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Category: In the Lab

As White House shifts focus toward AI and tech, U.S. science leaders defend role of the American university

BOSTON — This fall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where 95% of students are STEM majors, enrolled nearly 500 fewer graduate students — a 20% drop compared to 2024. The reduction is a direct result of a $100 million cut in federal research awards to the institution in that same timespan, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the STAT Summit Wednesday in Boston.

Graduate students are largely supported with these grants, and “if we admit someone, we don’t want them to be partway through their Ph.D. and run out of funding, so we tend to be conservative on the front end,” Kornbluth said. “I wish I had a crystal ball and knew when things were going to turn around, but for now we’re just being cautious.”

It’s not just MIT. Universities across the country have suspended or shrunk admissions to graduate programs in response to a tumultuous 18 months that have included unprecedented grant terminations, funding delays, and policy changes to how science is supported at the federal level. Even if the upcoming midterms usher in a power shift in Congress, it will do little to change the uncertainty faced by academic institutions regarding the reliability of the U.S. government as a science funding partner, particularly in light of a recently revealed plan for political appointees to gain more control over National Institutes of Health grantmaking decisions.

“We will go toe-to-toe with the best of them based on merit. If there are other elements that lead to being funded or not, we don’t have control of that and that concerns me,” Kornbluth said. “I think we just have to do our very best science and feel like that in the end will win the day, and the country needs that.”

Kornbluth was joined by Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, to argue for the model of American research that for the last 80 years propelled the U.S. to global dominance in science, technology, and medicine. First articulated by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 report “The Endless Frontier,” it involved sustained public funding of science at research universities and federal laboratories and a commitment to open inquiry.

While that model was showing signs of stagnation before the second Trump presidency, the last 18 months have shredded the social compact at its foundation. In its place, the administration has proposed a new blueprint for American innovation — one that is focused more narrowly on national priorities and a smaller role for the federal government in science funding.

At the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age summit last week, the Trump administration announced $6 billion in new national research investments, including support for the buildout of advanced computing facilities and autonomous laboratories, the development of nuclear powered spacecraft and next-generation quantum computers, and the creation of accelerated training programs in artificial intelligence and engineering. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios described the funding announcement as “the most transformative day for the American scientific enterprise since the reshaping of the federal research ecosystem following World War II.”

The investments mark the administration’s first steps to implement its vision for advancing U.S. innovation. Laid out in an OSTP report over the summer, it calls for a dramatic shift of hundreds of billions of research dollars from universities to industry — primarily AI and technology companies.

While there are roles for commercial entities as well as national labs to play in propelling science and innovation, Kornbluth said, what has very uniquely flourished at universities is the very basic end of the pipeline — the unpressured curiosity-driven research that has led to revolutionary discoveries including CRISPR gene editing, microRNA, and this year’s Nobel-winning work underlying the exploding field of optogenetics. “I worry that all of these moves, while they’ll have short term gains, are going to result in a serious drought in the pipeline … for us maybe five, 10 years down the line, but certainly for our children and their children’s children,” Kornbluth said.

It’s too soon to see the effects of these shifting priorities in research output indicators like top-tier journal publications, Thorp said. But he doubts the Trump administration’s push will do much to reverse the ongoing trend of the U.S. falling further behind its geopolitical rivals.

Even before the last 18 months of disruptions and delays to government investment, the U.S. was on its way to losing its place of prominence as the world’s largest public funder of science. Forecasts have put China on track to surpass the U.S. on research spending in the next two to three years. On the ground, that means buildings going up, more people going to graduate school, and a tangible sense of momentum.

“The atmosphere is just so much more pro-science there than it is here,” Thorp said, recounting a recent trip to China in which he sat down with presidents of several universities.

It’s getting results. Nine out of the top 10 academic research institutions are now in China, according to the latest data from the Nature Index, with Harvard University as the lone U.S. representative. A decade ago, American universities held half of the top 10 spots.

“Submissions from China continue to increase, not just in number but in quality,” Thorp said of the Science family of journals. To the point that, Science Advances, an open-access journal that is slightly less competitive than the flagship, is now publishing an equal number of papers from the U.S. and China. He expects the same to be true for Science within the next four to five years. “That’s the competitive effect that I don’t think the administration has very good answers for,” Thorp said. “At least when I write to them and ask them if they want to comment about it in my column, they never respond to me.”

How these dueling visions of research in America play out will in some ways be shaped by the outcomes of the next few elections. But science happens on a longer time scale, and both Thorp and Kornbluth pointed to the need of scientists and academics everywhere, regardless of who holds power in Washington, to confront the underlying political reality of rising populism and cratering trust in institutions.

Kornbluth highlighted a new initiative launched this month — MIT for America — which sends students and alumni out across the country to help under-resourced high schools teach math, computer science, and other STEM classes often required for admission into the kinds of college programs required to move ahead in the increasingly AI-centric U.S. economy. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” she said.

Thorp urged universities to follow MIT’s lead on getting rid of legacy admissions policies that give children of alumni an edge (which the university did decades ago). “It’s a huge part of why people are suspicious of higher education,” Thorp said. But he acknowledged that there’s only so much that institutions of all types can do to reverse the tide of populism, which has been growing for close to a century.

“My view is we have to accept the fact of what modernity has given us,” Thorp said. “Some people come to me as the editor of Science and think I have a big platform, and I’m sure they go to STAT and think STAT has a big platform, but compared to Mr. Beast, we’re off by three orders of magnitude. I can put all the cool videos and explainers and everything I want to on the Science social media accounts, which are the largest in academic publishing, and it’s not going to move the needle.”

