White Coats v the White House

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Science journalist Roland Pease asks whether the rounds of cuts, reorganisations and political strong-arming in US science can be weathered, and how they will likely affect us all. Eighty years ago Vannevar Bush proposed what became the pact between government and universities that led to decades of global scientific dominance. Today, US scientists fear the Trump administration is ripping up that agreement, mandating what and what can’t be studied, who can study it, and redefining expertise. The specialist agencies are either being closed down or defunded to the extent that tens of thousands of government scientists are already unemployed. Multi-year experiments are being closed down uncompleted. Top universities are besieged by mandates on who and how they hire, tied to their future funding. Data streams that benefit researchers around the globe are being switched off. Even definitions of what counts as evidence are being redrafted. Can the administration's declared aim of "restoring gold standard science", be achieved?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Scientists, British and American, have made the atomic bomb at last.
0:12.9	A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and assured its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than
0:23.9	20,000 tons of PNP. President Truman says that the Allies have spent 500 million pounds on what
0:31.7	he calls the greatest scientific gamble in history, and they've won.
0:43.5	Summer 1945 was a turning point for American science.
0:46.6	The deadly dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan symbolized their unrivaled technical prowess science
0:50.6	in the service of the country's war effort.
0:53.6	And just weeks before, the organizer of that
0:56.8	effort unveiled a blueprint for how science could continue to serve America in peace.
1:02.4	I go back really to 1945 when Vannevar Bush, an advisor to then President Roosevelt, wrote a report called Science the
1:13.6	Endless Frontier, and he outlined a science policy, which has been the unwritten policy
1:22.0	of the United States ever since then, so for 75 years, and it's worked.
1:27.3	I'm Ron and Peace, and as a global science journalist with almost 40 years in the business,
1:32.0	I've seen those successes time after time after time. It's been clear how well the Neva Bush's deal helped fuel the American economy.
1:41.4	But that formula for success has been put in doubt.
1:45.4	Are we all here to defend science? Now, I am just thrilled to be here with so many mad scientists.
1:56.0	The white coats have been out on the street because of the new scientific direction the White House has taken.
2:03.6	Should be angry and everybody in America should be mad and angry about what we are witnessing right now in our country,
2:12.6	including the illegal and reckless attacks on science by Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
2:21.7	They're mad at what they see as attacks on the very integrity of science. I'll come to that shortly.
2:28.6	And also the funding of science.
2:32.1	Trump has cut science funding to its lowest levels in decades, and these cuts include all
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.