast and inexpensive, such as Cambodia, Rwanda or Ecuador. Affordability should be a consideration, because currency differences can make conferences in the global north unaffordable for researchers from low- and middle-income countries.

Researchers should be given at least six months’ notice of conferences, and organizers should help participants to apply for visas by issuing invitation letters and communicating with embassies. Some of these changes are already being implemented — for instance, the joint meeting held by the American Society for Cell Biology and EMBO has started to expedite abstract reviews and issue customized visa invitation letters to conference attendees.

Organizers should offer lower registration fees for scholars from visa-underprivileged countries, which they could calculate using a country’s per capita income or the Henley Passport Index, which ranks countries according to the number of nations to which their citizens can travel visa-free (see ‘Global mobility divide’). Organizers should also set aside funds to award more travel grants to researchers from low-income countries, and make those grants larger. All conferences should include virtual options to increase international attendance.

Global mobility divide. A world map showing the number of countries citizens can visit, by country. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and Singapore are ranked top.

Lastly, early-career researchers from visa-underprivileged countries must routinely be included in conference organizing and institutional leadership committees, expanding the pool of decision makers to bring diverse immigrant perspectives to the table.

Some might argue that the world’s scientific output is already becoming less centred on the global north, negating the need for these steps. It is true that global south countries such as India, China, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates are publishing more papers and producing more science graduates than ever (see, for example, Nature 620, S2–S5; 2023). However, most gatekeepers of knowledge, such as journal editors and reviewers, are located in the global north12.

Beyond perpetuating a global divide, citizenship privilege intersects with other biases that favour cisgender, white and male researchers. The professoriate in global north countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom remains predominantly white. Some countries’ policy choices pose immense challenges to making academia more equitable, including the US Supreme Court’s decision to end race as a considering factor in admissions, and US subnational policies that limit access to gender-affirming care and create a hostile environment for global immigration. Lowering mobility barriers is a key step in driving change.

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science mourns physicist Peter Higgs

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Professor Peter Higgs poses for a portrait at an Edinburgh University press conference in 2012.

Colleagues remember Peter Higgs as an inspirational scientist, who remained humble despite his fame.Credit: Graham Clark/Alamy

Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012, died on Monday, aged 94. Six decades ago, Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Half a century later, experiments confirmed the prediction and Higgs shared the Nobel prize for the discovery. Notoriously self-deprecating, Higgs was uncomfortable with fame and shunned the spotlight: he was inaccessible by e-mail or mobile phone. “Peter was a very special person, an immensely inspiring figure for physicists around the world, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple yet profound way,” says Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of CERN.

Nature | 4 min read

On 4 July 2012, researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider declared success in their long search for the Higgs boson. The elusive particle’s discovery filled in the last gap in the standard model — physicists’ best description of particles and forces — and opened a new window onto physics by providing a way to learn about the Higgs field and how it gives particles their masses. But many of the properties of the Higgs boson remain mysterious.

Nature | 8 min read (from 2022)

In this podcast from 2022, two Nature physics gurus — senior reporter Lizzie Gibney and Federico Levi, a senior physics editor for the journal — looked back to the discovery of the Higgs boson ten years earlier. They reminisce about their experiences of its discovery, what the latest run of the Large Hadron Collider might reveal about the particle’s properties and what role it could have in science beyond the standard model of particle physics.

Nature Podcast | 22 min listen (from 2022)

Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

In 2013, Higgs told The Guardian that it’s unlikely he would have done his groundbreaking work under today’s ‘publish or perish’ culture. (5 min read)

In a surprise move, Iran has pardoned and released the last four members of a wildlife conservation group that were imprisoned since 2018. The four are part of a group of nine arrested and charged with espionage while carrying out research on Iran’s endangered Asiatic cheetah and Persian leopard. The group’s leader, sociologist Kavous Seyed-Emami, died in prison. The release is “very good news. But nothing can restore the lost years of life and the loss of Emami,” says Kaveh Madani, who was deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment when he was arrested as part of the same operation.

Nature | 4 min read

Avi Wigderson has won what is considered the ‘Nobel Prize’ of computer science for his work on randomness in algorithms. With a series of groundbreaking studies in the 1990s, Wigderson helped to confirm that algorithms that make random choices to achieve their objectives are as accurate as conventional, deterministic algorithms. “I was extremely happy, and I didn’t expect this at all,” Wigderson says. “I’m getting so much love and appreciation from my community that I don’t need prizes.”

Nature | 4 min read

In 2019, conservationist Ripi Yanuar Fajar and four others observed what might have been a Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), which are thought to have gone extinct in the 1980s. Now it seems a strand of hair recovered by researcher Kalih Raksasewu from the location of the sighting 10 days later is a genetic match with a Javan tiger pelt held in a museum. “I wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t just about finding a strand of hair, but an encounter with the Javan tiger in which five people saw it,” says Kalih.

Mongabay | 6 min read

Reference: Oryx paper

A black-and-white photo of a Javanese tiger walking across a clearing in a forest.

Features & opinion

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can help researchers to understand how genetic differences affect people’s responses to drugs. Yet most genetic and clinical data comes from the global north, which can put the health of Africans at risk, writes a group of drug-discovery researchers. They suggest that AI models trained on huge amounts of data can be fine-tuned with information specific to African populations — an approach called transfer learning. The important thing is that scientists in Africa lead the way on these efforts, the group says.