October 14, 2026
Americans trust science more than peers around the world, survey shows

Americans have more trust in science than most of the rest of the world, according to a new survey of people in 140 countries, a finding that may seem difficult to explain in a country deeply divided by issues such as the benefits and harms of vaccines.

According to the newest edition of the Wellcome Global Monitor, 52 percent of Americans report having “a lot” of trust in science. Across the globe, that number is a mere 26 percent.

Americans, in aggregate, are also more eager to get vaccines compared to peer nations; 45 percent of Americans say they would want to get vaccines recommended by a nurse or doctor “right away.” In Germany only 28 percent say the same.

And while the share of people globally who agree that science benefits most people in their society has dropped from 42 percent in 2018 to 37 percent in 2025, the share of Americans who agree with that statement has actually increased from 48 percent to 57 percent.

But the aggregate statistics don’t tell the whole story. STAT’s analysis of the Wellcome data demonstrates that while America may, in general, appreciate and trust science, it is also far more divided than peer nations.

Take the religious divide: According to STAT’s analysis there was, on average, a 5 percentage point gap between the percentage of religious and non-religious people in high-income nations who said science benefits most people in their country. In the United States that gap was 24 percentage points.

A similar divide — 19 percentage points — separates urban and rural Americans on the question of science’s benefits. The divide across other high-income nations is just three points. Education level divides Americans as well — just 47 percent of Americans without four-year degrees reported believing that science benefits most people, compared to 71 percent of college grads.

Wellcome, a British foundation focused on scientific research, funded the survey in 2018, 2020 and 2025. The most recent version was administered as part of the Gallup World Poll through a combination of in-person, telephone and online surveys of more than 140,000 adults. The global findings were weighted “to ensure that global estimates accurately reflect the relative populations of countries in the survey.”

The survey does not offer an explanation for why the United States appears to be outpacing its peers on trust. But at least some of Americans’ seeming polarization may be explained by Americans’ tendency toward extremes.

Americans are “more extreme responders to public opinion surveys,” said Matthew Motta, an associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health who is an expert on public opinion research.

For example, a smaller proportion of Germans than Americans said they would “not get vaccines at all.” Only 8 percent of Germans were completely anti-vaccine, compared to 13 percent of Americans. Instead, the vast majority of Germans said they would “prefer to think about it for some time.”

The survey also showed that Americans who historically have been less trusting are not necessarily souring on science and its benefits. STAT’s analysis finds that the proportion of Americans who identify as religious and who believe science benefits most people increased by four percentage points, from 46 percent in 2018 to 50 percent in 2025. Self-reported religious Americans are also more likely to report an eagerness to be vaccinated when compared to peer countries.

A similar pattern plays out with Americans without four-year degrees. The percentage of non-college grads who say science benefits most people increased by three percentage points over that seven-year period, and they too are more likely than residents of peer nations with similar education to want vaccines right away.

So what is causing America’s growing divide over trust in science? The poll shows it is growing enthusiasm for science among highly educated, secular Americans. Both reported substantial increases in their appreciation of the benefits of science: 13 percentage points for college grads, and 15 percentage points for secular Americans over seven years, the Wellcome survey found.

In short, America is divided not because certain groups are souring on science, but because others are becoming more appreciative of its benefits.

That might seem like good news. But the divide nonetheless underscores that the benefits of science are not reaching a large swath of Americans in ways they can see and feel.

“People are feeling left behind, they are not understanding how this benefits me,” said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, which focuses on strengthening public health.

Some divisions facing Americans will be difficult to combat in a country as large and diverse as the United States. City dwellers with cancer who can access care at a top-rated university medical center will inevitably see science’s impact on their lives more than people in a rural area who might have to travel a great distance for even the most basic hospital care.

Wellcome found that trust in science is closely associated with confidence in a nation’s health care systems, which presents a problem for the United States as well. Just 40 percent of Americans reported a lot of confidence in U.S. hospitals and health clinics, the same proportion as in Portugal and Uruguay.

Anti-science sentiment coming from America’s top political officials is likely playing a role too, several experts said. Diverging views on science among America’s political parties became apparent during the Tea Party movement of the 2010s and was amplified during Trump’s presidency, said Yotam Ophir, an associate professor of communication at the University at Buffalo.

But experts STAT spoke to underscored that this new data doesn’t just indicate the need for the sorts of systemic changes that can take decades to fulfill. Scientists need to hone their ability to discuss the benefits of science in people’s everyday lives, and to stop expecting the public to blindly trust them, several experts told STAT.

“What we need to do is be better communicators, not better debaters. We are not going to be able to lecture people into trusting us,” Castrucci said.

Mark Henderson, Wellcome’s executive director of corporate affairs and engagement, said scientists who wish to take steps based on the report’s findings should “meet people where they are.”

“Approach people on a level with understanding and engagement and respect, and you’re going to get a better outcome,” Henderson added. “It’s not rocket science, but it often surprises me how hard people in the scientific community find it to do that.”

October 10, 2026
The fall of Roe dramatically changed abortion access. This researcher used Reddit to capture how

Betsy Pleasants was studying one historic disruption to abortion access when a more seismic one emerged.

In spring 2022, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Pleasants was researching the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on abortion services when a leaked draft opinion indicated that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. The court finalized its decision that June, ending the nearly 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion and ushering in an era of rapid change and increased state restrictions.

Working with her thesis committee, Pleasants, who is interested in expanding access to abortion and other reproductive health care, adapted her dissertation to study conversations on the social network Reddit. Her new focus was tracking emerging barriers to abortion access in real time and examining the role of online resources in connecting people with evidence-based health information and services.

