Science, Interrupted - What happens after?

Dr. Patrick Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Amy Lansky, and Dr. Lisa M. Lee, our guest editors come together and explore the Annals of Epidemiology’s special issue: ‘what happens to science that is abruptly cut short?’ This episode explores what our guest editors are looking for and their expectations when science is interrupted.

The Editorial: Science, Interrupted was published in the September 2025 Issue (Vol. 109) of Annals of Epidemiology, find more here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1047279725001760 

For instructions on how to submit to the special issue, click the following link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/324263/science-interrupted

Episode Credits:

• Executive Producer: Sabrina Debas (Episodes 1-18) and Sofina Tran (19-)
• Technical Producer: Paula Burrows
• Annals of Epidemiology is published by Elsevier
  
  
  

Transcript

Patrick Sullivan 0:11

Hello, you're listening to EPITalk Behind the Paper, a monthly podcast from the Annals of Epidemiology. I'm Patrick Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the journal, and in this series we take you behind the scenes of some of the latest epidemiologic research featured in our journal. Today we're here with our editorial team for the special issue, Science, Interrupted. I'm so happy to welcome Dr. Lisa M. Lee and Dr. Amy Lansky. Welcome.

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 0:44

Thank you. It's so wonderful to be here, Patrick.

Dr. Amy Lansky 0:46

Thanks for having us, Patrick.

Patrick Sullivan 0:48

So this special issue is really going to be built around an organizing question, which is what happens to science that's abruptly cut short. Our focus is on maximizing the value of prematurely terminated studies and understanding the epidemiologic, methodological, and ethical challenges that arise when science is interrupted. In this episode, we'll explore what kinds of papers Drs. Lee and Lansky are looking for for this special issue, and we'll think a little bit about what the implications are for interrupting science. So, first I'll introduce our guests. Dr. Lisa M. Lee is the senior associate vice president for research and innovation and a professor of public health at Virginia Tech. She's the former executive director of President Obama's National Bioethics Commission and held several leadership positions at the CDC during her 14-year career there. She's an infectious disease epidemiologist and public health ethicist whose research interests include building ethics competence and confidence among public health practitioners and STEM researchers. Dr. Amy Lansky retired in 2025 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with 30 years of service. Her work at CDC focused on evidence synthesis for public health guidelines and HIV prevention. She's an adjunct instructor at the University of North Carolina's Gilling School of Global Public Health. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I'm looking forward to our discussion.

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 2:13

Great. Thanks, Patrick. It's very exciting to be here.

Dr. Amy Lansky 2:16

Thanks so much, Patrick, for having us on EPITalk. I'm really glad to be here today.

Patrick Sullivan 2:22

All right, so today we're going to talk about this special issue. And as you know, and maybe some of the listeners and authors know, we have these special issues in annals of epidemiology, which are often about like a public health area topic, a health promotion topic, or a disease area topic. But in this case, we're going to have a special issue about science interrupted. So, Lisa, can you just start us off by talking about why this issue of interrupted science is important?

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 2:49

Yes, happy to. Thanks, Patrick. And I'm delighted to be here with Amy to discuss these really critical issues in EPI and public health generally. So science interrupted, this special issue of Annals of EPI, was a result of several conversations with colleagues early last year that I have had, we all had with folks who experienced funding stoppages on critical public health research projects. We started thinking about what are all the complexities around stopping studies with no good reason. And, you know, there are impacts clearly on participants, but there are also impacts on researchers and on the public. And what we were hoping to do was our goal with this is to document some of these effects of what many scientists are calling capricious and harmful approaches to cutting research funding. There was an interesting piece, and just to highlight how important this is, there was an interesting piece in Nature recently by Max Kozlov and colleagues that really provided a stunning graphical view of the stopped science in the first year of this administration's term. And it shows that in 2025, for example, more than 7,800 grants were suspended or cut. And this 5,800 of these were at NIH and about 2,000 at the National Science Foundation. And some of these were huge multi-center, multi-year grants that affected large groups of researchers. Others were smaller grants that affected, you know, a handful of researchers. Nonetheless, they affected, as I said earlier, participants, researchers, and the public. So some of the grants were reinstated after several weeks or months of interruption, a little bit of chaos and uncertainty. But the remaining frozen grants represent nearly one and a half billion dollars of unspent funds. That means one and a half billion dollars of taxpayer-funded science left on the table. So we thought that this was really important topic to talk about all of these impacts of this discuss.