Nature | 10 min read

Media engagement can open up unexpected opportunities for collaborations and skills development, says physical-activity researcher Ben Singh. Although scientists should court media attention responsibly — the ultimate goal is to inform the public — he suggests pitching published papers to relevant journalists and outlets, writing for websites such as The Conversation or using social media to connect with peers and the public. To avoid overly simplified coverage or misinterpretation of his work, he learnt to “articulate the actual objectives and limitations clearly up front during interviews, conferences and seminars”.

Nature | 5 min read

Show us your eclipse photos!

A composite shot of seven images showing the moon’s shadow moving across the sun into a full eclipse.

A composite of the eclipse as seen from Addison, Vermont by Briefing reader Victoria Migneco.

Monday’s solar eclipse was exciting for those lucky enough to be in its path — and free of cloud — as well as for scientists observing it. Thank you to everyone who’s shared their images with us!

Readers often get in touch about working for Nature, so I wanted to flag a paid opportunity for students and recent graduates in the UK, US and Germany to gain experience in research, education and science news publishing in Springer Nature’s journals, books or magazines. Applicants from all backgrounds are welcome to apply, especially candidates from historically underrepresented groups, including but not limited to Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour, people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, people from underrepresented social castes, religious minorities and people with a disability and/or a neurodivergent condition. Please find more information on the Springer Nature website.

Among those paying tribute to Peter Higgs, I enjoyed this gem from science-mad comedian Dara Ó Briain: he got Higgs to sign off on a fun joke involving a boson in a jar.

Tonight, I’ll be raising a glass of London Pride, which I’m reliably informed was Higgs’s favourite tipple (and is luckily my favourite beer, too). Tomorrow I hope I return to an inbox filled with your feedback on this newsletter: please e-mail us at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Katrina Krämer

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science mourns giant of particle physics

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Few scientists have enjoyed as much fame in recent years as British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the namesake of the boson that was discovered in 2012, who died on 8 April, aged 94.

It was 60 years ago when Higgs first suggested how an elementary particle of unusual properties could pervade the universe in the form of an invisible field, giving other elementary particles their masses. Several other physicists independently thought of this mechanism around the same time, including François Englert, now at the Free University of Brussels. The particle was a crucial element of the theoretical edifice that physicists were building in those years,which later became known as the standard model of particles and fields.

Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — ATLAS and the CMS — confirmed Higgs’ predictions when they announced the discovery of the Higgs boson half a century later. It was the last missing component of the standard model, and Higgs and Englert shared a Nobel Prize in 2013 for predicting its existence. Physicists at the LHC continue to learn about the properties of the Higgs boson, but some researchers say that only a dedicated collider that can produce the particle in copious amounts — dubbed a ‘Higgs factory’ — will enable them to gain a profound understanding of its role.

Inspiring figure

“Besides his outstanding contributions to particle physics, Peter was a very special person, an immensely inspiring figure for physicists around the world, a man of rare modesty, a great teacher and someone who explained physics in a very simple yet profound way,” said Fabiola Gianotti, director-general of CERN in an obituary posted on the organization’s website; Gianotti who announced the Higgs boson’s discovery to the world at CERN. “I am very saddened, and I will miss him sorely.”

Many physicists took to X, formerly Twitter, to pay tribute to Higgs and share their favourite memories of him. “RIP to Peter Higgs. The search for the Higgs boson was my primary focus for the first part of my career. He was a very humble man that contributed something immensely deep to our understanding of the universe,” posted Kyle Cranmer, physicist at the University of Wisconsin Madison and previously a senior member of the Higgs search team at the CMS.

“I was fortunate to meet Peter Higgs in 2013 (days after the Nobel prize announcement). He was modest as he told a group of PhD students the history of the boson theory. Afterwards, I was very lucky to get my copy of the New York Times with the discovery signed by him,” said Clara Nellist, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the ATLAS particle-discovery collaboration.

“A career highlight was helping Peter into a cab after the Collider exhibition launch @sciencemuseum in 2013 with a carrier bag of special-edition beer marking his recent Nobel,” posted Harry Cliff, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

“He disliked the limelight but was comfortable with friends and colleagues,” Frank Close, a physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, and author of the book Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (2022), said in a statement to the UK Science Media Centre. “His boson took 48 years to appear, and when the Nobel was announced, he had disappeared to his favourite sea food bar in Leith.”

An exciting journey

Higgs’ work continues to be of fundamental importance, said physicist Sinead Farrington at the University of Edinburgh. “We’re still on an exciting journey to figure out whether some further predictions are true, namely whether the Higgs boson interacts with itself in the predicted way, and whether it might decay to other beyond the Standard Model particles,” she told the Science Media Centre.

For physicist and science writer Matt Strassler, Higgs’ death represents ‘the end of an era’. “Higgs was a fortunate scientist: he lived to see his insight at age 30 turn up in experiments 50 years later,” he posted on X. “His role and influence in our understanding of the #universe will be remembered for millennia.”



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India is booming — but there are worries ahead for basic science

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Some 970 million people in India will head to the ballot box starting on 19 April in a general election that polls predict will see Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), win a third five-year term. Many scientists in India are hopeful that the next five years could bring greater spending on applied science. But some have also expressed concerns. Among these are that funding is not increasing in line with India’s booming economy, and that the government’s top-down control of science, as some researchers see it, allows them little say in how money is allocated.

