Science
How Foreign Aid Cuts Are Setting the Stage for Disease Outbreaks
Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders.
The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to dangerous pathogens.
That includes Americans. Outbreaks that begin overseas can travel quickly: The coronavirus may have first appeared in China, for example, but it soon appeared everywhere, including the United States. When polio or dengue appears in this country, cases are usually linked to international travel.
“It’s actually in the interest of American people to keep diseases down,” said Dr. Githinji Gitahi, who heads Amref Health Africa, a large nonprofit that relies on the United States for about 25 percent of its funding.
“Diseases make their way to the U.S. even when we have our best people on it, and now we are not putting our best people on it,” he added.
In interviews, more than 30 current and former officials of the United States Agency for International Development, members of health organizations and experts in infectious diseases described a world made more perilous than it was just a few weeks ago.
Many spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the federal government.
The timing is dire: The Democratic Republic of Congo is experiencing the deadliest mpox outbreak in history, with cases exploding in a dozen other African countries.
The United States is home to a worsening bird flu crisis. Multiple hemorrhagic fever viruses are smoldering: Ebola in Uganda, Marburg in Tanzania, and Lassa in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
In 2023, U.S.A.I.D. invested about $900 million to fund labs and emergency-response preparedness in more than 30 countries. The pause on foreign aid froze those programs. Even payments to grantees for work already completed are being sorted out in the courts.
Waivers issued by the State Department were intended to allow some work to continue on containing Ebola, Marburg and mpox, as well as preparedness for bird flu.
But Trump administration appointees choked payment systems and created obstacles to implementing the waivers, according to a U.S.A.I.D. memo by Nicholas Enrich, who was the agency’s acting assistant administrator for global health until Sunday.
Then last month, the Trump administration canceled about 5,800 contracts, effectively shuttering most U.S.A.I.D.-funded initiatives, including many that had received permission to continue.
“It was finally clear that we were not going to be implementing” even programs that had waivers, Mr. Enrich recalled in an interview.
The decision is likely to result in more than 28,000 new cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg, and 200,000 cases of paralytic polio each year, according to one estimate.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has been working diligently since being sworn in to review every dollar spent,” the State Department said in an emailed statement.
“We’ll be able to say that every program that we are out there operating serves the national interest, because it makes us safer or stronger or more prosperous,’” the statement quoted Mr. Rubio as saying.
Most U.S.A.I.D. staff members were terminated or placed on administrative leave without warning. The agency had more than 50 people dedicated to outbreak responses, the result of a Congressional push to beef up pandemic preparedness.
Now it has six. Those who were fired included the organization’s leading expert in lab diagnostics and the manager of the Ebola response. “I have no idea how six people are going to run four outbreak responses,” said one official who was let go.
Also sent home were hundreds of thousands of community health workers in Africa who were sentinels for diseases.
In early January, the Tanzanian government denied there were new cases of Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever. It was a community health worker trained through a U.S.-funded Ebola program who reported the disease a week later.
The outbreak eventually grew to include 10 cases; it is now under control, the government has said.
Even in quieter times, foreign aid helps to prevent, detect and treat diseases that can endanger Americans, including drug-resistant H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, and bacteria that don’t respond to available antibiotics.
Much of that work has stopped, and other organizations or countries cannot fill the gap. Compounding the loss is America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which has instituted cost-cutting measures of its own.
“This is a lose-lose scenario,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, who has led pandemic prevention efforts at the W.H.O. and the C.D.C.
The slashing of foreign aid deprives the world of American leadership and expertise, but it also locks the United States out of global discussions, Dr. Fukuda said: “For the life of me, I cannot see the justification or the reason for this very calculated, systematic approach to pull down public health.”
Trying to Adapt
U.S.A.I.D.’s intense focus on global health security is barely a decade old, but it has mostly received bipartisan support. The first Trump administration expanded the program to 50 countries.
Much of the aid was intended to help them eventually tackle problems on their own. And to some extent, that was happening.
But confronted with a new virus or outbreak, “there’s so many things that one has to do and learn, and many countries can’t do that on their own,” said Dr. Lucille Blumberg, an infectious diseases physician and expert on emerging diseases.
U.S.A.I.D. and its partners helped countries identify the expertise, training and machinery they needed, brought together officials in various ministries and engaged farmers, businesses and families.