Dr. Amy Lansky 4:55

I would add on there too, that the special issue offers a venue, right? Like a place to bring together and showcase the adverse impacts of these actions, the stopping, you know, in some cases, restarting, those impacts on data, on ethics, and overall on the body of knowledge in various areas of science and research.

Patrick Sullivan 5:24

Those are all such critical dimensions and harms that I think we need to document at this point. I mean, we we would love to have averted them. We would love for those harms to not happen. But I think as scientists, part of our opportunity and obligation now is to document them and to try to understand them. So I think that the title of the special issue, Science Interrupted, is a little bit provocative. But I wonder to get concrete about it, what

What Science Interrupted Really Means

Patrick Sullivan 5:50

does it mean and what are the ways in which scientific research might be interrupted?

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 5:55

Um, Patrick, I think that's a really good question because we it isn't new that science gets interrupted. What's new here is the reason that the science has been interrupted. So there are many things that can disrupt research before it's a planned conclusion or before the study is finished. And in the past, studies have been stopped because the science itself has dictated that the risks of doing the study outweigh the benefits. So this can happen, for example, if a study is stopped because early results are just knocked out of the park, they're way better than expected. And a data safety monitoring board or DSMB says, stop the study. We know this works, and we need to get the control group to gain access to this effective treatment. So that's a good way studies can be stopped. Or the opposite can happen. An intervention might show no effect very early. And if the risks are really high, a study might be stopped because of futility. We don't love when that happens, obviously, but it's better to know earlier rather than later when the risks are high. So in some instances, we have to stop for those reasons. And rarely, but it does happen, studies can also be stopped if there is an unanticipated harmful outcome that happens and that it just again, the risks of the study far outweigh the potential benefits. And then the kind of the last usual reason we can see this happen is if researchers can't recruit enough participants to show an effect, if they can't get their power, so to speak. So those are some reasons that in the past research has been stopped. And there are ways to approach, you know, how to manage or mitigate the harms of that stoppage. For this special issue, though, that we're talking about today, we're focusing on the science that was interrupted as a result of this capricious discontinuation of federally funded research by the Trump administration. What we want to do is provide a place for scientists to report in a rigorous and objective way the impacts of this kind of interruption. We haven't seen this kind of interruption in the past. So we're really interested in how is this the same or different, or how are the impacts the same or different for these other things that we've seen science be stopped for.

Dr. Amy Lansky 8:13

So to me, one of the key aspects of thinking about science being interrupted is that it was stopped abruptly. And the science might be started again, right? We've talked about a temporary interruption, and that can cause all kinds of chaos to stop. And again, having confusion and chaos at the restart. Or you can permanently end a study, which can cause problems. I think particularly when it's not an orderly shutdown. I think in some of the examples that Lisa gave, yes, there are these studies that might be stopped, but they would have an orderly shutdown. And this abrupt stopping, I think, has long-lasting and wide-ranging effects. And these are the issues that we're trying to see highlighted in the special issue. It's not looking for a series of horror stories about what happened, but rather a thoughtful documentation of the affected studies and the effects of those interruptions.

Patrick Sullivan 9:23

Yeah, I mean, I guess I see two pieces to this. One is that if there's some knowledge, even if the accrual was cut short, even if the power is too small, there's still the respect for the sort of participation and obligation to make the best of what's available. Maybe it generates point estimates of something, but there's not enough follow time to make a conclusion about significance of it. So I think this idea of, in the spirit of honoring that participants have chosen to participate, that tax dollars have been invested, that people have dedicated a part of their career to do this, what knowledge can be retrieved from the information that's there while recognizing that it would have been a better investment to continue and get definitive answers, but we don't want to abandon the knowledge that can be taken away from what was actually done.

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 10:11

Yeah, I think Patrick, that that's a great point, and Amy too, that you know, the idea here is what can we salvage out of this one and a half billion dollars of research, knowledge, and experience and creation that's being left on the table. And I think what we want this to be is a venue that people can put as much as they can get out of what's been stopped out there so we can salvage what knowledge we can gain from that, not just for their own ability to publish their work, but to further science, because we all know science is a team sport. We all build on what previous researchers have done. And perhaps there's something out there that's really innovative and great and helpful that just couldn't be finished, but could really spur on the next step in that line of research. So that's really what we're looking for.

