How did President Trump transform science in 2025?

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget announced that a major climate research centre would be broken up. 2025 has brought a wave of reorganisations and funding cuts, reshaping the ways science is done in the USA. Veteran science journalist Roland Pease tells us whether we’re starting to see the impacts.

Victoria Gill gets a subterranean tour of Finland’s new nuclear waste disposal facility. It’s the first country in the world to get one and the UK are interested in learning how they did it. Victoria is also joined by science journalist Caroline Steel to talk about this week in science research.

And 40 years ago, Dian Fossey was murdered at her home in Rwanda where she had spent decades studying mountain gorillas. Gilly Forrester, Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Sussex talks about why the data collected from Dian’s ‘gorillas in the mist’ continues to shape science today.

To discover more fascinating science content, head to bbc.co.uk search for BBC Inside Science and follow the links to The Open University.

Presenter: Victoria Gill Producers: Clare Salisbury, Kate White and Tim Dodd Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.
0:13.4	This Christmas, forget about socks. We've got the best present of all.
0:17.2	Dead people!
0:18.2	All that sounds like zombies. Sorry, it's not zombies. Let me start again.
0:21.8	In our new family-friendly podcast series, dead funny history, historical figures come back to life
0:26.8	but just long enough to argue with me, tell their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves.
0:31.8	You're dead to me.
0:32.8	Dead funny history.
0:34.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.5	Hello, lovely curious-minded listeners. I'm Victoria Gill and this is Inside Science from the BBC World Service.
0:43.1	And it's the last Inside Science of 2025. I can't quite believe it.
0:47.0	Today we're examining the legacy of a complicated pioneering scientist whose murder 40 years ago this month has never been solved.
0:55.1	Each of the individuals came right up to my eyes and stared into my eyes for perhaps
1:00.9	50 seconds and then embraced me and sat down and continued.
1:07.3	That was the late Diane Fosse on Woman's Hour in 1984, and we'll be hearing more about her remarkable life and her untimely death later on.
1:16.9	And our own Caroline Steele is here to unearth some world-changing gems among the scientific discoveries that have emerged this week.
1:24.1	Hello, Caroline.
1:25.0	Hi, Vic. Thanks for having me on.
1:26.7	Oh, always a pleasure. What have you
1:28.2	got for us this week? I've got the news that satellites in orbit could be just three days
1:33.9	from disaster. Wow. But more on that later. That is a cliffhanger to end the year on. But first,
	...

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