“It actually doesn’t cost the U.S. government that much,” said an official with a large development organization. “But that sort of trust-building, communication, sharing evidence is a real strength that the U.S. brings to health security — and that’s gone.”
In Africa, some countries have reacted to the disappearance of aid with alarm, others with resignation. “We’re doing our best to adapt to this development,” said Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s health minister.
“The U.S. government is not responsible, ultimately, for the health and the security of Nigerian people,” he said. “At the end of the day, the responsibility is ours.”
A successful outbreak response requires coordination of myriad elements: investigators to confirm the initial report; workers trained to do testing; access to test kits; transport of samples; a lab with enough workers, running water, electricity and chemical supplies for diagnoses; and experts to interpret and act on the results.
In broad strokes, the C.D.C. provided expertise on diseases, U.S.A.I.D. funded logistics and the W.H.O. convened stakeholders, including ministries of health.
Before the aid freeze, employees from each organization often talked every day, sharing information and debating strategy. Together, they lowered response time to an outbreak from two weeks in 2014 to five days in 2022 to just 48 hours most recently.
But now, C.D.C. experts who have honed their expertise over decades are not even allowed to speak to colleagues at the W.H.O.
U.S.A.I.D. funding for sample transport, lab supplies, fuel for generators and phone plans for contact tracers has ended. Much of its investment in simple solutions to seemingly intractable problems has also stopped.
In West Africa, for example, rodents that spread Lassa fever invade homes in search of food. One program in U.S.A.I.D.’s Stop Spillover project introduced rodent-proof food containers to limit the problem, but has now shut down.
In Congo, where corruption, conflict and endless outbreaks mean that surveillance “looks like Swiss cheese even at the best of times,” the mpox response slowed because there were no health workers to transport samples, said a U.S.A.I.D. official familiar with the response.
More than 400 mpox patients were left stranded after fleeing overwhelmed clinics. Before a waiver restarted some work, the United States identified two new cases of mpox, both in people who had traveled to East Africa.
In Kenya, U.S.A.I.D. supported eight labs and community-based surveillance in 12 high-risk counties. Labs in the Marsabit, Mandera and Garissa counties — which border Ethiopia and Somalia — have run out of test kits and reagents for diseases including Rift Valley fever, yellow fever and polio, and have lost nearly half their staff.
Kenya also borders Uganda and Tanzania and is close to Congo — all battling dangerous outbreaks — and has lost more than 35,000 workers.
“These stop-work orders would mean that it increases the risk of an index case passing through unnoticed,” Dr. Gitahi said, referring to the first known case in an outbreak. His organization has terminated nearly 400 of its staff of 2,400.
Many labs in Africa store samples of pathogens that naturally occur in the environment, including several that can be weaponized. With surveillance programs shut off, the pathogens could be stolen, and a bioterrorism attack might go undetected until it was too late to counter.
Some experts worried about bad actors who may release a threat like cholera into the water, or weaponize anthrax or brucellosis, common in African animals. Others said they were concerned that even unskilled handling of these disease threats might be enough to set off a disaster.
Funding from the U.S. government helped hire and train lab workers to maintain and dispose of dangerous viruses and bacteria safely.
But now, pathogens can be moved in and out of labs with no one the wiser. “We have lost our ability to understand where pathogens are being held,” said Kaitlin Sandhaus, founder and chief executive of Global Implementation Solutions.
Her company helped 17 African labs become accredited in biosafety procedures and supported five countries in drafting laws to ensure compliance. Now the firm is shutting down.
In the future, other countries, including China, will know more about where risky pathogens are housed, Ms. Sandhaus said: “It feels very dangerous to me.”
China has already invested in building labs in Africa, where it is cheaper and easier to “work on whatever you would like without anyone else paying attention,” said one U.S.A.I.D. official.
Russia, too, is providing mobile labs to Ugandans in Mbale, on the border with Kenya, another official said.
Some African countries like Somalia have fragile health systems and persistent security threats, yet minimal capacity for tracking infections that sicken animals and people, said Abdinasir Yusuf Osman, a veterinary epidemiologist and chair of a working group in Somalia’s health ministry.