More money

Modi first became India’s prime minister in 2014. Since then, the total pot of money for research and development has increased. But relative to India’s gross domestic product (GDP), spending on R&D dropped from 0.71% in 2014–15 to 0.64% in 2020–21, the most recent financial year for which data are available (see ‘Stagnant funding pool’). This continues a decades-long trend that began under Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, and is lower than for some of India’s peers: China spent 2.4% of GDP on R&D in 2021, Brazil spent 1.3% and Russia spent 1.1%.

Public funding that fails to keep up with growing GDP is a particularly acute problem for science in India, because the government is the main funder of research, says Rohini Godbole, a particle physicist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Government funding accounts for some 60% of R&D spending. By contrast, in the United States, just 20% of total R&D spending comes from the government — with industry and philanthropy contributing the rest.

Stagnant funding pool: Line chart showing India's R&D budget has not grown while the incumbent coalition has been in power.

Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)

The relative lack of funds hasn’t stopped India from making big strides forward: in 2023, the nation became only the fourth in the world to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon. Scientists note that this was done at a fraction of the budget of other missions. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) “is known as one of the most frugal organizations in the world”, says Venni Krishna, a science-policy researcher at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. They’re “doing a fantastic job”. Researchers in India have also contributed to significant advances in developing drugs and vaccines.

But researchers say that other areas of research have been hampered by funding shortfalls, despite announcements that have suggested the opposite. “The government is serious in terms of their policy pronouncements. But when it comes to putting the money in, it’s been very conservative,” says Krishna.

In August 2023, the government passed a bill to set up the National Research Foundation (NRF), modelled on the US National Science Foundation — a move that many researchers applauded. The government promised 500 billion rupees (US$6 billion) for the NRF over 5 years, 28% of which — some 140 billion rupees — would come from public funds, and the rest from private and philanthropic sources. But the government spent only 2.6 billion rupees on the NRF in 2023–24, according to India’s Ministry of Finance. “This is a very, very negligible amount of money,” says Ramvilas Ghosh, a researcher who studies the diversity of marine organisms at Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies in Kochi.

For 2024–25, the government allocated 20 billion rupees for the NRF, still short of its initial commitment, and it has not clarified where the private funding will come from, says Ghosh.

Another project affected by a funding shortfall is the National Quantum Mission. In 2023, the government promised 60 billion rupees for this over eight years, in an attempt to build quantum computers and develop quantum communications, metrology and materials. The government spent 50 million rupees on the mission in 2023–24, and committed 4.8 billion for 2024–25.

Nature asked representatives of the Indian government for clarification on funding arrangements, but received no response.

More basic science

Indian scientists are part of some prominent international collaborations, including CERN, which operates Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, and ITER, an international nuclear-fusion project based in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France. But progress on similar, home-grown initiatives in basic-science has been slow over the past decade. When the international LIGO collaboration announced in 2016 that it had made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, Modi posted on social media that he hoped India would move forwards with a detector of its own. But it took another seven years for LIGO-India to be approved by the country’s cabinet. “Progress is still slow,” says Godbole.

This image provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation shows the Vikram lander, taken by the Pragyan rover, on the surface of the moon on Aug. 30, 2023.

India landed a spacecraft on the Moon at a fraction of the cost of other nations.Credit: ISRO via AP/Alamy

An Indian neutrino observatory, approved in 2015, has stalled because of environmental concerns over the site’s location. “Even if it takes off, its relevance is going to be marginal, because of the number of years that went by,” says Godbole.

Part of that might reflect changing priorities. Science is seen increasingly as a tool for development, Godbole says, meaning more funds for technological innovation and socially relevant research at the cost of basic research. Umesh Waghmare, a theoretical and applied physicist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore says that the current science ecosystem incentivizes applied research, from funding to new awards for technological innovation and missions focused on developing devices. A Modi win is likely to speed up this push for more applied and translational research, says Waghmare, who is also president of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.

More autonomy

But the government could usefully loosen its tight grip over funding decisions, with high-level government officials having more of an advisory role, and more decision-making powers being given to scientific committees, says Waghmare. “Significantly greater autonomy is essential,” he says.

The NRF is headed by the Prime Minister, ministers and secretaries of government departments, as well as representatives of the business and scientific community picked by the Prime Minister.

And when it comes to public funds, the same rules that govern the construction of large projects such as railways or bridges also apply to smaller research projects, which is “rather unfair”, says Shekhar Mande, former director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in Pune.

Even when researchers have been allocated money, it’s been difficult for them to spend all of it, says Shailja Vaidya Gupta, who served as a senior adviser at the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India between 2019 and 2021. That’s because administrative and financial rules for hiring staff, and for purchasing equipment and laboratory supplies, are complex and constantly changing, she explains.

In 2023–24, only an estimated 65 billion of the 106 billion rupees initially allocated for the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology was spent. Gupta hopes that the government will trust researchers more, and will allow them greater flexibility in how they spend their budgets. A large part of ISRO’s success was a result of the decades of administrative and financial autonomy that it was afforded, which offers a model to follow, says Gupta.

As in India’s previous general election in 2019, science has not featured heavily on the 2024 campaign trail. Researchers say they don’t expect to see substantial changes to science policy, whatever the result. “Science is not at all part of the political discourse,” says Achal Agrawal, who founded the Indian Research Watchdog, a volunteer group for investigating research integrity. In that sense, the elections starting next week are unlikely to provide a big turning point for Indian science. “Whether Modi wins or loses, it is going to be more of the same.”

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Brazil budget cuts could leave science labs without power and water

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More than three months into 2024, politicians in Brazil are still at odds about how much money the country’s research institutes and federal universities will receive this year. Scientists say that unless more funding is found, they won’t have enough money to cover basic expenses such as water, electricity and financial aid for students.