Patrick Sullivan 11:00

I mean, it is such a great point. And it's part of the scientific enterprise that like we have a responsibility to put out what we know. Like there's a similar discussion around publishing negative findings. Like, why do we do that? Like there's a perception that some journals might not want to publish negative findings. Well, one, it repeats people from doing it again. And two, there might be some directional knowledge about associations that didn't make it to significance because of sample size or other factors that really helps people think about what to do next. So I think there is an ethical obligation to share information that's been collected when we've asked people to give their time, their tissues, their, you know, whatever it is that their health information, whatever it is that's been provided. And I think you both speak to that in a way that's really compelling. We've sort of started into this a little bit, but what do you think? Like you both already put some more rich ideas into the discussion about this short phrase, science interrupted. But what do you think people might not think about all the downstream implications? What is at stake when science is interrupted?

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 12:04

I think that's a really important question because I think on the surface you're right. People who've experienced a funding termination have their experience and they they understand what has happened to them. I think there are a lot of other things that we need to think about as a field. There are a number of adverse outcomes, and I think that these can affect study volunteers, as we've already intimated earlier, that people give their time and effort and sometimes their biological samples to research, and then they do that with some risk to help other people in the future. So there are impacts to volunteers. There are impacts to researchers, to be sure, early career scholars or research trainees, or even uh well-established scholars can have incredible impacts from this. And importantly, there are impacts on the knowledge that we now know will not be generated. So, you know, we outlined some of the costs of this in our editorial announcement for the special issue. And so I'd just like to briefly touch on them. I think one of the important things is there is a cost of having collected now unusable data. So, you know, you have a study, you're looking to identify what kind of exposures are harmful, for example, and what kind of uh, or you're looking for beneficial prevention or treatment options. To do this, researchers have to very carefully calculate the number of people that they need in order to properly power their studies to be able to make statistical claims. And when we stop funding, which often means stopping data collection before reaching enough data to achieve statistically valid claims, that means these sunk costs that can't be recouped. And that's what I meant about the $1.5 billion kind of left on the table. So that unusable data is a cost to all of us. But they're also important costs to participants. Research volunteers have taken on study risks with knowledge and consent to help generate knowledge that will someday help other people. And when a study stops, they will have taken on that risk without the ability to provide any benefit. And this is obviously really ethically problematic and needs to be addressed. And as Amy said earlier, when you have an orderly shutdown of things, sometimes that gives you an opportunity to protect research volunteers in a way that can help mitigate some of those harms. But in this case, where there just was an abrupt stop, people did face challenges to ensuring that their research volunteers were well taken care of. The other thing that I think is a cost, and this is a bigger picture cost, but is

The Hidden Costs Of Stopped Studies

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 14:43

really important when we stop without any kind of scientific reason, it's the cost of public trust. And stopping studies that are designed to improve health, studies that cost the public's tax dollars, and getting nothing from this certainly will erode trust and research. And although we won't know this for some time, this lack of trust could affect the public's willingness to participate in future research studies, to have their tax money, you know, put toward scientific research. And the real harm that we've learned a lot about in public health is that when trust has been broken, rebuilding it is a long and challenging endeavor. So I think this bigger picture harm that feels a little nebulous is something we're gonna be dealing with for for many years to come. And Amy, you probably have something to add here, but that that's you know, in summary, what I think what I mean when I'm thinking about what people don't really realize about what's at stake when science gets interrupted.

Dr. Amy Lansky 15:47

And Lisa thinks I do want to pick up on this theme of the longer-term effects. I spent a number of years working in the area of evidence synthesis and guidelines development. And I'm really concerned about how these abrupt endings of studies will adversely impact an overall body of evidence in a particular area. And so it's not just that a particular study will not be completed, but the whole body of knowledge may be affected. And studies build on each other, they fill in gaps, they get analyzed together to make sense of them as a whole. And we could be missing really important pieces in a body of evidence. And so there won't be the data to contribute to broader understanding of a health issue. There may not be protocols made available to understand new or different methods for the design or analysis of study data that could set back innovation by months or years. And as you've said, Lisa, about trust, it just takes a really long time to build things back. It's a short time to cause disruption and a really long time, months and years to build it back. And I think, you know, Lisa, you've touched on some of these, but these wide-reaching effects on the participants and on the researchers themselves. So participants were maybe in a trial of a new medication or an intervention, and then all of a sudden those are taken away from them. Or researchers who, you know, they might be at the beginning or the middle or the end of their careers, and they have the teams of people they support. And even though it might be easy to stop or restart funding, you can kind of turn the money pipeline on and off. It's not that easy to just wrap up or later open back up a research study. And so we also see there's devastating psychological, economic, and social effects. And I think our special issue is an opportunity to highlight all of these types of impacts.