Each year Somalia exports millions of camels, cattle and other livestock, primarily to the Middle East. The nation has relied heavily on foreign aid to screen the animals for diseases, he said.
“The consequences of this funding shortfall, in my view, will be catastrophic and increase the likelihood of uncontrolled outbreaks,” Dr. Osman said.
In countries with larger economies, foreign aid has helped build relationships. Thailand is a pioneer in infectious diseases, and U.S.A.I.D. was funding a modest project on malaria elimination that boosts its surveillance capabilities.
The abrupt end to that commitment risks losing good will, said Jui Shah, who helped run the program.
“In Asia, relationships are crucial for any type of work, but especially for roles that work with surveillance and patient data,” she said. “Americans will suffer if other countries hesitate to engage with us about outbreaks.”
During an interview in late April with Dr. Phil, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reiterated his appeal to parents on vaccine safety: “We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research.”
The U.S. health secretary has also announced his own investigation, pledging to find an answer to the autism “epidemic” by September. It’s an ambitious goal. It’s also a realistic one but only if he already has an answer in mind.
To tell the story you want with statistics, you don’t have to lie or fabricate data — though that happens, too. More often, statistics are manipulated, figures massaged and results skewed through subtler means. Sometimes, it’s sloppiness or unconscious bias at work. Other times, the distortion is deliberate.
Whether the numbers attempt to tell a story about the economy, immigration, education or public health, we should empower ourselves to recognize the deception.
Vaccine data are far from immune to statistical trickery and its consequences.
Not only might individuals skip a vaccine and get unnecessarily sick, but the viral spread of misinformation can poke holes in the herd immunity needed to protect a population. One new, untampered statistic tells a chilling story: A meager 10% drop from today’s already dangerously low measles vaccination rates could spark an estimated 13-fold increase in annual cases.
Statistics wield incredible power. I developed a deep respect for them during my first career as a biostatistician. Today, as a journalist, I see numbers leveraged for good and for bad. I’ve seen them help the public and policymakers interpret complex data, detect patterns and make better decisions — evidenced in my reporting on data dashboards during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve also seen data withheld and statistics doctored for less-than-noble aims by chemical companies, the gun industry, police departments, the U.S. military, climate change deniers and vaccine skeptics, to name a few.
If left unaware of the deceit, the public can’t hold these groups accountable. And if citizens base their votes and other decisions — like whether to vaccinate their child — on distorted or false information, our democracy and our health lose again.
Fortunately, inoculation against misinformation is available. As Kennedy and his collaborators dig into vaccine and autism data, as measles cases mount, and as you “do your own research” or simply digest your news and social feeds, here are five red flags to watch for.
Chance
The infamous paper that launched the vaccine-autism controversy was based on just 12 children. Its author claimed that eight showed signs of developmental regression after receiving the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The study was later retracted for scientific misconduct. But even without fraud, the sample size should raise alarm. Chance alone could explain such a small cluster of cases. Contrast that with rigorous studies — like one in Denmark with more than 650,000 participants — that consistently find no relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism.
We should be just as wary when studies test a grab bag of possible outcomes. Suppose researchers ask whether a vaccine causes heart disease, diabetes, any of a dozen types of cancer or any of five neurodevelopmental disorders. Even if the vaccine is in reality not affecting any of those 20 outcomes, when researchers try to study so many things all at once, statistical noise can mean one may erroneously appear “significant” just by chance. A more rigorous and targeted study would be far less likely to give that false positive.
Count quality
Big numbers can impress. But quality counts. In 2021, the Delphi-Facebook survey estimated near real-time COVID-19 vaccine uptake using weekly responses from around 250,000 people. On paper, the large sample size conveyed statistical confidence. But in practice, the data missed the mark. The sample was biased and unrepresentative of the overall population. By late May, the study had overestimated vaccine uptake by a wide margin — 70% compared with the true rate of 53%. That inflated figure may have lulled the public and policymakers into a false sense of security.
Beware, too, of the misuse of raw data. Figures from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System appear in many papers and posts asserting vaccine harms. But this system was set up only as an early warning system. Anyone can submit a report on a suspected reaction. If a hint of a pattern emerges, then researchers will investigate to determine if the signal represents an actual risk. As its own website warns, the initial reports may be “incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.” People may be apt to connect an event that occurs shortly after vaccination with the shot itself, for example, especially if they personally fear the safety of vaccines. To demonstrate the system’s fallibility, a doctor filed a report saying he turned into the Incredible Hulk after receiving a flu vaccine. The entry was initially accepted into the database.
