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What is research-led teaching and why it matters

“I think we tend to say that we are research-led or research-based without necessarily reflecting on what that means in our particular discipline.” – Professor Ford  

ANU has a global reputation for research and prides itself on its research-led teaching. Yet as a student myself, I’ve often realised I am not fully aware of what this looks like in practice. It raises all sorts of questions: How do I know when research and teaching intersect? If the academics follow a teaching curriculum, does it make much of a difference if they are experts in a certain field of law? Does their external research really have any impact on one’s learning – and why does it matter?  

I conducted a series of interviews with four ANU College of Law academics on what research-led teaching looks like, hoping to contextualise and reflect on my own learning experiences as a law student. Through their insights and experiences, I saw the value of such pedagogy and the impact it has on student learning. 

What is research-led teaching and what does it look like at the ANU College of Law? 

According to Associate Professor Wayne Morgan – who is also the Associate Dean for the ANU College of Law:  “[T]he whole ethos of the ANU as a research-led institution … [is that] all of our teaching should be research-led. That applies throughout the programs, whether they be compulsory courses within the programs, or elective courses in the programs, or indeed even in the more work integrated learning aspects of the program.”   

At its core, research-led teaching is apparent when an academic teaches subject matter that aligns with their expertise, allowing them to bring insights from their research into their teaching. 

Academics practice this in multiple ways. While there is less scope for course design in a compulsory course, they require an element of research as the academic needs to be up to date with any changes in the legislation or new cases. Research can also be incorporated through illustrations and asides that demonstrate the core concepts in a different context more familiar to the academic. Professor Jo Ford describes this as: “…sprinkling or weaving through [the compulsory course] some of your own experiences and insights from your research area in ways that give your teaching more authenticity and authority.”  

In addition, the law program offers a plethora of electives, allowing students to engage with more specialised or niche aspects of the law that interest them. Wayne recommends this as a great platform for academics to design a course purely based on their research areas. A recent example of this is Dr Cassandra Steer’s new elective, Space Law and Governance, which was based entirely on her specialisation in space law, space policy and space security. By incorporating research in this way, academics are able to offer “expertise that doesn’t exist anywhere else, and a perspective on the subject matter that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” (Dr Steer)  

The ANU College of Law also offers experiential learning based on an academic’s research field. For instance, students recently had the opportunity to contribute to Jo’s research in modern slavery by analysing companies across a sector and how they have been responding to the risk of modern slavery. This project provided students with an opportunity to engage in research topics using less conventional and more collaborative and independently research-driven methods. 

Why does it matter?

Research-led teaching undoubtedly shapes the student learning experience. Foremost, research-led teaching develops critical thinking. This may sound rather obvious, but the impact it has on students’ learning should not be overlooked. While scientific and mathematical courses are generally about testing and applying a proven formula or ‘truth’, research-led teaching in the context of law usurps the assumption that what you are learning is hard truth. An academic’s research offers different perspectives, which inspires investigation, triggers debate and invites alternative ways of questioning the material being taught. For example, as well as discussing her own research on current issues, Cassandra was able to bring in an Aboriginal astronomer who offered insight into Indigenous perspectives in the realm of space law. In this way, she was able to use interdisciplinary research as a medium to enrich her students’ critical thinking skills.  

Moreover, research-led teaching produces an inspired and motivated academic, and as such directly influences the learning environment for students. While academics do not always teach their specialisation, especially within the compulsory subjects, it often interests and inspires them if they are able to incorporate their research. Jo notes the impact of this in the classroom:  “In my own experience, you feel a lot more alive and motivated and the students can tell. They’re like, ‘Wow, this person is very passionate about this subject that they know a lot about. They research it, and they’re sharing it with me… This person is letting me into the world that they know so well, which can create quite a good, intimate learning experience.”   

Finally, research-led teaching helps students see the relevance of the subject, whether it be through current affairs or everyday life. This shows students that what they are learning is not only confined to the classroom but also is relevant to the world in action. For instance, Associate Professor Vivien Holmes used her research on sexual harassment and bullying in the legal profession in the Laws, Justice and Ethics course. She found that when students can see a connection between research and an issue in real life, it not only enriches their learning but also empowers them to act and consider how they can practically put into action what they have learnt. Even for courses that may not have an immediate practical application, seeing the relevance can encourage students to consider how they can use their studies in the long run to address such issues.  

Conclusion 

My chats with these academics have helped me identify the ways in which specialised research has been incorporated in the courses I have taken, which has also enriched my appreciation of its ‘capillary effects’ on my learning. Students are fortunate that ANU invests in education driven by leading research, and I am confident that as students progress through their degree, they will continually see how ANU lives up to its reputation. 

View or download the video transcript

February 2022

Rebecca Gibson is a student in the ANU College of Law and a part-time Education Technologist at the Centre for Learning and Teaching. 

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What is research-led education and how does it benefit me?

Research-led education is a term that you will almost certainly have come across before or during your time at university. But what does it mean and how does it benefit your education?

To understand this, I begin with a brief explanation about the kind of university Essex is and the type of academics that make up our community. The University of Essex is a ‘dual-intensive’ university. This means we place equal importance on delivering excellence in education and excellence in research. As such, when we recruit teachers, lecturers, and professors, we seek those who have outstanding teaching skills but who are also either accomplished researchers or practitioners in their academic field. Thus, education and research are connected at Essex through the community of lecturers and professors that teach you.

You may be wondering why we expect the people who teach you to also be good researchers or practitioners. One reason is that, whether you are a lecturer or a student, you share something of great importance in common which is that you are both learners. Researchers are advanced learners who adopt very similar approaches to those that you will need as a student. For example, you’re expected to develop skills in finding and reading reliable sources of literature about your subject which is exactly what researchers do to understand the knowledge gaps in their academic fields. You are sometimes asked to submit written assessments as part of your course which is also very similar to the process of preparing and submitting articles for publication that your lecturers do. While you experience the highs and lows of getting good and, sometimes, not-so-good marks, your lecturers also experience similar swings in feeling when their written work either gets accepted or rejected for publication, usually after being evaluated by other experts in their field. So, you have a lot in common with your lecturer.

