Lost Science
In collaboration with Nature, I have been researching and investigating the destruction of science after one year of the Trump administration. The government canceled over 7,800 research grants affecting 25,000 scientists and personnel and amounting to US$32 billion in lost research funding.
While the outcome of this project is mainly represented in a single image of exploding glass, the process was elaborate in reaching this final image. Data visualization is not made for representing things that have been destructed. We use platonic shapes—circles, rectangles, lines—to represent distinctions drawn into the world. But how to represent disappearance?
I turned the cancelled grants into a glass surface and fragmented it as a tree structure representing each US state and grants by the total size of the grant. I then exploded the structure, leading to a productive tension between evidentiary visualization and simulated rupture.
Credits
- Max Kozlov writes for Nature from Washington DC
- Jeff Tollefson writes for Nature from New York City
- Dan Garisto is a science journalist in Syracuse, New York City
- Kim Albrecht is a professor at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, and a principal at metaLAB at Harvard and Berlin
- Art direction: Kelly Krause and Wesley Fernandes
- Infographics: Chris Ryan
- Subeditor: Sarah Skelton
- Editor: Richard Monastersky
Sources
- Cancelled grants: Grant Witness.
- Grant reductions: NSF grant information from NSF Award Search. NIH grant data from NIH RePORTER.
- Squeezing the pipeline for new scientists: Data from the Institute of International Education. The number of new international students for the 2025–26 academic year was extrapolated from the institute’s autumn snapshot, which surveyed a smaller number of schools than other years.
- Gutting government science agencies: Historical workforce numbers at scientific agencies were taken from the Office of Personnel and Management; numbers for 2025 were obtained from agency responses to Nature’s query or from shutdown plans released by agencies in late September 2025.
- The fight over funding cuts: AAAS R&D Budget and Policy Program.