Cherry-picking
One study circulating in the anti-vax community was led by David Geier, the same figure tapped by Kennedy to head his federal autism and vaccine investigation. The study found a connection between autism and vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal. But it hinges on a critical flaw: Cases of autism and the comparison group came from different time periods. Because vaccination rates changed dramatically over time, the design introduced a spurious association.
Among myriad ways to manufacture a desired conclusion is the strategic choice of time frame, analysis method or how the data are presented. By plotting only convenient variables or truncating inconvenient values, for example, you can tell the story of your choosing. One COVID-era graph appeared to show that vaccines did not prevent deaths. The trick? It compared vaccine uptake with cumulative deaths — a number that can only rise over time, and so of course would broadly move in the same direction as the uptake rate of a desperately needed new vaccine that the public is clamoring for.
Another sleight of hand to play down the size of a problem: Acknowledge a not-so-unusual number of outbreaks while ignoring how large or how deadly those outbreaks were, just as Kennedy did in February with measles.
Correlation vs. causation
A widely shared study recently referenced by Kennedy reports a link between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disorders among 9-year-olds in Florida. This one, too, is riddled with problems — namely, its failure to account for other factors that could explain the results. Children whose parents more regularly use the healthcare system, for example, are more likely to get both vaccinated and diagnosed. Healthcare engagement confounds the relationship. So, we can’t say the vaccine caused neurodevelopmental disorders any more than we could say that increased consumption of margarine resulted in a higher divorce rate in Maine. These are cases of correlation, not causation.
Something similar and even more interesting cropped up when people compared death rates by COVID-19 vaccination status. At first glance, an unexpected pattern emerged: The vaccinated were dying at about twice the rate of the unvaccinated. The catch here? The analysis didn’t account for age. Older people were more likely both to die and to get vaccinated. Once researchers broke the data down into age groups, a more accurate — and reverse — picture emerged: The unvaccinated were dying at higher rates.
Context and conflicts
Talk of an uptick in autism diagnoses often skips crucial context: expanded awareness, broader diagnostic criteria and financial incentives for diagnosis. There could well be a surge in the number of cases without any surge in the true incidence of the disorder.
Also, discussions motivated by a desire to explain autism or to oppose vaccines tend to omit the robust studies that have debunked any link between vaccines and autism — because those would be unhelpful to the agendas. Vaccine opponents may further ignore the glaring conflicts of interest behind many of the studies still pushing that autism narrative. Geier had a study retracted, in part, for not disclosing his involvement in vaccine-related litigation.
Conflicts of interest surround Kennedy as well. He has spent years pushing anti-vaccine claims despite overwhelming evidence of vaccine safety and despite not being a doctor or a scientist. Now that he is in a position of authority over public health, he should at least be held to the same ethical standards as a scientist. Modern scientific practice calls for statisticians to specify their hypotheses and analysis plans before data are collected. This ensures transparency and objectivity, and reduces the risk of data dredging and misleading results. Statisticians follow where the data lead rather than mold or seek out data to fit a predetermined narrative.
Kennedy’s team appears to be following a different playbook. According to a former top vaccine official, Kennedy’s team requested a wish list of data seemingly to justify their autism theory: The team asked for cases of brain swelling and deaths caused by the measles vaccine. The official said there are no such cases. Someone who keeps hunting for evidence to back up his discredited theory is not conducting science.
Our stories should be malleable. Our statistics should not.
Lynne Peeples, a science writer, is the author of “The Inner Clock: Living in Sync With Our Circadian Rhythms.”
Richard L. Garwin, an architect of America’s hydrogen bomb, who shaped defense policies for postwar governments and laid the groundwork for insights into the structure of the universe as well as for medical and computer marvels, died on Tuesday at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y. He was 97.
His death was confirmed by his son Thomas.
A polymathic physicist and geopolitical thinker, Dr. Garwin was only 23 when he built the world’s first fusion bomb. He later became a science adviser to many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite reconnaissance systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for surviving the Cold War, and championed verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I have ever met,” Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet.