The important point is that, as part of your research-led education at Essex, you will be taught by a range of academics who, through years of learning experience, will have developed their own preferred approach to learning. In being taught by many lecturers at Essex, we hope that you will begin to notice how they differ in their own learning methods and that, through your own experience and reflection, this will help you develop and refine your own style in ways that see you leave us as a highly effective, life-long learner. Thus, learning to learn is a great benefit of your research-led education at Essex.

At some point, you may find yourself listening to a lecturer discussing a very specialised and nuanced aspect of their research, and you could be forgiven for wondering how this is relevant to your own education. Or could you? You see, to make new discoveries and draw credible conclusions, researchers often need to overcome theoretical inconsistencies and pragmatic difficulties. By telling stories about their research, your lecturers are actually sharing valuable insights and experiences with you about how to overcome difficult or confusing problems with thoroughness and rigour. This kind of insight is a major advantage of the kind of research-led education you receive at Essex compared to research-informed education. It will help you to develop the kind of advanced cognitive and enquiry skills that will help distinguish you as a graduate when you leave university, especially to prospective employers.

Research-led teaching is a fundamental part of what we refer to as a transformational education at Essex. During your time at Essex, you will be taught by research-active academics, learn about our research, and will have an opportunity to be directly involved in contributing to our research, especially during your capstone project. These experiences have very important transformative benefits, providing you with a chance to see your lecturers not just as your teachers but also as learners just like you. This will not only help refine your own learning skills but it will also enable you to develop intellectually rigorous discovery skills that will be of great benefit to you whatever you go on to do after university, especially in the world of work.

About the Author:

Professor Dominic Micklewright

Dean of Partnerships and Professor (R), University of Essex

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Research-led teaching

About this topic.

As a research intensive institution, we actively contributes to new knowledge that underpins teaching both here and across the world.

Whilst there is considerable debate about the relationship between research and teaching in higher education there is some agreement that the what, why and how of teaching and learning is informed by the concepts, evidence and outputs of academics.

We use 'Research-led teaching' to describe our teaching approach. This topic provides examples of how these three broad areas often considered under the term research-led teaching can be applied in teaching practice:

• presenting discipline based research to students
• teachers undertaking pedagogic research and scholarship activities to enable better teaching
• students learning through engagement in a range of research activities.

Increasingly the latter is being utilised across all disciplines through problem-based learning, group collaborative projects and formal research undertakings.

Case Studies

The online research group teaching model, dr richard lewis.

Published 23 Jul 2021 • 12 mins read

This presentation from the 2021 Learning and Teaching Conference summarises how the School of Physics and Astronomy successfully transitioned from 100% face-to-face to 100% remote delivery of MSc programmes to meet the needs of the Academic Year 2020

Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme: Production of GM plants resistant to aphid infection

Dr geraint parry, ryan coates, emily heath, hannah elliott and sophie thomas.

Published 13 May 2020 • 8 mins read

This video features Dr Geraint Parry and undergraduate Bioscience students discussing their experiences undertaking a Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (CUROP) summer placement in 2018.

Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme: Analysis of NGO Communications on Social Media Sites

Andrea drobna.

Published 17 Jan 2020 • 3 mins read

This video features Andrea Drobna, a first year undergraduate talking about her experience on a Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (CUROP) summer placement in 2018.

Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme: The Mushin Museum Military and Developing World Anaesthesia Project

Kerry leyton.

This video features Kerry Leyton, a first year undergraduate talking about her experience on a Cardiff Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (CUROP) summer placement in 2018.

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Teaching intelligence: get to grips with ‘research-led teaching’

Olga burlyuk explores the different conceptions, challenges and possibilities within the practice.

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Everyone in academia has heard about research-led teaching. Many of us are supposedly doing it. But what exactly does it involve?

There is much variation across different higher education systems and institutions. But it is helpful to think of the concept in the broadest manner possible. To help navigate the field, I have identified the six most common ways of understanding research-led teaching: you teach your research; you teach others’ research; you teach students to do research; you do research with your students; you research what you teach; and you research your teaching.

‘You teach your research’ This is perhaps the most widespread understanding of research-led teaching. It implies that you get to teach your own research, be it in a guest lecture, a compact seminar or a full-blown course. No matter the platform, you develop a curriculum based on your own research. As most of us trained as researchers (and often did not formally train to be teachers), enjoy our research and face excessive workloads, this is considered an attractive, indeed desired, route when it comes to teaching.

Given the current academic job market, however, teaching only your own research is risky because your teaching portfolio might become too narrow and eventually render you unemployable. Therefore, scholars, especially junior ones, should embed their research in a broader curriculum and should not shy away from teaching “old but good” general courses, either.

Likewise, while you might consider yourself to be on top of the material in your field, designing a class or a course on it might prove to be a challenging exercise in stock-taking, broadening outlook, engaging with alternative opinions on the subject – and simply keeping up to date.

‘You teach others’ research’ This is another common understanding of research-led teaching. Put simply, it means that the substance of your teaching is driven by work that other researchers have done in the field. In practice, this implies using your lectures and course readings to expose students to original academic research, rather than textbooks and handbooks.

The bones of contention in this strand of research-led teaching concern what research deserves to be taught and at what educational level. All would agree that the research we teach should be noteworthy. Yet opinions vary as to what the key selection criterion should be: most fundamental? illustrative? mainstream, deviant, recent, diverse (theoretically, methodologically, ideologically)? – or something else altogether? Although the tutor should make the final call, institutional and disciplinary constraints will play a role.

Furthermore, while most in higher education seem to agree that teaching led by research of some kind is important, opinions differ as to whether this teaching approach is suitable only for postgraduate students, who are likely to be more mature and specialised in their field of study. I have used research-led teaching with postgraduate and undergraduate students and found that it works with both.