“When it became clear that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned, we all agreed that we had to shift the project,” said Pleasants, now a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court decision “is something that required a response, and this project was positioned to offer timely insights into what this policy change means in people’s lives.”

Pleasants and her colleagues plumbed thousands of posts from the Reddit forum r/abortion using natural language processing (NLP) — a type of computational analysis used to identify patterns in human language — alongside a qualitative close reading of a subset of posts. Through this dual approach, grounded in safeguards for user privacy, Pleasants is defining a framework for using artificial intelligence tools without losing sight of the context, complexity, and people behind the data.

“We are in a complex policy moment for reproductive health,” said Pleasants, who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind. This type of research “is an act of documenting in an effort to work towards evidence-based policy change over time, and to advocate for the change that’s needed to promote access to reproductive health care.”

Findings by Pleasants and her colleagues reaffirmed well-established barriers to access, including high costs and limited appointment availability, while also revealing lesser-known challenges, such as delays in receiving abortion medications by mail, low credibility of online ordering platforms, and concerns about the legal risks of seeking abortion or related medical care.

“Embracing this opportunity and new methods was visionary,” said Ushma Upadhyay, professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, who mentored Pleasants during her doctoral research. “At the time, I didn’t know of any other studies using NLP to study online discourse on abortion. Most researchers will just take a random sample of a manageable number that they can analyze, and so this approach was really great because Betsy was able to get a more complete picture.”

For scientists like Pleasants, the value of NLP goes beyond making large-scale research more efficient. It offers a broader view of how people communicate and behave at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to capture.

“Computational research is like a stepping stool over a tall fence that lets you look at the other side and see everything that’s around you,” said Danny Valdez, associate professor of public health at the Indiana School of Public Health-Bloomington, who has employed NLP to study vaccine misinformation, addiction and recovery, and cancer care. “NLP, machine learning, and, increasingly, AI methods give you a 1,000-foot overview of how people communicate when they need help. You can learn a lot about the pulse of the nation, which helps us understand and inform where future policy could be headed.”

A new model for studying online discourse

Growing up in North Carolina, Pleasants got her first window into how people access health information, sparking an interest that would eventually shape her career. Even in Durham, a liberal core city of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, she recalled receiving abstinence-only sex education from a gym teacher. The contrast between the information she received at school and at home made her aware of how unevenly health knowledge and resources could be distributed.

“I saw peers and other people in the community navigating not having good sex education, not having access to desired health services, and stigma,” said Pleasants. “All of these things really shaped the capacity they had to make decisions for themselves about their reproductive health.”

Those early observations would become a throughline in Pleasants’ career, from earning her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina to completing her master’s and doctorate at UC Berkeley, and ultimately returning to UNC for her postdoctoral research.

Pleasants entered college with an eye on becoming a physician, but was instead drawn to medical anthropology and broader discussions of how history, politics, and culture have shaped, and continue to shape, the U.S. health care system.

“A big question that came up for me was: ‘Do I want to work within that system or do I want to critically engage with it?’” said Pleasants. “So, I ended up on this trajectory of research with an interest in asking questions of how we offer health services, particularly for women, and seeking to understand how we can make that better for all people as much as possible.”

Analyzing r/abortion while at Berkeley allowed Pleasants to capture perspectives often overlooked by conventional research methods. The platform’s relative anonymity gave people space to speak candidly about personal experiences they might hesitate to share elsewhere. And because most community members had not interacted with the health care system, their experiences would often be missed by practice-based analysis.

“Following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, a lot of people were turning to Reddit for support,” said Upadhyay.

Pleasants and her collaborators used NLP to analyze more than 7,000 posts from the months before, during, and after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision, identifying 55 distinct topics. Human oversight was integral throughout, both to validate the computational approach and to guide deeper qualitative analysis. The team closely examined posts within the identified topics to understand not only what people were discussing, but how they were navigating their experiences.

The research revealed a wide range of barriers to abortion care, from state bans, high costs, and long travel distances to stigma and lack of social support. It also surfaced emerging challenges, including delays receiving abortion medications by mail, uncertainty about the legitimacy of online services, and concerns about potential legal risks. The qualitative analysis provided further insight into the impacts of these barriers, including anxiety and isolation and, in some cases, the need to self-manage abortions.

The emphasis on human supervision also extended to protecting the privacy of Reddit users. As NLP and AI tools become more widely integrated into public health research, their use has fueled broader discussion, both within the research community and among the public, about the ethical use of online data. Pleasants said the stakes are particularly high in reproductive health research.

“We are studying issues that are, at minimum, sensitive and stigmatized, and in some cases even pose risks for prosecution,” she said. “This becomes even more complex when you’re working with publicly available data where people may not be aware that their posts could be used for research.”

To protect Reddit users, the team employed a “heavy disguise” process, replacing potentially identifiable posts with composite quotations that combined and rephrased similar experiences. The researchers then tested these composites using online searches and plagiarism-detection tools to help ensure they could not be traced back to their original sources.

Together, these practices have established a model for studying sensitive online discourse at scale.

“As this technology keeps getting faster and faster and faster, you do have very talented and forward-thinking researchers like Betsy, who are slowing things down and looking at how to make this as rigorous and concrete as possible through a very firm qualitative lens,” said Valdez, who was not involved in Pleasants’ research, though both have received funding from the Society of Family Planning. “We need work like Betsy’s that’s already acknowledged the difficulties of social media mining … and to show very high regard for the content that people are leaving on social media.”