In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Intended only to prove the fusion concept, the device did not even resemble a bomb. It weighed 82 tons, was undeliverable by airplane and looked like a gigantic thermos bottle. Soviet scientists, who did not test a comparable device until 1955, derisively called it a thermonuclear installation.
But at the Enewetak Atoll on Nov. 1, 1952, it spoke: An all-but-unimaginable fusion of atoms set off a vast, instant flash of blinding light, soundless to distant observers, and a fireball two miles wide with a force 700 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Its mushroom cloud soared 25 miles and expanded to 100 miles across.
Because secrecy shrouded the development of America’s thermonuclear weapons programs, Dr. Garwin’s role in creating the first hydrogen bomb was virtually unknown for decades outside a small circle of government defense and intelligence officials. It was Dr. Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, who first publicly credited him.
“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin’s design,” Dr. Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice, and Dr. Garwin long remained unknown publicly.
Compared with later thermonuclear weapons, Dr. Garwin’s bomb was crude. Its raw power nonetheless recalled films of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, and the appalled reaction of its creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflecting upon the sacred Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
For Dr. Garwin, it was something less.
“I never felt that building the hydrogen bomb was the most important thing in the world, or even in my life at the time,” he told Esquire magazine in 1984. Asked about any feelings of guilt, he said: “I think it would be a better world if the hydrogen bomb had never existed. But I knew the bombs would be used for deterrence.”
A Pivot to I.B.M.
Although the first hydrogen bomb was constructed to his specifications, Dr. Garwin was not even present to witness its detonation at Enewetak. “I’ve never seen a nuclear explosion,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “I didn’t want to take the time.”
After his success on the hydrogen bomb project, Dr. Garwin said, he found himself at a crossroads in 1952. He could return to the University of Chicago, where he had earned his doctorate under Fermi and was now an assistant professor, with the promise of life at one of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions.
Or he could accept a far more flexible job at the International Business Machines Corporation. It offered a faculty appointment and use of the Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, with wide freedom to pursue his research interests. It would also let him continue to work as a government consultant at Los Alamos and in Washington.
He chose the I.B.M. deal, and it lasted for four decades, until his retirement.
For I.B.M., Dr. Garwin worked on an endless stream of pure and applied research projects that yielded an astonishing array of patents, scientific papers and technological advances in computers, communications and medicine. His work was crucial in developing magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and later touch-screen monitors.
A dedicated maverick, Dr. Garwin worked hard for decades to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein had predicted. In 2015, the costly detectors he backed were able to successfully observe the ripples, opening a new window on the universe.
Meantime, Dr. Garwin continued to work for the government, consulting on national defense issues. As an expert on weapons of mass destruction, he helped select priority Soviet targets and led studies on land, sea and air warfare involving nuclear-armed submarines, military and civilian aircraft, and satellite reconnaissance and communication systems. Much of his work continued to be secret, and he remained largely unknown to the public.
He became an adviser to such Presidents as Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He also became known as a voice against President Ronald Reagan’s proposals for a space-based missile system, popularly called Star Wars, to defend the nation against nuclear attack. It was never built.
One of Dr. Garwin’s celebrated battles had nothing to do with national defense. In 1970, as a member of Nixon’s science advisory board, he ran afoul of the president’s support for development of the supersonic transport plane. He concluded that the SST would be expensive, noisy, bad for the environment and a commercial dud. Congress dropped its funding. Britain and France subsidized the development of their own SST, the Concorde, but Dr. Garwin’s predictions proved largely correct, and interest faded.
Clashes With Military
A small, professorial man with thinning flyaway hair and a gentle voice more suited to college lectures than a congressional hot seat, Dr. Garwin became an almost legendary figure in the defense establishment, giving speeches, writing articles and testifying before lawmakers on what he called misguided Pentagon choices.
Some of his feuds with the military were bitter and long-running. They included fights over the B-1 bomber, the Trident nuclear submarine and the MX missile system, a network of mobile, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that were among the most lethal weapons in history. All eventually joined America’s vast arsenal.
While Dr. Garwin was frustrated by such setbacks, he pressed ahead. His core message was that America should maintain a strategic balance of nuclear power with the Soviet Union. He opposed any weapon or policy that threatened to upset that balance, because, he said, it kept the Russians in check. He liked to say that Moscow was more interested in live Russians than dead Americans.