‘You teach students to do research’ In essence, this strand involves integrating research assignments to train students in one (or a combination) of the following: the process of enquiry (curiosity, creativity, critical thinking), the content of a subject (specialisation, profiling) and research and writing methods (commonly sold as “transferable skills”).

Beyond your usual course paper or thesis, this might take the form of assembling a portfolio of some kind, individual or group student presentations, and various in-class research assignments. The challenges here are striking a balance between autonomy and guidance, assessing students’ work and curbing the burden of evaluating plentiful student submissions. Each option comes with its own set of pedagogical wins and losses. But practice does make perfect in this respect.

‘You do research with your students’ This hardly requires explanation: you team up with students in doing research. Of course, undertaking such research-led teaching depends not only on the strength and commitment of students and the nature of your research, but also on the formal rules of your institution. In some cases, you might be unable to formally account for such collaboration as teaching, which could pose problems for both sides.

‘You research what you teach’ This approach, which might be better called “teaching-led research”, refers to arguably infrequent and counter-intuitive occasions when teaching a subject inspires you to explore new research avenues. Well, why not?

‘You research your teaching’ The last strand could be known as “teaching as research”, and it denotes cases when teaching is your research. This type of research-led teaching need not be limited to scholars working in pedagogy studies: others can carry out research into the teaching of their particular subject or discipline, or reflect on an innovative method.

Whichever type of research-led teaching you might wish to practise, be aware of the professional evaluation matrices in your academic system, or the system you might wish to land in, because they could shift your priorities. And, of course, bureaucratic “dos and don’ts” may set the parameters of the possible. But if we think of research-led teaching in its broadest sense, perhaps it can open up new possibilities for us as teachers, and for our students.

Olga Burlyuk is a Flanders Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for EU Studies at Ghent University .

POSTSCRIPT:

Print headline:  Is my research space suited to teaching?

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Research-informed teaching

The university is committed to enhancing the link between research disciplines, professions and teaching to improve our students’ experience.

• providing students with meaningful and deep learning experiences 
• enhancing the student experience of real-world issues
• developing critical thinking 
• improving student confidence 
• enhancing employability 
• developing digital and networking skills 
• highlighting the profile of undergraduate research.

equip our researchers with the skills, opportunities and environment to engage in disciplinary and interdisciplinary research and research-led teaching.

recognised nationally and internationally for our high-quality, research-led education by ensuring that all curricula include Plymouth research-based material, and that students have opportunities to generate knowledge in their programmes. 

Embedding research-teaching links into the curriculum at Plymouth

• Research Informed Teaching Education
• Research Informed Teaching Health Professions
• Research Informed Teaching Psychology

Research-informed teaching scheme

• collaborative research
• research skill development
• course development
• learning environments
• teaching materials
• student publication and dissemination
• student placements
• technology-enhanced learning. 

Linking undergraduate research and community

Developing research partnerships between the University and community is important so that research subjects are authentic, applied and have real value. Looking to community for research ideas that students can contribute to can be a great learning experience. Check out Dilly Fung’s connected curriculum which links employability, globalisation and research-informed teaching for ideas on how to do this. 

Although normally student research takes place within the curriculum, there are extra-curricular research possibilities at Plymouth through student jobs , placements and internships. Plymouth undergraduates regularly undertake authentic research with peers, academics and the wider community.

Involving students in the scholarly community 

Exposing students to academic events like research seminars and conferences can be fantastic for their development. If your discipline or institution holds a local conference then promote this to students. The Plymouth annual research festival is a good example. Encourage students emulate academic scholarly activity by holding their own meetings to critique literature or artefacts and encourage them to share useful resources.

• The Plymouth Student Scientist showcases excellence in undergraduate student research from the University of Plymouth's STEM disciplines. Since its launch in 2008 its papers have had 400,000 views. 
• The Plymouth Student Educator highlights examples of good undergraduate research practice from courses within the Plymouth Institute of Education (School of Society and Culture).
• The Plymouth Law & Criminal Justice Review encourages and promotes legal scholarship and writing on a wide range of legal issues. It also provides a forum for disseminating information about current projects in the Law School and includes articles by staff and students. 

Useful resources  Professor Mick Healey's recent publications – Professor Healey has worked extensively linking discipline-based research and teaching and engaging students in research and inquiry. Good for getting an overview of how research-informed teaching has developed in the UK context and reviewing benefits for students, academics, departments and institutions.  The Council on Undergraduate Research is an American organisation with the mission to support and promote high-quality undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship. They host a range of resources including student and scholarly journal material. Good for disciplinary examples for research-informed teaching in practice.  Advance HE present numerous relevant resources. Particularly useful is their publication What does research-informed teaching look like? Good for institutional examples of research-informed teaching.  Professor Dilly Fung has developed the ‘ Connected Curriculum ’. An institution wide initiative at University College London, which links teaching, learning, research, real world application and employability. Students undertake research iteratively throughout their programmes and work on authentic research issues.  Helen Walkington has produced a concise and comprehensive overview of how to support undergraduate research in the curriculum. Jennie Winter has developed a  7 steps to: Linking research and teaching.  This provides a concise overview of how to implement research informed teaching in your practice. 

Teaching Matters blog

Promoting, discussing and celebrating teaching at the university of edinburgh, research-led teaching and the research/teaching nexus.

In one of the very first blogs on Teaching Matters, Elizabeth Bomberg wrote ‘ It’s time to focus on teaching-research synergies ’ and provided a valuable account of how she, and her students, engage with and benefit from research-teaching links.

Research and teaching may sometimes pull in opposite directions in terms of demands on staff time and institutional and external drivers. It is therefore an institutional as well as an individual challenge to promote and sustain such synergy and ensure that research and teaching are not experienced as mutually exclusive activities. With such a vibrant learning community, we are surely up to the challenge.