Today, Pleasants said her research, which has now expanded to include contraception and misinformation online, has taken on greater urgency as shifting policies increasingly constrain access to reproductive health care. She noted that researchers, advocates, and clinicians in the field have long worked amid scrutiny and uncertainty.

“The importance of the research doesn’t lessen just because policies make the work harder. Rather, the opposite seems true right now,” she said.

October 9, 2026
Breast cancer can behave differently in older women. This physician is making more tailored treatments a reality

Of all the factors that can increase a person’s risk of breast cancer, age is among the most significant. Almost half of people diagnosed with breast cancer are at least 65, and about 20% are 75 or older. Despite these rates, older women are frequently excluded from clinical trials; one study of breast cancer trials found that only 9% of participants were 65 or older, leaving physicians with a poorer understanding of how drugs behave in older adults and fewer guidelines with which to treat them.

There’s increasing evidence that these patients could benefit from more tailored treatments. Neil Carleton, a cancer biologist and first-year resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that breast tumors can develop and grow differently in older patients than in younger ones because of hormone levels and inflammation.

“It can be a very heterogeneous disease,” Carleton said. But “historically, we’ve kind of treated all breast cancer the same,” he added — in a way that’s “age-agnostic.”

Carleton, who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind, wants to change that. After an M.D.-Ph.D. spent studying how clinicians can better treat tumors in older adults, he is now working to ensure that these patients receive care that is right for them, whether that means dialing back treatment or increasing it.

“We typically think an older adult may be a little bit more frail” or less able to tolerate standard surgeries and therapies, he said. “But I don’t even think it’s about that. I think it’s more about appropriately treating.”

Crafting the ‘nudge’

As an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, Carleton spent two summers working in a Johns Hopkins prostate cancer lab and was surprised to see surgeons making a point to attend the department’s journal club. On Wednesday mornings, as the urology group — basic scientists and physicians alike, in all stages of their careers — filed into the conference room to discuss scientific papers in the field, Carleton began to see how medicine and research were intertwined.

He’d been thinking about medical school since high school in Pittsburgh, when a formative biology teacher veered his lessons away from photosynthesis and toward anatomy, physiology, and new biotechnology — the kind of science that explained how human health really worked. The idea of a physician-scientist was completely new, and it felt like the right fit.

“I knew you could be a doctor, and I knew you could do research. I had no idea that you could kind of do both,” Carleton said.

When he started his M.D.-Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, Carleton began working in the lab of Adrian Lee and Steffi Oesterreich, a husband-and-wife team of breast cancer biologists who were enthusiastic about new ideas and had a robust track record of translational research. Lee remembers the intensity with which Carleton wanted to be involved in that kind of work. “We can go on doing basic research forever, but we would like to eventually impact patient care,” Lee said. “And you could tell that he wanted to do that.”

At the time, there were reports from surgeons and in the scientific literature that older women with breast cancer were being overtreated. The three started talking about the patients that would come to launch Carleton’s career and a body of work in Lee and Oesterreich’s lab. In 2020, under the guidance of Lee, Oesterreich, and surgeon Priscilla McAuliffe, Carleton set out to quantify how many patients were receiving a surgery called a sentinel lymph node biopsy.

When removing a tumor from a patient’s breast, surgeons sometimes make an incision in the armpit and take a small amount of lymph node tissue to see if the cancer has spread there. Though professional society guidelines recommended against performing this biopsy on women 70 or older with early-stage cancer, other groups had reported that it was still being done.

In data from the university medical center, Carleton found that about 65% of patients were still receiving biopsies. Rates actually continued to increase after the Society of Surgical Oncology adopted the guidelines in 2016, even though patients who received the biopsy were not more likely to survive or avoid recurrence. But “it can be very hard for surgeons to stop doing a surgery that’s kind of been ingrained in the paradigm for a while,” Carleton said.

How, then, could he and his colleagues convince surgeons to reconsider? They designed a “nudge” within the electronic health record — a pop-up that would appear in a provider’s schedule for a qualifying patient that would remind them to consider omitting the biopsy. They implemented the nudge in eight clinics across the community and, in a clinical trial, tracked biopsy rates. The year after the nudge, they decreased by almost half.

McAuliffe, now a breast cancer surgeon and clinical investigator at Emory University, said that surgeons encounter a lot of extraneous information in the electronic health record — but the nudge was simple. “I think that it reminded them without being a burden to them,” she said.

One surgeon, when surveyed, said that the nudge “did exactly what its job was,” urging physicians to think about biology rather than reflexively recommending the biopsy. “I had to keep in mind that complete care doesn’t always equate with better care,” they said.

The science behind a paradox

While in the clinic, Carleton began studying a years-old question in the lab. Most breast cancer cases in older women are estrogen-receptor positive (ER+), meaning that tumor cells have receptors that bind to estrogen and trigger cancer growth. By 85, 91% of women with breast cancer have ER+ disease, even though postmenopausal women have lower levels of circulating estrogen. Carleton wanted to know how those tumors managed, seemingly paradoxically, to thrive.

Looking at the gene expression in tissue from patients and healthy controls, Carleton and his colleagues found that the patients produced more of an enzyme involved in converting estrone — a form of estrogen that circulates in the bloodstream in postmenopausal women — to estradiol, its more potent version, within the tumor’s environment.

Scientists had known for 20 years that tumors made their own estrogen but didn’t know how it was done, Lee said. The enzyme Carleton identified was more than a mechanistic insight — it created a druggable target. In 3D models the lab made from patient cells, inhibiting the enzyme blocked estrogen conversion.