On one side of the bargaining table is the National Congress. In December, it imposed cuts to the 2024 budget for the country’s research and higher-education institutions, which have already had their funding slashed several times in the past decade.

On the other side is the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which is fighting to reverse some of the congressional cuts. Lula, as the leader of the leftist Workers’ Party is popularly known, took office in 2023 pledging to make science a priority, increase Brazil’s spending on research and eliminate deforestation.

“We should be doing research to support conservation policies, but now we are in a situation where we don’t know if we will be able to cover our routine activities,” says Nilson Gabas Júnior, director of the Emílio Goeldi Museum in the Amazonian city of Belém, whose studies provide data that feed into the management of the Amazon rainforest.

Although the cuts affect the entire country, the Amazon institutions argue that they are the hardest hit because their federal support is already disproportionately low.

Temporary reprieve

Lula managed to increase the budget for science and technology in 2023, compared with the levels in 2022, and scientists had hoped that funding would at least remain stable in 2024. Instead, Congress, which is controlled by a conservative majority, slashed the 2024 budget of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, which funds Brazil’s 16 federal research institutes, by 6.8% compared with that in 2023. Congress also reduced the budget for higher education from 6.3 billion reais (US$1.24 billion) in 2023 to 6.0 billion reais in 2024.

After the budget was passed, an organization that represents the interests of the 69 Brazilian universities supported by the federal government published an open letter calling for more funding. Scientists’ allies in Congress have also tried to persuade legislators to reconsider their decision.

In March, the government and Congress reached an agreement to restore 250 million reais to federal universities’ funding. But Sylvio Mário Puga Ferreira, dean of the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus, who was involved in the negotiations, points out that “it would take a funding increase of 2.5 billion reais just to bring the universities’ budget closer to 2017 levels”.

Winner take all

The paltry funding for federal universities and research institutes is likely to exacerbate an already-grim situation for science in Brazil’s Amazon. Data from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil’s largest government agency for research funding, indicate that only 4% of the money invested in research projects in 2023 was directed to institutions in the seven states classified as the North region, which encompasses 87% of the Brazilian Amazon.

“Scientific activity in Brazil is heavily concentrated in a few education and research institutions in the South and Southeast” regions, says Odir Dellagostin, president of the Brazilian National Council of State Funding Agencies. “They boast the best graduate programs, produce and publish more research and offer the best job opportunities” — and receive the most funding.

The problem extends to biodiversity research. A study1 analysing CNPq’s investments in projects in botany, zoology, ecology and limnology (the study of freshwater ecosystems) between 2016 and 2022 found that research groups from the North region received only 2.57 million reais during this period. “This situation leaves the region with a very limited capacity to respond to the threats the forest faces,” says Lis Stegmann, one of the study’s authors and a biologist at the Eastern Amazon branch of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), in Belém. CNPq did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

Institutions in the North region produce fewer — and lower-quality — research outputs than do those in the South and Southeast regions, in part because they have difficulty training and attracting highly qualified personnel, and getting funding. In 2022, the seven Amazon states accounted for 3.9% of Brazil’s scientific production, whereas the state of São Paulo alone accounted for 28.9%, according to an unpublished study by Dellagostin.

Funding feedback loop

This leads to a self-perpetuating problem: decisions about who gets research funding in Brazil are based heavily on quantitative assessments. Scientists who produce more research and publish in high-impact journals have better chances of acquiring funding.

“Amazon research institutions are caught in a vicious circle,” says Emmanuel Zagury Tourinho, dean of the Federal University of Pará. “They don’t have enough funding because they lack robust scientific production, but they also cannot develop their research capacity because they don’t have enough funding.” This has led to a situation in which researchers from São Paulo (around 3,000 kilometres away from the Amazon) receive more public funding to study Amazon biodiversity than do researchers who are actually located in the Amazon.

Some scientists are still hopeful that they will get some extra funds this year. “We are talking to the [science] minister Luciana Santos about the possibility of additional budget allocations for the upcoming months,” Gabas says. The most likely scenario, however, is that this discussion will be postponed until the next budget, because some of the funds that were earmarked for science and education in 2024 have already been redirected.

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Ready or not, AI is coming to science education — and students have opinions

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Yan Jun (Leo) Wu speaks into a microphone while opening the Students@AI Conference

Leo Wu, an economics student at Minerva University in San Francisco, California, founded a group to discuss how AI tools can help in education.Credit: AI Consensus

The world had never heard of ChatGPT when Johnny Chang started his undergraduate programme in computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign in 2018. All that the public knew then about assistive artificial intelligence (AI) was that the technology powered joke-telling smart speakers or the somewhat fitful smartphone assistants.

But, by his final year in 2023, Chang says, it became impossible to walk through campus without catching glimpses of generative AI chatbots lighting up classmates’ screens.

“I was studying for my classes and exams and as I was walking around the library, I noticed that a lot of students were using ChatGPT,” says Chang, who is now a master’s student at Stanford University in California. He studies computer science and AI, and is a student leader in the discussion of AI’s role in education. “They were using it everywhere.”

ChatGPT is one example of the large language model (LLM) tools that have exploded in popularity over the past two years. These tools work by taking user inputs in the form of written prompts or questions and generating human-like responses using the Internet as their catalogue of knowledge. As such, generative AI produces new data based on the information it has already seen.