Indeed, it is learning that most obviously links research and teaching: inquiry is central to both. As researchers, teachers and students we are all engaged in the processes of knowledge production and in the acquisition and application of research related skills. In a knowledge based economy, students will increasingly need to develop and use these skills of information gathering, synthesis, analysis and application, whatever field they are studying and whatever career they enter.

There are different dimensions to research-led learning and the concept defies neat definition. Existing literatures stress an inquiry-based approach as key, with students centrally involved in the learning process. We have already seen excellent examples on Teaching Matters, making visible the diverse ways in which we are engaged in research-led learning, even if the activity is not labeled as such.

Learning in a research mode actively mirrors the research process, whether this is peer review in the context of assessment and feedback (c.f. Susan Rhind’s blog on repositioning assessment and feedback ) or a student-led course or project (c.f. Shirley Gray on the PE4C Investigation and Student-Led Research Conference ). This demands flexible curricula with multiple modes of research-led learning, building across all years of study and sometimes taking staff and students out of their comfort zones to confront other disciplines, approaches and contexts – learning within and beyond the University.

Research-led learning is also research informed in two ways. First, in the sense of learning about others’ research and knowledge within a discipline (and let’s not forget how useful it is for academics to keep on top of the broader developments in their field through curriculum development and interacting with students). Second, in that teaching and learning practices themselves are informed through applying and contributing to pedagogical research. Staff and students can learn about learning – drawing on up to date and appropriate pedagogies such as online teaching, for example (c.f. Sian Bayne’s blog on the Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning (IDEL) course and staff bursaries ).

The integration of teaching and research requires active shaping involving students, staff and management practices. Let’s make visible the multiple ways in which we are already practicing research-led learning. And let’s identify barriers and enablers that will help us to be excellent in research and teaching and learning through embedding research-led learning.

Do let us know about ways in which you are engaging in research-led learning and teaching and what your aspirations are for developing the research/teaching nexus in the future.

Further reading:

Healey, M. 2005. “Linking research and teaching: disciplinary spaces and the role of inquiry-based learning”. In: R. Barnett (Ed.) Reshaping the university: new relationships between research, scholarship and teaching , 67-78. SRHE and Open University Press, McGraw – Hill Education.

Jenkins, A and Healey, M (2005) Institutional strategies to link teaching and research . Higher Education Academy.

Malcolm, M. 2014. “ A critical evaluation of recent progress in understanding the role of the research-teaching link in higher education ”. Higher Education , 67, 289-301.

Sarah Cunningham-Burley is Professor of Medical and Family Sociology, Assistant Principal, Research-led learning and Dean of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. She researches and teaches in a multi-disciplinary environment, bringing social scientific perspectives and methods to understanding and practice in medicine, public health and health and family policy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Social Sciences.

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School of Life Sciences

Research led teaching

The University of Liverpool is a research-intensive university, and many of our academic staff are leading researchers in their fields. What this means for you as a student is that your learning will be informed by the very latest developments in Life Sciences.

The School of Life Sciences is large and varied, which is illustrated by the breadth of internationally respected research currently taking place. Two examples include the work of  Professor Ilik Saccheri  and his team to unravel the secrets of evolutionary change in the peppered moth, and the research team led by  Professor Munir Pirmohamed , which has changed the way drugs that can cause serious adverse reactions are prescribed to patients.

A world wide impact on adverse drug reactions

Genetic variation in drug response has been studied for many years and its effects can be dramatic, with drugs being ineffective or even toxic. Pre-treatment genetic testing, which is now recommended by the regulatory agencies worldwide, has drastically reduced, and in some countries eradicated occurrence of severe allergic reaction to certain drugs.

The Department’s research on adverse drug reactions over the last two decades has been at the forefront of the international efforts which revealed that several human leukocyte antigen genes were associated with severe allergic reactions to commonly used drugs. Importantly, prescribing information has now been revised to include the recommendation for a preprescription genetic testing in order to decrease the risk of serious adverse drug reactions.

Professor Pirmohamed says: “Adverse drug reactions represent a major cause of hospital admissions and can be life threatening. The introduction of pre-treatment genetic testing into clinical practice has improved patient care and quality of life, improved public health services and achieved international impact”.

Dr  Terry Gleave  talks about how research informs teaching at the School in this video:

The staff here are research active and their latest research informs their teaching. This really influenced my decision to study here. Jason Salt, BSc Zoology

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"research-led" approach: a model reshaping learning and teaching into the future.

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Presentation about a research-led approach to reshape learning and teaching into the future

AEC e-Newsletter Special Edition

Applying service-learning pedagogy in a chinese university, unearthing the treasures in building a community: a case study in the university of hong kong, multi-disciplinary teaching and learning - planning ahead for collaborative practice in an innovative era, toward an innovation and entrepreneur-friendly leanring environment, towards impact + university: looking ahead to sustainability education at xjtlu in 2025, cultural intelligence in transnational education: a chinese case study, written in the stars: the future of my classroom, performance management frameworks in higher education in multicultural contexts: cultural dimensions models and behavioural preferences towards the design of performance indicators, using a graphic organizer for comprehension and analysis, introducing customized video demonstration into the future lab-based teaching at xjtlu, research-led learning and teaching in civil engineering education, enhancing classroom learning using a mobile application for guided exploratory site visits, large groups, embedded language support, and blended learning: how an ibss-lc jointly delivered undergraduate module is responding to current global trends in higher education, m-learning at xjtlu: the case of ice for mobile devices, ubiquitous digital repositories in the design studio, the case for "exercise 0" at xjtlu in the next 10 years, preparing students for the future collaborative economy: a solution for assessing and motivating groupwork for an industrial design studio module, the patchwork assessment: a formative-summative assessment combo in an ecology module, the development of an in-house placement test to improve understanding of future cohorts' english language needs, why flipped classroom, active learning with hands-on science: chemists students learning physics, enhancing active learning by developing a virtual construction site visit game, how might we foster future faculty interdisciplinary networking in teaching and research, writing centres: shaping the learning culture, teaching and learning strategies for improving language accuracy in final year projects, the prime machine: a new learner-centred corpus application as a language reference and learning tool for students, integrated exams in eap: future challenges, presenters: xiaojun zhang, junzhe guan, xuzhe tong (institute of leadership and education advanced development), key words: research-led approach, learning and teaching, educational reform.