Currently, doctors often treat postmenopausal women with ER+ tumors with inhibitors of a different enzyme. The drugs cause side effects like fatigue and joint pain, which lead many patients to stop treatment prematurely. Though the work is still early, Carleton hopes that drugs targeting the process they identified, administered through a gel or patch, could treat or even prevent breast cancer with fewer side effects. “I think it opens up possible therapeutic interventions,” he said.

‘Refining what we do’

When looking through patient data early in his degree, Carleton noticed that some women ages 70 and older were forgoing surgery — not only the biopsy, but also a procedure to remove the main tumor in the breast. In this group, only 3% died of breast cancer after six years, and about 91% had their tumors controlled with primary endocrine therapy, which blocks estrogen receptors on ER+ breast cancer to prevent its growth.

If you could identify those patients for whom endocrine therapy might be enough treatment and monitor them, both the patient and their surgeon might be more comfortable with scaling back surgery, Lee said. “Precision medicine doesn’t mean doing more,” he said. “It means refining what we do, and sometimes refining what we mean we do means doing less.”

While others might have missed the dozens of patients that hadn’t had any surgery among the thousands that did, Lee said, Carleton has a knack for noticing small details. And in September 2021, he uncovered a way to potentially track disease in patients who might not need surgery.

Sitting in a talk at a local conference, Carleton learned about circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), which cancer cells release into the bloodstream and can be measured to survey tumor growth. Natera, a molecular diagnostics company, had designed an assay that seemed perfect for older patients who’d declined surgery in favor of endocrine therapy: It required only a blood sample and could be done through a mobile blood-drawing service that came to their homes. Carleton and Lee approached Natera and, in the months afterward, designed a clinical trial to test whether they could use ctDNA to watch and identify patients at risk of progression.

“It’s not an easy trial to recruit to — to say to someone, ‘Hey, you have breast cancer, but we’re not going to cut it out,’” Lee said.

But Carleton “has an amazing ability to kind of get the message across and encourage people,” Lee said, and put in hours with patients and physicians to earn their trust. Carleton was surprised by how many older adults were thrilled to join a trial that would guide not only their care, but the treatment of others going forward. “I think it was kind of one of the first times they were even approached to join a study,” he said.

Over the next few years, the team studied patients who decided against surgery with Natera’s assay and ultrasound imaging. Patients with detectable ctDNA at six months were 30 times more likely to progress in their disease during the study, suggesting ctDNA was a marker of potential progression. And indeed, no patients with undetectable ctDNA before endocrine therapy progressed.

The ‘closer’

Today, as a first-year resident in Boston, Carleton spends most of his time treating patients. But he stays engaged with research: with the students in Lee and Oesterreich’s lab continuing to study the estrogen-converting enzyme, and with projects like designing a larger ctDNA trial. Lee and Oesterreich, with whom he still has regular check-ins, call him a “closer” — someone who takes on projects and sees them through to completion, synthesizing complex data from basic science and clinical practice into an understandable whole. “He has the complete package,” Lee said.

Ultimately, Carleton hopes this work can help patients receive care without frequent trips to the clinic — turning breast cancer “into more of a chronic disease,” he said, where a patient might just take a daily pill and have regular imaging or ctDNA tests.

Of course, Carleton said, not every patient will want that, and people with aggressive disease may need every intense treatment, test, and appointment. But better tools can help doctors identify: Who can be the patient they send home?

October 8, 2026
STAT+: In small trial, optogenetics restores some vision lost to retinitis pigmentosa
Nobel-recognized technology is being explored for safety and clinical potential
Optogenetics involves genetically engineering specific brain cells to increase their sensitivity to light.CAROL AND MIKE WERNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.

Retinitis pigmentosa is a genetic disorder that causes degeneration of the light-sensing cells in the retina. Generally diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence, patients gradually lose peripheral and night vision, often becoming legally blind by young adulthood.

With the exception of a subset of patients who present a specific genetic mutation and can be treated with gene therapy, there is no cure for the condition. Cases are addressed by measures to slow degeneration and preserve what is left of the vision.

Optogenetics — the technology just recognized with a Nobel Prize — could offer hope, according to a new paper published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.
October 7, 2026
2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded for ‘mirror image’ molecule research, with impact on pharmacology

Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai were awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for discovering how to manipulate “mirror image” molecules, paving the way for manufacturing more precise and safer drugs.

Kagan, 95, of the Université Paris-Sud in France, and Soai, 76, of Tokyo University of Science in Japan, solved a chemical mystery: Some molecules exist in the world that are mirror images of one another. This is a phenomenon known as chirality, from the Greek word for hand (as hands are mirror images of one another). Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are among chiral molecules, and a living organism can only contain one of the versions. The other mirror molecule is found rarely elsewhere in nature. More than half of clinically employed drugs are chiral, so understanding how this imbalance of two mirrored molecules occurs had crucial relevance for pharmacology.

As the Nobel Committee puts it, imagine needing to make copies of a set of keys, but when you try to make them, you get both the key that correctly fits the lock, and a mirror image of it. It’s very hard to distinguish which is which, so you risk trying the wrong key into the lock.

The stakes are much higher if that key is a drug: when chemists develop new drugs, they often end up with some of their chiral versions, too. Sometimes, the mirror molecule does something completely different from what it was originally intended to — take novrad, a cough medicine, and darvon, a painkiller, which are chiral molecules (hence their mirror names, too). Other times the mirror molecule can cause serious side effects.

Still, drugs are typically sold as so-called “racemates” containing an equal mixture of both molecules, and prior to Kagan and Soai ,it was pretty much the only option, as chemists had not found a way to produce a molecule without its chiral version in equal parts.

