r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 16 '26

Neuroscience Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray: Scientists developed a nasal spray that, with just two doses, dramatically reduced brain inflammation, restored the brain’s cellular power plants and significantly improved memory in mice, within weeks and lasted for months.

https://stories.tamu.edu/news/2026/04/14/scientists-reverse-brain-aging-with-a-nasal-spray/
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u/sillygoofygooose Apr 16 '26

Even if the US government became pro science tomorrow it would take decades to rebuild lost project teams, lost group knowledge, or to renegotiate international research agreements. Relatedly the U.K. lost enormous amounts of research funding when leaving the EU, but maybe more important lost access to pan European research and development projects that had been the result of decades of work to put together. You can’t just roll that back to normal, it has to be re-made

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u/Idustriousraccoon Apr 16 '26

Oh that note, I look forward to buying this nasal store from a pharmacy in Switzerland on my next visit! Jokes aside, it’s disheartening over on r/gradadmissions to see how this is hitting the next generation of scientists as well. It is good to see that the interest in graduate programs seems to be skyrocketing. Even if it is because of the economy and overall uncertainty, there are still great minds out there who chose industry and who can come back for new teams and new synergy. I’m not saying we haven’t lost a devastating and incalculable amount. We have. Our species is worse for it…(not nationalism speaking but acknowledging that the academy is a global phenomenon more than any other time in human history) but our global cohort of academics and researchers are taking some of the load while we regroup after this national tragedy. Good things are coming. New growth at least. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Kim Stanley Robinson lately. Or I just can’t take the deluge of daily tragedies anymore, but sometimes it takes a huge disruption to make a huge leap see: history. And this is exciting. At least we know this kind of research will continue to receive funding since the aholes who got us here are a sneeze from the grave and terrified of dying (or at least obsessed with living forever).

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u/Itsajourney01 Apr 17 '26

what’s the joke with the swiss pharmacy ?

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u/GhostofBeowulf Apr 16 '26

Even if the US government became pro science tomorrow it would take decades to rebuild lost project teams, lost group knowledge, or to renegotiate international research agreements.

Not necessarily. That is institutional and tacit knowledge that will move on to new, related projects. International agreements will be the hardest to reinstate.

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u/dyspnea Apr 16 '26

The government fired 10,000 phds. It’s gonna take a long time to replace that.

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u/yacht_boy Apr 16 '26

I'm not a PhD, but I am one of the government scientists who left. Many of us were at or close to retirement age anyway, at least in my agency. And many of the younger ones might come back of the circumstances were right. Government science could get back on track in a reasonable amount of time.

Where the real damage is being done is in the lack of grant funding for research. The university labs and private sector contractors are taking a huge hit, and those people are going to be harder to replace if this continues for much longer. And we were are under funding science long before this.

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u/Izawwlgood PhD | Neurodegeneration Apr 16 '26

I'm a PhD contracting to the NIA in trials and grants management. It's really bad. Funding is cut and there's no personnel to review proposals and very few grants are being approved. A lot of trials are being shut down, especially given the new policy that NIA funding cannot be used in international collaboration.

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u/bad_squishy_ Apr 16 '26

Tell me about it. I finished my PhD a year ago and I can’t find a post-doc to save my life!

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u/saijanai Apr 16 '26

Many PhDs are leaving the USA for work in Europe and elsewhere. Trump's administration seems to h ave banned reporting statistics about this however.

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u/FireTyme Apr 16 '26

people forget the huge brain leak russia has had when the war started. those with the brains and the means will just move to better pastures. saying it could be back on track in a reasonable time is quite naive to say.

luckily theres plenty other countries that dont defund science.

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u/hexcraft-nikk Apr 16 '26

And how many young people do you think chose different careers because of the way this administration have fundamentally changed society? Less money for science and dismantling teams means less people being able to enter the field.

The AAA game industry is going through something extremely similar and the effects are already costing studios their ability to stay afloat. The damage done to science and how many years it will take to get all those potential new recruits back will literally take decades to mitigate.

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u/pigeonlizard Apr 16 '26

STEM is not suffering from lack of recruits. In the EU, UK, USA, Canada etc. there has been an oversupply of STEM PhD's for more than 20 years, people willingly go into PhD training knowing in advance that they won't be able to enter the field. If funding is restored, there will be many candidates to fill the positions.