Research-led learning and teaching has been considered as an effective way to transform teaching from a teacher-centered passive learning model to a more student-centered active learning model. It is found that the “Research-led” approach helps to foster deep understanding and cultivate students’ critical thinking. Therefore it may reshape learning and teaching and contribute to education reform in the future. However, there is no consensus on how to apply RLLT to teaching practices in different disciplines. Our presentation will therefore focus on our current findings in implementation of RLLT in teaching practices, and explore the role RLLT plays in reshaping learning and teaching, and promoting education reform. We will also invite Dr. Chee Chin from Department of Civil Engineering to share his expectations on implementing RLLT in civil engineering. 

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Being a Researcher pp 1–23 Cite as

What Is Research and Why We Do It

• Carlo Ghezzi 2  
• First Online: 23 June 2020

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The notions of science and scientific research are discussed and the motivations for doing research are analyzed. Research can span a broad range of approaches, from purely theoretical to practice-oriented; different approaches often coexist and fertilize each other. Research ignites human progress and societal change. In turn, society drives and supports research. The specific role of research in Informatics is discussed. Informatics is driving the current transition towards the new digital society in which we will live in the future.

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In [ 34 ], P.E. Medawar discusses what he calls the “snobismus” of pure versus applied science. In his words, this is one of the most damaging forms of snobbism, which draws a class distinction between pure and applied science.

Originality, rigor, and significance have been defined and used as the key criteria to evaluate research outputs by the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) [ 46 ]. A research evaluation exercise has been performed periodically since 1986 on UK higher education institutions and their research outputs have been rated according to their originality, rigor, and significance.

The importance of realizing that “we don’t know” was apparently first stated by Socrates, according to Plato’s account of his thought. This is condensed in the famous paradox “I know that I don’t know.”

This view applies mainly to natural and physical sciences.

Roy Amara was President of the Institute for Future, a USA-based think tank, from 1971 until 1990.

The Turing Award is generally recognized as the Nobel prize of Informatics.

See http://uis.unesco.org/apps/visualisations/research-and-development-spending/ .

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This figure has been adapted from a presentation by A. Fuggetta, which describes the mission of Cefriel, an Italian institution with a similar role of Fraunhofer, on a smaller scale.

The ERC takes an ecumenical approach and calls the research sector “Computer Science and Informatics.”

I discuss here the effect of “big data” on research, although most sectors of society—industry, finance, health, …—are also deeply affected.

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Science News

How patient-led research could speed up medical innovation.

People with understudied chronic conditions are taking up science

Suffers of long COVID, ME/CFS and other chronic conditions are taking medical research into their own hands.

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By Betsy Ladyzhets

March 28, 2024 at 12:00 pm

Melissa Red Hoffman was “feeling really stuck” last summer. A 50-year-old surgeon in Asheville, N.C., Hoffman had been struggling with long COVID since getting infected with the coronavirus two and a half years earlier. “Deafening fatigue” was one of her worst symptoms, she says. “I feel tired behind my eyes from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep.” She managed to work part time, but much of her work had shifted to administrative tasks that she did from her couch.

“I was really at a point where I had tried so many different things myself, with so many different providers,” she says, “not really sure what the hell to do next.”

Then she found Remission Biome . It’s a research project started in early 2023 by Tamara Romanuk and Tess Falor, two people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, a chronic disease that shares symptoms with long COVID. Project participants have taken medical research into their own hands to determine whether and how changes to their gut bacteria can improve their health. After an initial test with three participants led to some symptom relief, Romanuk and Falor announced last July that they would recruit 50 people with ME/CFS, long COVID or both for a larger test of the project’s protocol.

Hoffman was one of 500 people who applied within 36 hours of the call for volunteers. By the fall, she and 49 other people, dubbed the “Renegade 50,” had joined the project.

Remission Biome’s protocol is a multistep process, which participants undertake in consultation with their physicians. Initial steps involve patients collecting samples of their guts, immune systems and other connected organ systems, either at home or at a health care provider’s office. After those samples are analyzed by a lab to get baseline data, participants take a regimen of over-the-counter supplements, such as probiotics to cultivate certain types of gut bacteria, and then a prescribed antibiotic. Next comes further testing to examine if and how the regimen altered the composition of the gut microbiome. Throughout the process, participants track their symptoms and learn about past research on the microbiome that informed the project, ensuring that they understand the rationale for every step.

Early in the testing process, Hoffman’s fatigue started to lift, she says. “That’s been exciting, just to feel a little bit of a change.”

Alleviating symptoms — which can include debilitating fatigue, trouble sleeping, intense allergic reactions and cognitive problems — motivates many members of the Renegade 50, who come from different countries, age groups and stages of illness. But participants also aim to collect and publish data that will give the broader scientific community more information about ME/CFS and long COVID, two complex, often fluctuating conditions.

Participant María Richardson, a 36-year-old former educator in Mexico City, has dealt with progressively worse ME/CFS symptoms since high school. She received her diagnosis in the United States in 2015, but when she moved back to her native Mexico, where knowledge of the condition is limited, trying to get care “was like starting from zero,” she says. Remission Biome helped her better understand her own symptoms and share scientific information with the ME/CFS community in Mexico, through the ME/CFS advocacy group Millions Missing Mexico .

Remission Biome is one effort in the growing movement of patient-led research, which seeks to investigate chronic conditions that have been under-researched by academic and clinical scientists yet impact many people’s lives.