That changed with the scientists’ “discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis,” as the Nobel Committee described it. In 1986, Kagan found a way to manipulate chemical reactions so that they produced more of one type of mirror images. Seventeen years later, Soai was finally able to develop an experiment that created only one of the two variants, creating a chiral molecule out of a non-chiral combination of molecules for the first time “since the dawn of life.”

“This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, referencing the Soai reaction.

From a pharmaceutical point of view, this opened the door to the creation of chiral drugs containing only the necessary version of the molecule, achieving greater precision and lower side effects.

“I’m very excited to receive this very nice news about the Nobel Prize,” said Soai, calling into the award ceremony at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, from his native Hiroshima, Japan. “Of course this is one of the most exciting days of my life. I am very glad to share the award with professor Kagan.”

There have been 202 award winners since the first chemistry prize was awarded in 1901, of which 8 have been women. However, only 200 individuals won the award, as both Frederick Sanger and Barry Sharpless have been awarded twice. The youngest recipient was 35, the oldest 97.

The award has been given 118 times: 63 times to a single individual, and has been shared among two winners 26 times, and among three (the maximum allowed by the Nobel statute) 29 times.

The winners will receive 12 million Swedish Kronor (SEK), or roughly $1.2 million.

The medicine and physics prizes were awarded earlier this week.

October 7, 2026
STAT+: Nobel-winning optogenetics research has led to experimental treatments for blindness and Alzheimer’s

Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.

It is probably impossible to overstate how complex a brain is: A network of billions of intertwined neurons forming an intricate anatomy, capable of working on the millisecond scale to perceive reality, detect sensations, create plans, and take actions.

“All of this is incredibly complicated, and so of course the challenge that we face as neuroscientists and as physicians treating brain disorders is how can we hope to make headway without tools that match the complexity and the precision of the brain?” said Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher who on Monday won the 2026 Nobel Prize for Medicine, alongside German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel, for work developing such tools.

“Our perception of reality and all our inner subjective states come from cells, and so the appropriate tool that would be matched to how the brain works would be something that was fast and could be targeted to individual cells or individual types of cells,” he said in an interview after the announcement.

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October 5, 2026
2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for brain research tool called optogenetics

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics,” the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden announced on Monday.

Deisseroth, 55, a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University; Hegemann, 72, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin; and Nagel, 73, a professor at the University of Würzburg, Germany, developed a method that uses light, combined with genetic modifications of neurons, to switch on or off individual cells in a living brain. This makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behavior in the brain, and is being studied as a treatment for disease.

The work started in the early 1990s at the Max Planck Institute, when Hegemann wondered how a single-cell green alga called Chlamydomonas could swim toward light. Teaming up with Nagel, they discovered the answer: a protein called channelrhodopsin, a light-sensitive ion channel in the cell membrane that rapidly opened when exposed to light. They found that this protein worked in any cell they injected it in.

Deisseroth then introduced the gene for the protein into nerve cells from rats, making it possible to trigger a nerve signal in the living brain with blue light and enabling scientists to identify what cells are responsible for what functions, and which are connected to one another.

“Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

Deisseroth spoke with STAT shortly after the announcement. “When you think about light in science or light in medicine, you think of it as an observational tool. It’s a way to collect information. But with optogenetics, it’s the complete opposite of that,” he said. “We’re not using light to collect information, we’re using light to cause things to happen … it’s using light to turn cells on or off with that millisecond precision and the cellular resolution that is essential to brain function.”

The committee was able to reach all three winners. “It was after midnight, and I was just drifting off to sleep. It was a very unexpected, but of course very delightful call,” said Deisseroth, who was the first of the three recipients to be notified of the award. He said he hasn’t yet had a chance to speak with the others, though he “really look forward to seeing my co-laureates and talking with them.”

When informed of the shared award, “all three said the same thing, that they thought it was absolutely wonderful to receive the prize with the other two; they called them ‘my friends,’” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary for the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

“These are two people who have been frequent collaborators of mine,” Deisseroth said. “We’ve written multiple papers together, and sort of shared this journey of discovery over many years. We met at conferences, met each other’s families, shared beers at meetings and talked — as scientists do — about the things that interest them, the things that are surprising, big picture details and everything in between. I couldn’t be happier than to share this with these two friends.”

As often happens in science, others contributed to the creation of optogenetics, though were not named by the committee.The Nobel rules limit the award to no more than three collaborators. Deisseroth nodded to the community of scientists who worked with him and his co-laureates to make their advances possible. “We have so many collaborators, colleagues, and students and postdoctoral fellows in the lab over the years,” said Deisseroth. “It’s been a very broad community, and so many things had to be solved to make everything work and to make the discoveries happen.”

On social media, many commentators noted Ed Boyden, who was the first author on Deisseroth’s landmark 2005 paper and a Ph.D. student in his lab, should not have been excluded. Boyden, now at MIT, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Nobel committee mentioned several other researchers in its background information, including Austrian neurophysiologist Gero Miesenböck, who achieved the first genetic sensitization to light of nonphotoreceptive neurons in 2002, and Zhuo-Hua Pan a vision scientist at Wayne State University in Detroit, who in 2004 successfully tried channelrhodopsin in ganglion cells, which became responsive to the light.

His work was recognized through a $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health, with the comment that it was a “quite an unprecedented, highly innovative proposal, bordering on the unknown.” But a paper showing the outcome of his research, initially submitted by the end of 2004, didn’t find a publication until 2006, when Deisseroth and Boyden’s paper had already made waves.