Dr. Garwin supported reductions of nuclear arsenals, including the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), negotiated by President Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier. But Dr. Garwin insisted that mutually assured destruction was the key to keeping the peace.
In 2021, he joined 700 scientists and engineers, including 21 Nobel laureates, who signed an appeal asking President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to pledge that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Their letter also called for an end to the American practice of giving the president sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons; a curb on that authority, they said, would be “an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack.”
The ideas were politically delicate, and Mr. Biden made no such pledge.
Dr. Garwin told Quest magazine in 1981, “The only thing nuclear weapons are good for, and have ever been good for, is massive destruction, and by that threat deterring nuclear attack: If you slap me, I’ll clobber you.”
A Whiz Kid at 5
Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928, the older of two sons of Robert and Leona (Schwartz) Garwin. His father was a teacher of electronics at a technical high school during the day and a projectionist in a movie theater at night. His mother was a legal secretary. At an early age, Richard, called Dick, showed remarkable intelligence and technical ability. By 5, he was repairing family appliances.
He and his brother, Edward, attended public schools in Cleveland. Dick graduated at 16 from Cleveland Heights High School in 1944 and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1947 from what is now Case Western Reserve University.
In 1947, he married Lois Levy. She died in 2018. In addition to his son Thomas, he is survived by another son, Jeffrey; a daughter, Laura; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
Under Fermi’s tutelage at the University of Chicago, Dr. Garwin earned a master’s degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1949, scoring the highest marks on doctoral exams ever recorded by the university. He then joined the faculty, but at Fermi’s urging spent his summers at the Los Alamos lab, where his H-bomb work unfolded.
After retiring in 1993, Dr. Garwin chaired the State Department’s Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board until 2001. He served in 1998 on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.
Dr. Garwin’s home in Scarsdale is not far from his longtime base at the I.B.M. Watson Labs, which had moved in 1970 from Columbia University to Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County.
He held faculty appointments at Harvard and Cornell as well as Columbia. He held 47 patents, wrote some 500 scientific research papers and wrote many books, including “Nuclear Weapons and World Politics” (1977, with David C. Gompert and Michael Mandelbaum), and “Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?” (2001, with Georges Charpak).
He was the subject of a biography, “True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the Most Influential Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of” (2017), by Joel N. Shurkin.
His many honors included the 2002 National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest award for science and engineering achievements, given by President George W. Bush, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, bestowed by President Barack Obama in 2016.
“Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father’s movie projectors, he’s never met a problem he didn’t want to solve,” Mr. Obama said in a lighthearted introduction at the White House. “Reconnaissance satellites, the M.R.I., GPS technology, the touch-screen — all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish — that I haven’t used. The other stuff I have.”
William J. Broad and Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Just when it seemed that the skincare industry had exhausted itself with absurd products and cyborgian procedures, Kim Kardashian brought a new one into the cultural consciousness. In the summer of 2024, Kim Kardashian announced on “The Kardashians” that she had salmon sperm injected into her face, spurring reactions of glee and intrigue that echoed from Rodeo Drive to TikTok.
Salmon sperm facials — which are sometimes called salmon DNA facials for civility’s sake — have become the latest addition to med spa menus across Los Angeles. Formula Fig in Culver City and West Hollywood recently added what is called “the longevity treatment,” which is its take on the popular facial, for $550. Done by Dorfman, a Beverly Hills-based med spa that boasts a celebrity client list, offers the procedure for $750. Kanodia Med Spa, also Beverly Hills-based, offers the facials starting at $1,000.
The procedure is performed through microneedling, which forms channels in the skin before the product is applied topically to the face. Using salmon DNA as an injectable is not yet FDA-approved, so doctors and med spas apply it in conjunction with microneedling and laser treatments. (The substance itself carries an orange-ish tint.) The procedure promises youthful, smooth skin and has been rapidly gaining popularity, thanks partly to endorsements on social media and by celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Charli XCX.
The idea to use salmon sperm for regeneration is older than you might think. The study of salmon DNA for wound healing was originally pioneered in Italy in the 1980s, said Dr. Zakia Rahman, a clinical professor at Stanford’s School of Dermatology. In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of scientific interest in the substance as a beauty treatment in Korea.
