From WNYC, I'm Brian Lair. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, June 10th.

The United States relationship with science is under strain on two fronts. The share of Americans who say science has

had a mostly positive impact on society, well, that share has fallen 16 percentage points

since before the coronavirus outbreak, from 73% saying mostly positive impact in 2019,

down to 57% in 2023, that according to the Pew Research Center.

Same time, federal science funding has faced an unprecedented political assault, and that's

continuing. The exact numbers are complicated to pin down, but here's some stats from a nature

article from January

this year. Over the course of 2025, more than 7,800 National Institutes of Health and

National Science Foundation grants were canceled or suspended, and the Trump administration

proposed historic cuts of 35% to non-defense research and development

in its fiscal year 2026 budget request. One program right here in our backyard in the New York

area is aiming to tackle the erosion of trust in our scientific institutions in a creative

and unconventional way, the Alan Alder Center for

communicating science at Stony Brook University is a program that uses improv theater training

to help scientists talk to the rest of us. The center, founded by MASH star Alan Alder, more than 15

years ago, has now trained more than 35,000 researchers worldwide with clients ranging from Stanford to NASA to AstraZeneca.

And joining us now is its director, Laura Lindenfeld.

Hey, Laura, welcome to WNYC.

Hi, Brian, so pleased to be here with you today.

All right, Laura, what was the insight that made Alan all to say, wait, these scientists need improv training? It's such a great concept,

isn't it? Alan did Scientific American Frontiers for 11 years. He served as host. We have some

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