Patrick Sullivan 18:09

Yeah, you together provided such a comprehensive view of what's at stake when science is interrupted. And so all of us as scientists ourselves who participate in editorial roles and who also write papers and run research, I think talked about this special issue as a way, hopefully, to mitigate some of the harm. Like Amy, you were talking about a lost partial knowledge. What will journals do when you come and say, I was funded to do a study with 2,000 person years of follow time and now only have 426 person years of follow time. So I have some point estimates, but it doesn't really get the confidence intervals are really broad. And so this idea of lost partial knowledge, I think is one of the things that motivates even those point estimates of effect have a value in public health. And if we turn from thinking about what the harms are to what the recovery from this is, how do we get back on track? It's gonna be really critical that we preserve the partial knowledge that was gained from interrupted science. And so I'm so grateful to the two of you for your leadership in making a place that we're gonna explicitly welcome this information. One, because partial knowledge also needs to be preserved, but also for those higher level insights about the very complex and impactful effects of interrupting science. So I think it's it's both things.

What The Special Issue Seeks

Patrick Sullivan 19:32

And so, in light of that, I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what types of papers you're expecting for the special issue and what kinds of things you'd be happy to have come in and get a chance to look at and think about, you know, how we get outside input and put together a special issue. What are you hoping comes in and how do you plan to proceed?

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 19:54

Well, Patrick, I think a couple things. One is, you know, we want this special issue, as Amy stated earlier, to be a helpful venue for people who have some information that they can't complete and they would really like to, and we would like to see that partial knowledge. So when we're talking about the special issue of science interrupted, we're really talking about that interruption part being the funding cuts or the terminations of funding over the last year or so. And what we want to do, as we've said earlier, is provide a venue for outlining the varied impacts of this kind of unexpected and sudden interruption of science. So, broadly speaking, well, we want really are looking for four kinds of papers. One is really, as we've been recently talking about here today, about the partial results of interrupted studies. So the disruptions have meant that studies haven't been able to complete their enrollment goals, or perhaps that's resulting for them in underpowered analyses. We hope that what we can do is, as you say, put out there what's had with what they've been able to collect and analyze with the addition of some context about the stopping of the study. We hope to salvage some of these sunk costs from these projects that have been terminated without any cause. The second kind of articles we hope to see is to highlight at this time in history some of the actual and potential harms caused by this premature ending of studies for non-scientific reasons. So these manuscripts could focus on things like harms to research participants, harms to the research infrastructure. I mean, if you think about how grant money and researchers build a research infrastructure around a particular topic or theme or lane of research, you pull a few of those pieces of that infrastructure out, and just like a Django tower, it can't come crashing down. So those infrastructure impacts are really important. As Amy mentioned earlier, there will be harms to the development of knowledge, that bigger picture of the meta analyses and the systematic reviews and those kinds of things that we do. So We'd like to be able to highlight what these actual and potential harms are. Thirdly, we want to see, we do see this as an opportunity to preserve whatever knowledge gathering has started for these terminated projects. So we're interested in things like innovative protocols. Perhaps you've written a great protocol and you weren't able to start to do any data collection. That's okay. If it's an innovative protocol that might help a future researcher, that might be something we're interested in. Excellent data collection instruments or intervention materials or other products from projects that folks have planned but weren't able to implement because they were cut. Those might be really important tools for a future researcher to use. So that would be important. The other thing that I think really matters here, and we've touched on it a little bit, but we are really interested in documenting the harms to researchers, to trainees, and their careers. And so we'd like to know a little bit about how these terminations are changing the landscape of our future scientific workforce. We know already that some early career scientists have left the field because their major sources of funding were terminated last year and they have not been able to recover and have not been able to get new funding for that. So they've left the field. That is a loss for us in the field. And so we'd like to get some documentation of what that might look like and how our very near medium and longer term future of public health researchers, epidemiologic research will be impacted by these changes in the scientific workforce. Another piece that I just think is really important for us to think about, which Amy touched on earlier, is this idea of what we call moral distress or this distress that a researcher might have from having started a study, engaged participants, made claims about things they were going to deliver, and then not be able to deliver that. That also has an impact on researchers, regardless of where they are in their career, about what they've committed to do, what now they can no longer do. That kind of distress has huge impacts on researchers and their staff and their colleagues. And we're interested in learning more about that. So we really hope that we can get a variety of papers that cover all of these various impacts of interrupting science.