The committee chair declined to comment on the reasons behind selecting the winners.

Jeremy Berg, former editor-in-chief of the journal Science and a former NIH institute director, told STAT, “I have followed Karl Deisseroth’s career since he received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award as an assistant professor in 2005. He proposed a vision for optogenetics that was quite compelling and he has developed his ideas remarkably ever since. His work displays the power of engineering approaches with a deep knowledge of human physiology.”

Berg added, “I am not at all surprised that his work has ended up with a Nobel Prize. That seemed plausible even during his Pioneer interview in 2005.”

Don Hilgemann, a biophysicist at the UT Southwestern, mentored Nagel in 1991 and 1992. “Georg showed real pioneer spirit in applying the methods I had developed. He was an extremely adventurous experimenter who could quickly master difficult, technically challenging methods,” he said in a note to STAT.

There have been 235 award winners since the first medicine prize was awarded in 1901, of which 14 have been women. The youngest recipient was 31, the oldest 87.

The award has been given 117 times: 40 times to a single individual, and has been shared among two winners 36 times, and among three (the maximum allowed by the Nobel statute) 41 times.

The winners will receive 12 million Swedish Kronor (SEK), or roughly $1.2 million.

This story has been updated with comments from Karl Deisseroth.

October 5, 2026
NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily

Finding information from the National Institutes of Health about human health, disease, and biomedical research is about to look a lot different. On Monday, the NIH will unveil a new version of its website that shifts attention away from individual institutes and centers and towards eight thematic hubs focused on health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants.

Agency officials say the redesign — which is part of an ambitious project to consolidate the NIH’s digital footprint — is intended to streamline what was a sprawling and fractured information ecosystem, requiring users to understand the NIH’s organizational structure, into an intuitive experience that more closely reflects what type of information people seek out most often.

The goal, said Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, is “to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find.”

The beta version, which was soft-launched this week, is still under development and will continue to evolve in the coming months, NIH officials told STAT. Some functions, including search, do not yet appear to be operational. During this transition period, NIH’s existing websites will remain available. They will be sunset on a rolling basis “as critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place,” Fine told STAT.

Researchers who study science communication and science misinformation say the overhaul is a welcome development. “It was badly needed,”said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and former director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Trying to find something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist.”

Over the past few decades, the NIH’s digital footprint had ballooned to include more than 700 separate websites — often with different, non-connecting backend architectures and hosting platforms — stretching across millions of webpages. Information was duplicated across five or six locations, sometimes appearing in slightly different configurations. Its potential for creating confusion became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the public turned to the NIH and other federal science agencies for guidance and information about the fast-moving public health crisis.

“It became a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn’t evident pre-Covid,” said Hall Jamieson.

Spurred by the pandemic, the NIH began to develop its first-ever five-year strategic communications plan in 2022 under President Biden. Working groups made up of more than 70 staffers from communications offices spread across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers came up with a plan to streamline the hundreds of NIH-owned websites to just one per institute. This massive undertaking was set to be phased over five years, starting in 2025.

That plan, which was never published but which was obtained by STAT, was scrapped when the Trump administration came in and fired hundreds of communications staffers as part of a government-wide reduction in the federal workforce. As a result of the layoffs and mass cancellation of contracts in early 2025, millions of NIH websites have been effectively frozen for nearly 18 months. That created a sense of urgency for the remaining dozen or so communications employees tasked with pushing forward website consolidation under the new administration.

Fine said her team worked to develop a data-driven process to better understand the path people take to NIH websites and how they navigated them once there. That helped them identify where people were getting stuck and the most highly sought after and frequently accessed information. The content on the new site is taken directly from health information from existing NIH websites, Fine said.

The consolidation, once complete, will reduce the number of NIH-owned websites from more than 700 to a single, fully connected web environment.

October 2, 2026
What it’s like to wait for the call from the Nobel Prize committee

Some 20 years ago, Mary-Claire King was asked to hold a seminar at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

The invite, the geneticist soon learned, was code for: You are being considered for a Nobel Prize. She traveled to Sweden, held the seminar, then spoke about her work with interested experts who she later understood to be the prize committee.

She couldn’t have been too surprised: Her work has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and changed cancer therapy.

In 1994 and 1995, King, then a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that breast and ovarian cancer could be hereditary, and identified that mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes dramatically increased the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

There is actionable power in this knowledge: Women who test positive for the mutations can have preventive mastectomies, or get their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed. Many have decided to do so, and preventive surgeries have reduced cancer mortality for thousands of women.

Naturally, when Nobel Prize predictions are made, King’s name is often on the list. Ahead of this year’s announcements, starting with the medicine and physiology prize on Monday, STAT spoke to her about what it feels like to be a finalist of sorts in the highest-profile intellectual competition in the world. Now 80 and at the University of Washington, she also talked about her work, her advice to young women scientists, and her favorite mantra — which she invented.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

So, the Nobel announcement is next week.

Oh, my God, it’s next week already. I can’t believe it.

Your name has been among the possible winners for many years. Do you have a routine? Do you set an alarm to check the winner?

I think if it were at any time other than truly the middle of the night, I might. But I’m on the Pacific Coast, so it is the middle of the night.

It’s not worth setting an alarm for 2 a.m. in the morning?

It’s not that it’s not worth it! It’s just that it’ll still be there, and the chances of any one year are extremely low.

Still, it’s hard to predict.

That’s true. The year that Katalin Karikó won [with Drew Weissman for work that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines], I think, was the most predictable. I mean, she saved the planet, it’s hard to argue that anything else could have surpassed that. It was the world’s largest experiment. But my guess would be GLP-1 this year.