“People who were ignored by the American health care system … often need to turn to each other in order to gather the data that gets the attention of the mainstream,” says health care researcher Susannah Fox, author of the new book Rebel Health: A Field Guide to the Patient-Led Revolution in Medical Care .

Compared with mainstream medical research that tends to focus on finding biological causes and disease cures, patient-led work is more often rooted in what’s immediately relevant to patients’ daily lives, like identifying symptom triggers or relievers. But the approach faces challenges — particularly a lack of funding and other research resources — as scientific institutions aren’t set up to support these projects.

Patient-researchers and their scientist collaborators say the patient-led approach has big potential to move chronic disease research forward, making it more informed, quicker and more poised to directly improve patients’ lives.

Projects like Remission Biome “are going to change how research into these chronic, multi-organ-system diseases is going to be done,” Hoffman says. The approach may someday become a standard part of more mainstream research.

Experimental design

Remission Biome is studying whether changes to the gut microbiome can improve the health of people with ME/CFS or long COVID. Participants follow a protocol that includes taking prebiotic and probiotic supplements and a course of antibiotics.

Initial safety checks and testing : Samples from several body systems are collected and analyzed to ensure it’s safe for a volunteer to participate and to collect baseline data.

Symptom tracking : Participants record their symptoms throughout the project.

Start supplements : Participants begin taking prebiotics and probiotics.

Antibiotic added : An antibiotic is added to the regimen for 14 days.

Post-antibiotic testing : Body systems are checked again to look for changes.

Result : Remission Biome members hope to experience some symptom relief, as well as publish study findings and inspire new research projects for professional scientists.

A history of patient activism and patient-led research

About 1.3 percent of adults in the United States have ME/CFS, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists first noticed the condition in the 1930s, but since then, it’s been hard to define and hasn’t attracted extensive research attention. Initial observations noted outbreaks characterized by fatigue, chronic pain and other symptoms now associated with ME/CFS, often occurring — but not always — after viral infections. Scientists started to link these mysterious outbreaks in the 1980s under the umbrella term chronic fatigue syndrome.

Progress on identifying the disease’s triggers has been slow, in part because of the wide variety of symptoms across many organ systems and in part due to relatively limited research funding. And some doctors have dismissed patients’ symptoms as all psychological — a factor that some experts connect to the disease’s higher burden on women.

Combined, these challenges have contributed to a lack of treatments for people with ME/CFS, despite the illness’s potentially devastating impact on patients. Long COVID — which 6.8 percent of U.S. adults currently have, according to data from the CDC and U.S. Census Bureau — raised the profile of ME/CFS during the pandemic because of the two conditions’ similarities ( SN: 3/4/24 ).

“Biomedical research has blind spots.” Susannah Fox

Remission Biome started thanks to a Twitter conversation in fall 2022. Falor and Romanuk realized they had both independently experienced what they call “remission events,” in which symptoms recede for a few hours or days after courses of antibiotics. These events led each of them to look into the possible connection between ME/CFS symptoms and the gut microbiome, an emerging area of study with many unanswered questions. The pair were also both working scientists before their symptoms became debilitating. Falor had worked as an aerospace engineer at NASA; Romanuk had been a biologist studying microbiomes.

The two scientists set out to replicate their remission events — and collect extensive data on how their microbiomes and bodily systems changed to better understand the underlying biology of these events. They started with a self-test in early 2023, which included taking a lengthy list of supplements chosen to either increase or decrease levels of specific bacteria with possible ME/CFS connections. In addition to Romanuk and Falor, Isabel Ramirez-Burnett, a 50-year-old engineer and health coach in Rhode Island who has lived with ME/CFS since childhood, participated in the experiment.

The testing “went even better than we could have expected,” Falor says, with two of the three participants experiencing remission events. So Remission Biome expanded to the Renegade 50 cohort and fundraised through a crowdfunding campaign, grants and sponsorships to support this larger project. The team also recruited the participants’ physicians, to help ensure safety, along with scientists to collaborate with the participants and other volunteer researchers working on the project. Scientists regularly attend research meetings hosted by Remission Biome, Falor says, which include presentations and discussions about new, relevant findings in other ME/CFS and long COVID research.

Theoharis Theoharides is one of those scientists. As director of the Center of Excellence for Neuroinflammation Research at Nova Southeastern University in Clearwater, Fla., he has decades of experience studying mast cell activation syndrome, a chronic condition characterized by intense allergic reactions that is often diagnosed alongside ME/CFS and long COVID. “They’re very bright, very dedicated,” Theoharides says of Falor and Romanuk. He has provided feedback on Remission Biome’s regimen of supplements and plans to help analyze microbiome and blood samples taken from the Renegade 50 participants to look at how immune system changes may connect to their gut bacteria.

Another collaborator is Tatyana Dobreva, cofounder and CEO of the San Francisco–based biotech start-up ImYoo , which operates remote clinical trials and other research. ImYoo is assisting Remission Biome with genetic analysis of patient blood samples. The Renegade 50 study is similar to other ImYoo projects studying conditions such as IBS and sickle cell disease, in which participants tie symptom tracking to data from medical testing, Dobreva says.

Remission Biome adds to a long history of patients with complex and contested illnesses advocating for their communities, Fox says. “Every decade of the 20th century had an example of people who were either being ignored or who were being discriminated against” by scientists and doctors, and who “banded together to innovate or gather data,” she says. Examples include Black people with sickle cell disease in the 1970s and people with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s ( SN: 12/8/23 ). In some cases, this translated to patient-informed research, in which patients consult on scientific projects, informing everything from research questions to how results are disseminated.

In the 21st century, the internet aided patient-led projects, with patients actually doing research, as like-minded patients could more easily find each other, as happened with Romanuk and Falor, Fox says. In these projects, patients also closely follow scientific studies about their disease and may collaborate with academic experts to develop scientific frameworks, rather than self-experimenting individually.