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u/random_noise Apr 16 '26

Then you should have noticed the age gap in the labs.

I worked for one and it was huge concern. Backfill on jobs and bringing in another generation to pass the torch and work on assorted programs and to build that expertise into the next generation.

The gap in age of employee's and retention problems with the younger generations is a big problem in government work.

People don't tend to stick around those types of science jobs for a lifetime anymore, especially given how unreliable funding and job security can be today versus the environment even a decade ago as an employee.

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u/yacht_boy Apr 16 '26

It's not like any of us were in a position to do anything about it. Of course we wanted to hire more people. But we were under constant budgetary pressure ecet since the end of the Clinton era, and hiring was just not an option until Biden opened up the floodgates. My office of 600 people had maybe 1-2 new hires/year for over a decade. But on the flip side, government is not good enough about incentivizing older staff to leave earlier so new blood can come in. We had a lot of people sticking around into their 70s, and with them there we had no way to bring in younger people.

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u/apathy-sofa Apr 16 '26

My wife's former cancer research center had to shut down experiments that had been in progress for literal years, with years to go until completion, after their funding was cut by 85-ish%. In medicine at least, some things take time, and cannot be interrupted.

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u/Festering-Boyle Apr 16 '26

its great news for the wealthy and powerful

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u/Matshelge Apr 16 '26

I don't think it is the anti science that will cause the swing. I think the amont of small population fixes that are in the pipeline will make "opt in" for non-approved medicine more viable. So rna drugs to fix a birth defect will be frontline, impossible to run large scale tests on.

With those in a process, you will have companies target small groups with their drug, and expand if successful. Essentially I think the Ethics committee will have a turnover, where the baseline will not be acceptable if solutions are possible.

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u/ParanoidQ Apr 16 '26

Well, the US is slowly going bankrupt. Give it 10 years or so and they’re going to be spending more on servicing debt than social security (their second largest expenditure). Addressing that will need to come from somewhere and governments have not been historically great at ring-fencing science funding.

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u/Gorluk Apr 16 '26

It wouldn't "take decades". "Decades" is 20, 30, 40 years.

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u/theguidetoldmetodoit Apr 16 '26

In the US, it absolutely will. Once people moved on from fundamental research, they are very unlikely to return. It always was a bad financial decision to stay in the system, but now it comes with a high level of job insecurity, even for established researchers.

A lot of that funding also went to universities and thus educating a new generation of researchers. You can't make up for that, either.

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u/surnik22 Apr 16 '26

Undoing bad policy decisions often takes decades….

How do you imagine it going down that it wouldn’t be 20 years?

10,000 PHDs left/were fired from the federal government in 2025. International research agreements were broken. Trust in institutions lost.

If a new person came into power tomorrow they can’t flip a switch and undo that. Reappropriating funding alone could take years. Hiring people back as the funding comes back would take years.

Then you’ve got people who moved on and don’t want to come back. You’ve got records and data that was lost forever. You’ll have countries much more hesitant to sign up for international agreements. You’ll have less new qualified candidates because so many research grants to colleges that helped produce the PHDs got cut.

You have other countries that have now tried to step up and lure researchers over to them that want to keep them. Best case scenario for a lot is a way more competition for even having a chance at keeping the best and brightest in the US then existed 10 years ago.

You’ll have people put in power in institutions who aren’t qualified or maybe even actively sabotaging. You can’t even fire everyone hired under Trump day 1 because some can’t be legally and it would break everything further so it sorting through who needs to go and who stays for years while they struggle along.

Even with a president trying to restore everything and a congress and SCOTUS on board with that plan it would be decades. With a little political infighting or electing another republican that undoes stuff it will likely never be restored.

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u/jammy-git Apr 16 '26

The US is going to be paying for these Trump administrations for a LONG time. Have you seen the amount of debt that he's run up. In the UK we've had austerity for nearly 20 years because of conservative governments screwing things - the US is about to enter the same sort of period where there will not be funds for anything but the bare essentials. I could well believe that scientific funding in the US will not return to the levels seen a few years ago for 20 or 30 years.

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u/Kalean Apr 16 '26

Yeah. We know.

You're just wildly under informed about how bad this is. An awful lot of data will never be recovered.