It must be an interesting process. It’s certainly a tiny filter, and there’s a lot of stochastic features involved.

Do you remember the first time that you heard your name among the possible winners?

It was when they invited me to the Karolinska Institutet to give a seminar. They were very open about saying that they do this with people who are under consideration, and that anyone in this position should bear in mind that these things take years to sort through, and they just want to have the information and be able to talk to us personally.

I had a lovely time. I gave a seminar. I interviewed with what I’ve now recognized in retrospect are the members of the committee, and it was fine. There was no feedback.

That was the first time I realized that it was even a possibility.

What were the discussions like?

It varies a lot within the course of the visit. I think it’s largely about the personality of the individual and their belief in the work and their knowledge about the work. In my case, the individual discussions ranged from totally fascinating with someone who totally understood the work … and then another person who was very open about being skeptical about how genetics could possibly solve such a problem. He was extremely polite, absolutely delightful, and charming — but very skeptical.

In a way it’s like going for any other interview: You just have to be prepared for a variety of levels of skepticism and questioning. It was an interesting experience.

What does it feel like to know your work is so impactful that not only does it get noticed by the Nobel Committee, but becomes common knowledge?

I don’t think that scientists are necessarily aware of how important the positive impact that we have on other people is. It just boosts you. It just makes you feel so much stronger and so much more confident and so much more able to continue in rough patches, of which there are of course many.

It’s been a half-century now that I’ve been working on this, and I think when it comes up it’s more like a secret handshake. Thousands of women, or their husbands, fathers, brothers write to me for clarification, for information. It’s a huge network of women all over the world, multiple languages which I don’t speak, and we work together on this.

I got a letter a few years ago, which I’ll treasure forever, from a woman. It was a physical letter, just a note on a little piece of paper and with a photograph of her and her daughter. She said, “My mother died of breast cancer when I was 14. It was way before testing. I’ve since discovered I have a mutation in BRCA1. I’ve had the necessary surgeries. I have not had breast or ovarian cancer. As you see, my daughter just graduated from high school: I thought you’d like to know.” What can you say? I was in tears. I’m in tears telling you about it.

So that’s it, it’s a secret handshake, and we all know what it means, and we can help each other out.

You went into a line of work that didn’t have many women in it, and did work that benefited, first and foremost, women. You encouraged female scientists, and advocated for greater diversity in the field. What do you think of the state of women in research now?

An enormous amount has changed for the better. We are a far greater proportion of the research pool. We’re a far greater proportion of senior faculty. We’re a far greater proportion of policymakers in the health arena.

What hasn’t changed is that the time of a woman’s life when she has small children is the same as the time of her life when her career is getting off the ground, and until we accept that responsibility as a society and have structured high-quality subsidized childcare, it’s not gonna be equal. It’s simply not.

But over the years, generation after generation, what I tell younger women is that careers are long, and children grow up quickly. So it’ll be OK if you just do what you can now. But as one physician-scientist said to me, “All that’s true, but while they’re growing up, there’s a lot going on [in the lab].”

What is your advice for young scientists — perhaps women — looking to make a big discovery, something that can change the course of medicine, as you did?

What’s most important is picking problems that are important to you. That will, for many of us, be problems that are important to many people — but they have to be important to you, they have to involve ways of thinking and experiment approaches that appeal to you, that you like doing every day.

I think that’s the way to go because these things have a way of growing. What begins as a small problem becomes a larger problem and a larger problem and a larger problem, and if you still like it, and if it still seems plausible, stick with it and and accept the encouragement from people who care, both people who might be affected by it and, especially at the beginning, people that you see every day, that are right there in the lab with you.

When did you start realizing how major your discovery was going to be for medicine?

It was quite abrupt, because the whole time I was working on the problem, it was a 17-year period. I came out of evolutionary biology and genetics, and then when it was clear that that way of thinking applied just fine to proving that breast cancer was inherited, and furthermore there was a gene, and furthermore, here’s where it was — that was a huge creative leap. And as soon as that happened, all sorts of people who cared about breast cancer from a medical perspective as well as genetics realized its importance. And that’s when I did too.

You have done a lot of work since the BRCA discoveries. What is it like, emotionally and intellectually, to continue doing research after you’ve found something this big?

It’s something I think about a lot. One can apply the same way of thinking with new tools to problems that are as old as people but haven’t been tackleable before. My favorite mantra — which I confess to having invented — is, genetics is a way of thinking, genomics is a set of tools, so then problems that one can tackle are ever more challenging. The kinds of approaches that we can use now are just fabulous. We can ask genetic questions that we could not have asked even a decade ago, or three years ago.

And then, within the area of inherited predisposition to cancer, where do I see myself having a long-term niche? I think that’s in two ways. One is a kind of public-facing way. But the other is in what I’m really good at, which is figuring out how to use genetics in really tricky areas, and we still do that a lot.

When this [the BRCA discovery] clearly became a major issue in medicine, and far greater than I would have ever guessed, Bernie Fisher, who was the father of modern breast cancer treatment, said to me: “You’re not going to be able to control this. You need to, on the one hand, let it go, but on the other hand, be there for people when they have questions.”

What are you working on now in your lab?

I have a nice group, and we’re all all involved in all our projects. We’re working on de novo mutations in schizophrenia, we’re working on expanding repeats in bipolar disorder, we’re working on cryptic mutations, structural variations leading to inherited predisposition to breast and other cancers. We’re working on congenital abnormalities.

It’s a wide swath.

October 2, 2026