However, these newly generated data — from works of art to university papers — often lack accuracy and creative integrity, ringing alarm bells for educators. Across academia, universities have been quick to place bans on AI tools in classrooms to combat what some fear could be an onslaught of plagiarism and misinformation. But others caution against such knee-jerk reactions.

Victor Lee, who leads Stanford University’s Data Interactions & STEM Teaching and Learning Lab, says that data suggest that levels of cheating in secondary schools did not increase with the roll-out of ChatGPT and other AI tools. He says that part of the problem facing educators is the fast-paced changes brought on by AI. These changes might seem daunting, but they’re not without benefit.

Educators must rethink the model of written assignments “painstakingly produced” by students using “static information”, says Lee. “This means many of our practices in teaching will need to change — but there are so many developments that it is hard to keep track of the state of the art.”

Despite these challenges, Chang and other student leaders think that blanket AI bans are depriving students of a potentially revolutionary educational tool. “In talking to lecturers, I noticed that there’s a gap between what educators think students do with ChatGPT and what students actually do,” Chang says. For example, rather than asking AI to write their final papers, students might use AI tools to make flashcards based on a video lecture. “There were a lot of discussions happening [on campus], but always without the students.”

Portrait of Johnny Chang at graduation

Computer-science master’s student Johnny Chang started a conference to bring educators and students together to discuss the responsible use of AI.Credit: Howie Liu

To help bridge this communications gap, Chang founded the AI x Education conference in 2023 to bring together secondary and university students and educators to have candid discussions about the future of AI in learning. The virtual conference included 60 speakers and more than 5,000 registrants. This is one of several efforts set up and led by students to ensure that they have a part in determining what responsible AI will look like at universities.

Over the past year, at events in the United States, India and Thailand, students have spoken up to share their perspectives on the future of AI tools in education. Although many students see benefits, they also worry about how AI could damage higher education.

Enhancing education

Leo Wu, an undergraduate student studying economics at Minerva University in San Francisco, California, co-founded a student group called AI Consensus. Wu and his colleagues brought together students and educators in Hyderabad, India, and in San Francisco for discussion groups and hackathons to collect real-world examples of how AI can assist learning.

From these discussions, students agreed that AI could be used to disrupt the existing learning model to make it more accessible for students with different learning styles or who face language barriers. For example, Wu says that students shared stories about using multiple AI tools to summarize a lecture or a research paper and then turn the content into a video or a collection of images. Others used AI to transform data points collected in a laboratory class into an intuitive visualization.

For people studying in a second language, Wu says that “the language barrier [can] prevent students from communicating ideas to the fullest”. Using AI to translate these students’ original ideas or rough drafts crafted in their first language into an essay in English could be one solution to this problem, he says. Wu acknowledges that this practice could easily become problematic if students relied on AI to generate ideas, and the AI returned inaccurate translations or wrote the paper altogether.

Jomchai Chongthanakorn and Warisa Kongsantinart, undergraduate students at Mahidol University in Salaya, Thailand, presented their perspectives at the UNESCO Round Table on Generative AI and Education in Asia–Pacific last November. They point out that AI can have a role as a custom tutor to provide instant feedback for students.

“Instant feedback promotes iterative learning by enabling students to recognize and promptly correct errors, improving their comprehension and performance,” wrote Chongthanakorn and Kongsantinart in an e-mail to Nature. “Furthermore, real-time AI algorithms monitor students’ progress, pinpointing areas for development and suggesting pertinent course materials in response.”

Although private tutors could provide the same learning support, some AI tools offer a free alternative, potentially levelling the playing field for students with low incomes.

Jomchai Chongthanakorn speaks at the UNESCO Round Table on Generative AI and Education conference

Jomchai Chongthanakorn gave his thoughts on AI at a UNESCO round table in Bangkok.Credit: UNESCO/Jessy & Thanaporn

Despite the possible benefits, students also express wariness about how using AI could negatively affect their education and research. ChatGPT is notorious for ‘hallucinating’ — producing incorrect information but confidently asserting it as fact. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, physicist Rupert Croft led a workshop on responsible AI alongside physics graduate students Patrick Shaw and Yesukhei Jagvaral to discuss the role of AI in the natural sciences.

“In science, we try to come up with things that are testable — and to test things, you need to be able to reproduce them,” Croft says. But, he explains, it’s difficult to know whether things are reproducible with AI because the software operations are often a black box. “If you asked [ChatGPT] something three times, you will get three different answers because there’s an element of randomness.”

And because AI systems are prone to hallucinations and can give answers only on the basis of data they have already seen, truly new information, such as research that has not yet been published, is often beyond their grasp.

Croft agrees that AI can assist researchers, for example, by helping astronomers to find planetary research targets in a vast array of data. But he stresses the need for critical thinking when using the tools. To use AI responsibly, Croft argued in the workshop, researchers must understand the reasoning that led to an AI’s conclusion. To take a tool’s answer simply on its word alone would be irresponsible.

“We’re already working at the edge of what we understand” in scientific enquiry, Shaw says. “Then you’re trying to learn something about this thing that we barely understand using a tool we barely understand.”

These lessons also apply to undergraduate science education, but Shaw says that he’s yet to see AI play a large part in the courses he teaches. At the end of the day, he says, AI tools such as ChatGPT “are language models — they’re really pretty terrible at quantitative reasoning”.

Shaw says it’s obvious when students have used an AI on their physics problems, because they are more likely to have either incorrect solutions or inconsistent logic throughout. But as AI tools improve, those tells could become harder to detect.