Dr. Amy Lansky 24:34

And you know, I would add that I think we've all seen a lot of stories about this, either in the news, LinkedIn posts, Substacks, talking about science that's been interrupted. We've seen the funding cuts, I've seen scientists featured in news stories who've had their research terminated. And we'd be willing to see those types of stories repurposed for the focus areas and the formats of this special issue. So I would say if you've written something for a different outlet, it would be great to look at the formats that we're looking for and see how something maybe that's already been started or had a particular focus in one direction could be appropriate for what we're looking for in this special issue. So it doesn't all have to start from scratch.

Patrick Sullivan 25:36

That's great. I think we've really covered the what types of papers. So as we wrap up, I just want to ask, give each of you a chance to think about, you know, is there anything about the interruption that caused you to see your work, caused you to see the scientific landscape in a different way, either around your work or others?

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 25:57

Thanks for that opportunity, Patrick. I will say that it was a very rough year for so many people who have spent a lot of their professional and intellectual capital working on really important health impact studies, studies about health and public health. And for me, one thing that really motivated my wanting to talk about these issues in an objective and in a scientific journal in that way was that a lot of us processed these cuts, these terminations, through our researcher lens, our intellectual kind of approach to things. Yet there were so many just very human things that happen to people, people who, you know, their salaries got cut, they had to let people go, members of their research team that they really cared about and have worked together for a long time. So what I really hope happens during this, authors who submit to our journal for this special issue is that they're able to pull together kind of and maybe unify some of that very human part of them themselves and what this meant to them, as well as, you know, the scientific part that is always our go-to. So, you know, for me, I think we have opened up an opportunity for people to, I hope, process a little bit of this, both for what it means for them and for their teams, as well as for what it means to the field to which we're all committed, which is to improve the public's health.

Dr. Amy Lansky 27:31

You know, Lisa, that makes me think about conversations that I've had with people. I think particularly my conversations have been with people in government. And we talk about red lines, about when things get to a point where you just can't stay in that particular environment. And I think that's happened with a lot of government scientists who get to that point where they just need to not be there anymore. And that was my particular case. And I am now spending my time giving back by doing scientific work, such as this special issue. I'm teaching and also doing advocacy. And over the past year, I've thought about this, and I'm really excited about our special issue because I really believe we have an obligation to students and trainees to have a record of these unprecedented times and what they meant. And with this special issue, we're helping build the historical record of what occurred and the various aspects of the impacts. And I feel really fortunate to be a part of that. And I'm really looking forward to the submissions and to pulling together this special issue.

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 28:59

Well said, Amy. I'm very much looking forward to working with you on this.

Patrick Sullivan 29:03

Well said. And I just want to comment as someone who's had the privilege of working with the two of you over decades. Um, if we sum them all up, maybe a century among us of work in public health, that I appreciate your leadership in public health in the past. And I think you're leading this special issue for the reasons that each of you just spelled out, is also a really important piece of leadership to document this moment and to help us think in objective and longer form ways about just exactly what's at stake. So thank you for your leadership. And we really look forward to seeing manuscripts come in and establishing. I mean, this is what we know how to do, right? Is which is to look at things systematically, to think, to write, to document. And I think it's so important to document what the impact of this is so that in the future people can say, maybe it's a good idea to make our budget look better by just stopping science per year or stopping 50% of science per year. And this is such an important part of documenting what the real costs and outcomes of that are. So thank you both for your work as scientists, for your work as scientific thought leaders, and for your time today to talk about this topic. So that's going to bring us to the end of this episode. Thanks to each of you for joining us again today. It was such a pleasure to have you on the podcast and to talk about this important issue.

Dr. Lisa M. Lee 30:26

Thanks, Patrick. Thanks for your support.

Dr. Amy Lansky 30:29

Thanks so much for having us. I enjoyed it.

Patrick Sullivan 30:31

And

How To Submit

Patrick Sullivan 30:32

I'll just add if any of our listeners are interested in submitting a paper to the special issue, please submit your manuscript through the Annals of Epidemiology website before the submission deadline of the 31st of July, 2026. I'm your host, Patrick Sullivan. Thanks for tuning in to this episode and see you next time on EPITalk. Brought to you by Annals of Epidemiology, the official journal of the American College of Epidemiology. For a transcript of this podcast or to read the article featured on this episode and more from the journal, you can visit us online at www.annals of epidemiology.org.