ME/CFS patients have been particularly motivated to pursue their own research, says Emily Taylor, vice president of advocacy and engagement at the ME/CFS organization Solve M.E . One key motivator is “the failure of the medical establishment to provide any sort of support or treatment or quality of life improvements for this population,” she says. Previous ME/CFS research done without patient input, such as a now-debunked clinical trial examining exercise as a potential treatment, has led patients to push back with their own studies.

“There was a desperate need to validate the anecdotal stories of patients in a formalized way,” Taylor says.

In spring 2020, during the first months of the pandemic, patients whose symptoms persisted for weeks after the initial infection started documenting their complex symptoms in real time. The Patient-Led Research Collaborative , or PLRC, formed out of a long COVID support group, led by members who had scientific experience.

PLRC released its first report in May 2020 , documenting symptoms common among the group’s hundreds of members. “We saw a need to start collecting people’s experiences and really try to take things into our own hands,” says PLRC cofounder and long COVID patient Lisa McCorkell.

U.S. adults who have ME/CFS

U.S. adults who have long COVID

Patients are experts

Patient-led and patient-informed research can be a win-win for both patients and scientists, advocates say. For patients, this work is more likely to address questions that are meaningful to their daily lives, says Jaime Seltzer, director of science and medical outreach at the advocacy group #MEAction . In one pre-pandemic example, a patient group focused on polycystic kidney disease proposed potential treatments to scientists at the University of Cambridge, leading to clinical trials at a new patient-led research hub.

Patient leadership can also inspire people to participate in clinical trials, as the interest in joining Remission Biome demonstrates. And study designs informed by patient experience often prioritize accommodations for people with different levels of symptoms or access to care, meaning a more diverse group of patients may be able to participate. With a patient-led, “decentralized” approach to research, “we can reach more people in more diverse areas” who don’t live near medical facilities in big cities or aren’t able to travel for clinical trials, Dobreva says.

Connor, a member of the Renegade 50 who asked that only his first name be used to maintain medical privacy, “couldn’t participate in a traditional study,” says his wife, Nicole Bruno. Since a COVID-19 infection two and a half years ago, he has faced a severe case of both long COVID and ME/CFS, leaving him bedbound in a dark room.

“He could never go to a lab” or a doctor’s office to have samples collected, Bruno says. But with Remission Biome’s remote framework and individual support, he can be a patient-researcher. In addition to flexibility in locations, each member of the cohort is going through the testing protocol at their own pace, incorporating their microbiome test results, other diagnoses and input from their physicians. Flexibility also helps with logistical challenges; for example, test kits take longer to ship internationally.

For scientists, patient-led studies may move a field forward by highlighting key questions and hypotheses that might not emerge from traditional research. “Biomedical research has blind spots,” Fox says. McCorkell points to a paper from the PLRC , published in eClinicalMedicine in 2021, that expanded upon its 2020 survey work by describing 200 long COVID symptoms across 10 organ systems based on a detailed survey of about 3,800 people.

“It is still, to this day, one of the most cited papers in long COVID,” McCorkell says. Without this paper, she adds, other scientists might still be investigating “a small, limited set of symptoms” rather than the full scope of the condition. David Putrino, a long COVID clinician and director of rehabilitation innovation at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, also points to the PLRC paper as an example of successful patient-led research that informed later studies.

Patient-led research “moves orders of magnitude faster than traditional modes of research,” Putrino says, because it focuses on the questions that are of greatest concern to patients, leading more quickly to impactful results. Patient-led groups may also be able to start new studies more quickly than institutions that have to, say, go through formal academic procedures, he says. In that way, this research is similar to how start-ups move faster than large corporations.

In addition, patients can help scientists design studies that are more likely to provide accurate results. For example, feedback from members of Remission Biome and other patient representatives helped David Esteban, a biologist at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who was looking for people who had gotten COVID-19 but didn’t develop long COVID and could serve as control patients in a project funded by PLRC.

“Their perspective was, many people who recover from acute COVID go through a period where they feel better, but then get worse again,” he says. “I hadn’t really thought about that.” But that insight helped Esteban establish how long after a COVID-19 infection to wait before declaring a patient past the threshold for developing long COVID.

After studies are completed, patient teams may be more thoughtful about communicating results back to patient communities. In sharing a recent paper about managing ME/CFS that she co­authored with clinicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for instance, Seltzer anticipated questions that ME/CFS patients might have about the study. She explained up front that the paper was a concise review and could not include every relevant study, as patients would want to know “why I hadn’t mentioned their favorite paper,” she says. Such communication can “save a research group a lot of time and energy,” Seltzer says, and can encourage patients to bring the paper to their doctors so that the findings might inform their health care.

Groups like PLRC are working to build infrastructure to help scientists better engage with patients, including experienced patient-researchers and others who haven’t done scientific work before.

In January 2023, PLRC and the Council of Medical Specialty Societies introduced scorecards for academic teams interested in these collaborations. The scorecards can help teams evaluate success. “Our scorecards were developed with the intention of trying to change the baseline of what’s considered acceptable patient engagement,” McCorkell says, moving away from “tokenizing” engagement that she and other PLRC members have experienced. Taylor, at Solve M.E., would like to see the scorecards or a similar evaluation incorporated into traditional funding applications at scientific institutions.

ME/CFS funding

Of 73 diseases (dots) with research funding from the National Institutes of Health, ME/CFS is among those underfunded relative to its disease burden, the total number of healthy years lost due to premature death or disability from illness. The graph includes an estimate of ME/CFS burden with the arrival of COVID-19. The red line is expected funding levels based on burden.

NIH funding vs. disease burden, 2020

The challenges of patient-led research

Current institutional and financial support for patient-led research projects is limited. These projects typically are not eligible to apply for academic and government grants, leading them to seek money from nontraditional sources. Patient-researchers also don’t tend to have access to laboratory space, clinical tests and other research resources.

“We’re limited in the type of research that we can do,” McCorkell says. As a result, surveys and self-experimentation are the most common methods.