Chongthanakorn and Kongsantinart say that one of the biggest lessons they took away from the UNESCO round table was that AI is a “double-edged sword”. Although it might help with some aspects of learning, they say, students should be wary of over-reliance on the technology, which could reduce human interaction and opportunities for learning and growth.

“In our opinion, AI has a lot of potential to help students learn, and can improve the student learning curve,” Chongthanakorn and Kongsantinart wrote in their e-mail. But “this technology should be used only to assist instructors or as a secondary tool”, and not as the main method of teaching, they say.

Equal access

Tamara Paris is a master’s student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, studying ethics in AI and robotics. She says that students should also carefully consider the privacy issues and inequities created by AI tools.

Some academics avoid using certain AI systems owing to privacy concerns about whether AI companies will misuse or sell user data, she says. Paris notes that widespread use of AI could create “unjust disparities” between students if knowledge or access to these tools isn’t equal.

Portrait of Tamara Paris

Tamara Paris says not all students have equal access to AI tools.Credit: McCall Macbain Scholarship at McGill

“Some students are very aware that AIs exist, and others are not,” Paris says. “Some students can afford to pay for subscriptions to AIs, and others cannot.”

One way to address these concerns, says Chang, is to teach students and educators about the flaws of AI and its responsible use as early as possible. “Students are already accessing these tools through [integrated apps] like Snapchat” at school, Chang says.

In addition to learning about hallucinations and inaccuracies, students should also be taught how AI can perpetuate the biases already found in our society, such as discriminating against people from under-represented groups, Chang says. These issues are exacerbated by the black-box nature of AI — often, even the engineers who built these tools don’t know exactly how an AI makes its decisions.

Beyond AI literacy, Lee says that proactive, clear guidelines for AI use will be key. At some universities, academics are carving out these boundaries themselves, with some banning the use of AI tools for certain classes and others asking students to engage with AI for assignments. Scientific journals are also implementing guidelines for AI use when writing papers and peer reviews that range from outright bans to emphasizing transparent use.

Lee says that instructors should clearly communicate to students when AI can and cannot be used for assignments and, importantly, signal the reasons behind those decisions. “We also need students to uphold honesty and disclosure — for some assignments, I am completely fine with students using AI support, but I expect them to disclose it and be clear how it was used.”

For instance, Lee says he’s OK with students using AI in courses such as digital fabrication — AI-generated images are used for laser-cutting assignments — or in learning-theory courses that explore AI’s risks and benefits.

For now, the application of AI in education is a constantly moving target, and the best practices for its use will be as varied and nuanced as the subjects it is applied to. The inclusion of student voices will be crucial to help those in higher education work out where those boundaries should be and to ensure the equitable and beneficial use of AI tools. After all, they aren’t going away.

“It is impossible to completely ban the use of AIs in the academic environment,” Paris says. “Rather than prohibiting them, it is more important to rethink courses around AIs.”

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The beauty of what science can do when urgently needed

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A woman sits in an office room with a blue wall. A chart is shown on the glowing screen behind her.

Cultivarium chief scientific officer Nili Ostrov works to make model organisms more useful and accessible for scientific researchCredit: Donis Perkins

Nili Ostrov has always been passionate about finding ways to use biology for practical purposes. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit during her postdoctoral studies, she went in the opposite direction from most people, moving to New York City to work as the director of molecular diagnostics in the Pandemic Response Lab, providing COVID-19 tests and surveilling viral variants. She was inspired by seeing what scientists could accomplish and how much they could help when under pressure.

Now the chief scientific officer at Cultivarium in Watertown, Massachusetts, Ostrov is bringing that sense of urgency to fundamental problems in synthetic biology. Cultivarium is a non-profit focused research organization, a structure that comes with a finite amount of time and funding to pursue ‘moonshot’ scientific goals, which would usually be difficult for academic laboratories or start-up companies to achieve. Cultivarium has five years of funding, which started in 2022, to develop tools to make it possible for scientists to genetically engineer unconventional model organisms — a group that includes most microbes.

Typically, scientists are limited to working with yeast, the bacterium Escherichia coli and other common lab organisms, because the necessary conditions to grow and manipulate them are well understood. Ostrov wants to make it easier to engineer other microbes, such as soil bacteria or microorganisms that live in extreme conditions, for scientific purposes. This could open up new possibilities for biomanufacturing drugs or transportation fuels and solving environmental problems.

What is synthetic biology and what drew you to it?

Synthetic biology melds biology and engineering — it is the level at which you say, “I know how this part works. What can I do with it?” Synthetic biologists ask questions such as, what is this part useful for? How can it benefit people or the environment in some way?

During my PhD programme at Columbia University in New York City, my team worked with the yeast that is used for brewing beer — but we asked, can you use these yeast cells as sensors? Because yeast cells can sense their environment, we could engineer them to detect a pathogen in a water sample. In my postdoctoral work at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we investigated a marine bacterium, Vibrio natriegens. A lot of time during research is spent waiting for cells to grow. V. natriegens doubles in number about every ten minutes — the fastest growth rate of any organism.

Could we use it to speed up research? But using V. natriegens and other uncommon research organisms is hard work. You have to develop the right genetic-engineering tools.

How did the COVID-19 pandemic alter your career trajectory?

It pushed me to do something that I otherwise would not have done. During my postdoctoral programme, I met Jef Boeke, a synthetic biologist at New York University. In 2020, he asked me whether I wanted to help with the city’s Pandemic Response Lab, because of my expertise in DNA technology. I’m probably one of the only people with a newborn baby who moved into Manhattan when COVID-19 hit.

