The Trump administration’s assault on research institutions threatens countless people’s livelihoods and security at all levels of the country’s scientific enterprise. Non-government researchers, students, professors, postdoctoral fellows, and even researchers funded by private foundations — all face radical changes to their careers and risk indefinite detours to their life’s work.
I recently caught up with Max Kozlov, a science reporter at Nature who has been all over these regressive policies. We spoke about an important distinction between public and private institutions, compliance, resistance, and his experience reporting on the crisis.
The following is a transcript of our conversation edited for clarity.
Sequencer: What has it been like in the Nature newsroom these days?
Kozlov: It's been difficult to keep up with the deluge of all the news that's coming out. Our US team is pretty small. We have about four or five full-time reporters, and they're all wonderful but it does mean that we can't do every single story. We have to pick and choose what's most important to scientists and to our readership.
I'm a young journalist. I partially became a reporter because of the first Trump administration, wanting to contribute in reporting and how science is covered. I hadn't really experienced that urgency in the last few years, but in the last three weeks it's definitely been reawakened.