In fact, many doctors source salmon DNA from there. Dr. Donald Yoo, a facial plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, uses a substance called Rejuran, which is procured from one ocean-side factory in a beachfront town in Gangneung, Korea. In October of last year, he visited the factory during the salmon spawning season to witness the extraction process, which kills the salmon as the DNA is removed.
“During the tour, they showed us the streams where the salmon were captured, the factory where they process the salmon DNA, and actually had us handle some of the live salmon prior to processing,” he says.
Dr. Yoo argues that the uncanniness of salmon sperm is what has made the procedure so popular. His office in Beverly Hills offers the treatment for a starting price of $850.
“There’s a little bit of that shock factor involved,” says Dr. Yoo. “The reason that it’s growing is the fact that science has given it a good, strong basis.”
What basis is that? It begins with polynucleotides, which are fragments of DNA derived from salmon sperm. They were previously used in wound healing after clinical studies showed that they accelerated the tissue repair process. Salmon DNA, as it turns out, shares striking similarities with human DNA, causing it to stimulate collagen production, according to a 2022 peer-reviewed study in the journal Marine Drugs.
“It decreases inflammation,” says Dr. Yoo. “It promotes cell proliferation and blood vessel proliferation.”
When applied to the face, it can result in a soft, radiant, even-toned complexion. For years, scientists in Europe and South Korea have performed clinical studies of salmon DNA on skin to investigate its effect on collagen reproduction. One study conducted on wound healing in mice showed that administering polynucleotides expedited healing and collagen density.
However, despite the growing interest in this treatment, Dr. Rahman is not convinced of its efficacy.
“You have to be careful before jumping on a trend to see if it’s scientifically valid,” said Dr. Rahman.
After reviewing the scientific research, she explains that because of how the nucleotides function on the cell level, they can potentially be harmful to patients with rosacea and can actually cause some inflammation within the cells.
She notes that, when it comes to absorption, polynucleotides are also relatively large, as opposed to more commonly used skin treatment ingredients like retinoids and vitamin C.
“The reason why retinoids and vitamin C work so well is that they’re very small and they can penetrate the skin,” says Dr. Rahman. “So this, if you were just to apply it topically, probably wouldn’t get absorbed.”
From a scientific perspective, it’s not clear that salmon DNA has the potential benefits that are advertised, she said, adding that established methods still yield the best results.
“If you’re using a topical retinoid or topical vitamin C, they’re much less expensive,” she says. “A lot of the laser treatments that we do, which are FDA-cleared for things like collagen stimulation and resurfacing of the skin, are actually much more cost-effective.”
“Do we really want to kill more salmon for their gonads?”
— Dr. Zakia Rahman, Stanford School of Dermatology clinical professor
She also has sustainability concerns. After all, salmon sperm is finite.
“Do we really want to kill more salmon for their gonads?” she asks.
Nevertheless, the trend has become widespread in Europe and South Korea, and in the last year, it has developed a loyal fan base in the U.S. On Instagram, the hashtag #salmonspermfacial has over 5,000 posts featuring before-and-after photos. On TikTok, viral testimonials about salmon DNA facials rack up hundreds of thousands of likes.
Jorian Palos discovered salmon DNA facials after searching for a way to lessen her eye bags and discoloration. She tried the treatment at a med spa chain called Skin Station in Orange County. She said the process was slightly disquieting.
“It was painful, just because it’s salmon semen essentially going under your eye.”
Though she was happy with her results, the recovery was also intense.
“My face was bruised under my eyes for about a week,” she said. “It turned purple, and then it turned yellow.”
Shirel Swissa did not have as an intense recovery. She routinely microneedles and vouches for the treatment.
“Right now, my skin is the smoothest and clearest it’s been in forever,” she says. “There’s no texture. It also helps with my active acne.”
As for the sperm element, Swissa is unbothered: “It smells a tiny bit fishy. It’s not overpowering, but it’s tolerable.”
Dr. Yoo says it’s good to be skeptical of the latest health trend, but predicts that, based on the results he’s seen, salmon sperm facials will stick around.
“It’s an exploding field,” he said.
No pun intended.
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