That was an amazing experience: I took my science and skills and used them for something essential and urgent. In a couple of months, we set up a lab that supported the city’s health system. We monitored for new variants of the virus using genomic sequencing and ran diagnostic tests.

Seeing what science can do when needed — it was beautiful. It showed me how effective science can be, and how fast science can move with the right set-up.

How did that influence what you’re doing now with Cultivarium?

COVID-19 showed me how urgently needed science can be done. It’s about bringing together the right people from different disciplines. Cultivarium is addressing fundamental problems in science, which is usually done in academic settings, with the fast pace and the dynamic of a start-up company.

We need to make progress on finding ways to use unconventional microbes to advance science. A lot of bioproduction of industrial and therapeutic molecules is done in a few model organisms, such as E. coli and yeast. Imagine what you could achieve if you had 100 different organisms. If you’re looking to produce a protein that needs to be made in high temperatures or at an extreme pH, you can’t use E. coli, because it won’t grow.

How is Cultivarium making unconventional microbes research-friendly?

It took my postdoctoral lab team six years to get to the point where we could take V. natriegens, which we initially didn’t know how to grow well or engineer, and knock out every gene in its genome.

At Cultivarium, we’re taking a more systematic approach to provide those culturing and engineering tools for researchers to use in their organism of choice. This kind of topic gets less funding, because it’s foundational science.

So, we develop and distribute the tools to reproducibly culture microorganisms, introduce DNA into them and genetically engineer them. Only then can the organism be used in research and engineering.

Developing these tools takes many years and a lot of money and skills. It takes a lot of people in the room: a biologist, a microbiologist, an automation person, a computational biologist, an engineer. As a non-profit company, we try to make our tools available to all scientists to help them to use their organism of choice for a given application.

We have funding for five years from Schmidt Futures, a non-profit organization in New York City. We’re already releasing and distributing tools and information online. We’re building a portal where all data for non-standard model organisms will be available.

Which appeals to you more — academic research or the private sector?

I like the fast pace of start-up companies. I like the accessibility of expertise: you can bring the engineer into the room with the biologists. I like that you can build a team of people who all work for the same goal with the same motivation and urgency.

Academia is wonderful, and I think it’s very important for people to get rigorous training. But I think we should also showcase other career options for early-career researchers. Before the pandemic, I didn’t know what it was like to work in a non-academic set-up. And once I got a taste of it, I found that it worked well for me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What Putin’s election win means for Russian science

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Vladimir Putin behind a lectern marked with a golden eagle crest.

Vladimir Putin spoke at an event marking the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences.Credit: Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin has secured a fifth term in office, claiming a landslide victory in the country’s presidential election on 18 March. Election officials say he won a record 87% of votes. This outcome came as a surprise to no one, and many international leaders have condemned the vote as not being free or fair.

Researchers interviewed by Nature say that another six years of Putin’s leadership does not bode well for Russian science, which has been shunned globally in response to the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and is on precarious ground at home. Those still in Russia must choose their words carefully: as one scientist, who wishes to remain anonymous, put it, “business as usual” now includes possible prison time for offhand comments.

Publicly, Putin’s government is a big supporter of research. In early February, at a celebration of the 300-year anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Putin bolstered the academy’s role, effectively reversing parts of a sweeping reform that limited its autonomy he oversaw in his third term. And at the end of last month, he signed an update to the 2030 national science and technology strategy, which calls for funding for research and development to double to 2% of gross domestic product, and stresses an increased role for applied science amid “sanctions pressure”.

Despite being made before the election, these big announcements were framed not as campaign promises but as top-down directives, says Irina Dezhina, an economist at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy in Moscow. “The fact that it was set in motion back then implies no one really expected any changes at the helm.”

Fractured landscape

Although domestic support for Russian science, which remains mostly state-funded, appears to be strong, many collaborations with countries in the West have broken down since the invasion of Ukraine, prompting a shift to new partners in India and China.

After intense internal discussions, CERN, the European particle-physics powerhouse near Geneva, Switzerland, voted in December 2023 to end ties with Russian research institutions once the current agreement expires in November this year. And the war has severely disrupted science in the Arctic, where Russia controls about half of a region that is particularly vulnerable to climate change. A study1 this year gave a sense of how collaborative projects could be affected by losing Russian data: excluding Russian stations from the International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic causes shifts in project results that are in some cases as large as the total expected impact of warming by 2100.

Reports also suggest that political oppression combined with the threat of military draft have led to a ‘brain drain’ among scientists. Getting an accurate headcount is challenging, but a January estimate by the Latvia-based independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, based on researchers’ ORCID identifiers, says at least 2,500 researchers have left Russia since February 2022.

Researchers who stayed in Russia have had to contend with serious supply-chain disruptions as well as personal risks. And international sanctions on Russia might have hit even the most productive scientists: according to a January 2024 paper co-authored by Dezhina, which surveyed some of the most published and cited Russian researchers, three out of four of them report at least some fallout from sanctions, mostly economic ones2.

Russia’s isolation has particularly affected the medical sciences, because it means that international clinical trials are no longer held there, says Vasily Vlassov, a health-policy researcher at the Higher School of Economics University in Moscow. He fears that being cut off from the global community will erode Russia’s expertise in this fast-moving and technically complex field: “It’s a problem we have yet to fully appreciate.”

Researchers in the social sciences and humanities are less dependent on overseas partners, but they are affected by increasingly nationalist ideology, says a Russian researcher who asked to remain anonymous. When reviewing articles for publication in Russian journals, the researcher says, they are seeing an increasing number of submissions blaming problems in research and higher education on ‘the collective West’, a common propaganda term. “It’s everywhere, and it’s poisoning minds.”

Uncertain future

The election outcome serves as a reminder of the ongoing war and the openly totalitarian environment in Russia, says Alexander Kabanov, chief executive of the Russian-American Science Association, a US-based non-profit organization. “We are still dealing with an ongoing disaster,” he says.

Yet the impacts of sanctions on Russian science are beginning to fade from public consciousness in other countries. Pierre-Bruno Ruffini, who studies science diplomacy at Le Havre University-Normandy in Le Havre, France, says that academic sanctions and their consequences have “rapidly and completely disappeared” from discussions in the French research community. Dezhina agrees, and adds that, in her experience, even cooperation between individual scientists, once seen as a promising workaround for institutional bans, is on the decline.

Researchers in exile are working on an alternative to the state’s vision of the future for Russia and national science. A policy paper published earlier this month by Reforum, a European project that aims to create a “roadmap of reforms for Russia”, presents a to-do list for revitalizing Russian research. Three out of five of the tasks listed focus on bringing it back into the international fold. Olga Orlova, a science journalist who wrote the policy paper, thinks that scientists in Russia have a part in building that future.

“They shouldn’t be afraid of the change — they should be working for it,” she says.

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How AI images and videos could change science

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An animated sequence from a video generated by OpenAI's Sora of a young man reading a book while sitting on a cloud.

Sora is one of several AI tools that generates video from text promptsCredit: OpenAI

The release of OpenAI’s sophisticated video-generating tool Sora has been met with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Some observers worry that the technology could lead to a barrage of realistic-looking misinformation. “We’re going to have to learn to evaluate the content we see in ways we haven’t in the past,” says digital-culture researcher Tracy Harwood. Others see positive potential: such systems could help to simplify and communicate complex scientific findings, and speed up the process of illustrating papers, conference posters or presentations. In some cases, for example when reconstructing extinct lifeforms, AI illustrations could mislead both scientists and the public. For now, many scientific journals prohibit AI-generated imagery in papers.

Nature | 5 min read & Nature | 6 min read

Researchers have laid out safety guidelines for AI-powered protein design to head off the possibility of the technology being used to develop bioweapons. The voluntary effort calls for the biodesign community to police itself and improve screening of DNA synthesis, a key step in translating proteins into actual molecules. “It’s a good start,” says global health policy specialist Mark Dybul. But he also thinks that “we need government action and rules, and not just voluntary guidance”.

Nature | 5 min read

Occasionally erasing part of an AI model’s ‘memory’ seems to make it better at adapting to new languages, particularly those for which not much data is available or that are linguistically distant from English. Researchers periodically reset a neural network’s embedding layer during the initial training in English. When the periodic-forgetting system was retrained on a language with a small dataset, its accuracy score dropped by only 22 points, compared with almost 33 for a standard model. “An apple is something sweet and juicy, instead of just a word,” says AI researcher and study co-author Yihong Chen, who explains that the neural network displays the same high-level reasoning.

Quanta Magazine | 5 min read

Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Image of the week

An animated gif of a snail robot. Its soft body is made from a white rubber-like material, wearing a real snail shell. Scissors enter the frame, cutting a strip of material along the robot’s side, which (though only briefly) stops its crawling motion.

(Soft Machine Lab, Carnegie Mellon University)

This robot snail can heal itself when it’s damaged. The electrically conductive gel connecting the motor to the battery was designed with specific chemical bonds that knit the material back together after it is cut. (Nature | 12 min read)This article is part of Nature Outlook: Robotics and artificial intelligence, an editorially independent supplement produced with financial support from FII Institute.

Features & opinion

Researchers should be careful about projecting ‘superhuman’ abilities onto AI systems, warn anthropologist Lisa Misseri and cognitive scientist Molly Crockett. They characterized four mindsets — AI as oracle, AI as arbiter, AI as quant and AI as surrogate — after reviewing 100 papers, preprints, conference proceedings and books. Scientists should consider these cognitive ‘traps’ before embedding AI tools in their research.

Nature | 44 min read

Read more: Why scientists trust AI too much — and what to do about it (Nature editorial | 6 min read)

A well-structured prompt increases the likelihood of accurate text prediction in large language models and minimizes the compounding effect of errors, says psychologist Zhicheng Lin. Here are his tips for prompt engineering:

• Break down tasks into sequential components

• Provide examples and relevant context as input

• Be explicit in your instructions

• Ask for multiple options

• Instruct the model to roleplay, for example as a writing coach or a sentient cheesecake

• Specifying the response format such as reading level and tone

• Experiment a lot

Nature Human Behaviour | 13 min read

The ageing US electricity grid is struggling to keep up with skyrocketing demand from green-technology factories and the data centres that crunch the numbers for crypto, cloud computing and AI. “How were the projections that far off?” asks Jason Shaw from Georgia’s electricity regulator. “This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.” Already, the power crunch is delaying coal plant closures and it remains unclear who should pay for creating new power infrastructure. Some data-centre developers are hoping that off-grid small nuclear or fusion power plants will eventually solve the problem.

The Washington Post | 10 min read

Quote of the day

Software engineer Chet Haase’s joke sums up the problem of algorithmic recommendations: by guiding what we watch, read and listen to, they influence what gets made in the first place — a self-reinforcing cycle. (MIT Technology Review | 11 min read)

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