Internal capacity is another challenge: Chronically ill people tend to have limited energy to devote to projects; they must balance this work with managing their symptoms. Patients tend to be more ambitious than their available energy can support, Seltzer says. Sometimes a patient-researcher might have to take a break from a project to recover from a symptom flare-up. Projects like Remission Biome take these crashes into account when designing experiments and distributing tasks.

“If I disappear for a week,” it’s OK, says Katrin Boniface, a doctoral student studying the history of horses at the University of California, Riverside who had her own remission experience before joining the Renegade 50. But these constraints might frustrate academic or clinician collaborators who want patient-researchers to answer emails at all hours or pull together a last-minute grant proposal.

Nonpatient scientists might also be skeptical of results from patient-led research, as many in the scientific community haven’t yet recognized how lived experience can improve studies, Seltzer says. Although many patient-researchers have scientific backgrounds, they might not be experienced in biomedical research, leading to perceptions that they are underqualified and that their work is not rigorous or may even be biased.

Advocates like Seltzer argue that patient-researchers are more incentivized than anyone to make sure their results are accurate. “If we’re wrong, we and people like us suffer,” she says.

Taylor argues that data from patient-led research should be added to the types of evidence that regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration consider for approving treatments. The FDA and the National Institutes of Health took one step in this direction earlier this year by soliciting data from long COVID patients and doctors about their experiences with treatments approved for other diseases.

“There was a desperate need to validate the anecdotal stories of patients in a formalized way.” Emily Taylor

But some scientists and doctors are concerned that patient-led projects might encourage some patients to self-experiment on their own without appropriate safety measures. This has been a big challenge for Remission Biome, especially after its members posted about remission events during the project’s first phase in early 2023. Initially, the plan was to openly share all aspects of the project, including protocols and results, says Ramirez-Burnett, one of the three early participants. “But then we realized that people were starting to pick pieces of the protocol in order to do it, which is not safe,” she says. “So we had to close that document.”

Now, when asked about the full protocol, as they often are on social media, Remission Biome participants typically encourage safety and emphasize that more testing is needed before it’s widely shared. In the future, Ramirez-Burnett hopes to educate more clinicians about the project so they can work with patients outside the Remission Biome infrastructure.

Patient-led projects may also struggle with logistics. This has been the case for Remission Biome. Its two founders split in December over disagreements about the project’s pace, its handling of safety aspects and how to incorporate the project as a formal business. As a result, Romanuk and the group parted ways.

The Renegade 50 test was put on hold until mid-March while Falor and other project members addressed this leadership change and set up as a nonprofit, she says. The team is also adding more safety steps and participant education on the antibiotic in the testing protocol because that antibiotic may have negative side effects for some people with ME/CFS. Falor expects the Renegade 50 phase will be completed later this year, after which the project will share preliminary results and begin setting up a cohort of 500 participants.

Tests and supplements for that next cohort will require more financial support, which Remission Biome will continue to raise from its GoFundMe campaign and grants. The project has also secured sponsorships from supplement and testing companies, such as the probiotics provider FitBiomics, to provide research supplies to participants. Financial support is especially important for participants living in places where it’s difficult to receive medical care for ME/CFS, says Richardson, the Renegade 50 member in Mexico. Many patients globally could benefit from this work, she says.

Remission Biome is also working toward scientific publications, based on data from the Renegade 50 cohort and from side projects. But the 50-person test might not lead to publishable results, says scientist-collaborator Theoharides. The microbiome is extremely complex, and, unlike a clinical trial, the Renegade 50 group does not include control patients not taking the treatments. But he hopes “the information that will come out of this study might actually give us some new directions.” One key advantage, he says, is that each participant is testing many supplements rather than focusing on one at a time; ME/CFS and long COVID are such complex diseases that it’s unlikely for a single treatment to work for all patients or have a lasting impact.

Esteban, the biologist at Vassar College, similarly hopes to examine how different antibiotics might work together to alleviate symptoms. “I’m already thinking about experiments that I could do,” he says, such as work in lab animals that would “start to explore some of the proposed mechanisms that might underlie the effects they’re seeing with the antibiotic treatments.”

While Remission Biome’s participants are excited to contribute to research, their most important goal is to provide “solutions for the ME/CFS community,” Ramirez-Burnett says. “So people don’t have to lose their jobs, lose their relationships, not get proper care.”

Among the three Renegade 50 participants who had completed the testing protocol as of January, one experienced a remission event, signifying a potential success, Falor says. Meanwhile, the project’s frequent meetings, Slack group, apps for shared symptom-tracking and other communication options could provide models for other patient-research efforts.

Remission Biome participants who have dealt with ME/CFS for a long time, like Richardson, feel particularly motivated to help find answers for the millions around the world newly struggling with long COVID. “People with mild long COVID sound like what I experienced 20 years ago,” Richardson says. She hopes that the lessons learned from Remission Biome and other projects like it can help prevent new long COVID patients from experiencing decades of symptoms.

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The Effects of Climate Change

The effects of human-caused global warming are happening now, are irreversible for people alive today, and will worsen as long as humans add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

• We already see effects scientists predicted, such as the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, sea level rise, and more intense heat waves.
• Scientists predict global temperature increases from human-made greenhouse gases will continue. Severe weather damage will also increase and intensify.

Earth Will Continue to Warm and the Effects Will Be Profound

Global climate change is not a future problem. Changes to Earth’s climate driven by increased human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are already having widespread effects on the environment: glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking, river and lake ice is breaking up earlier, plant and animal geographic ranges are shifting, and plants and trees are blooming sooner.

Effects that scientists had long predicted would result from global climate change are now occurring, such as sea ice loss, accelerated sea level rise, and longer, more intense heat waves.

The magnitude and rate of climate change and associated risks depend strongly on near-term mitigation and adaptation actions, and projected adverse impacts and related losses and damages escalate with every increment of global warming.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Some changes (such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall) are happening faster than scientists previously assessed. In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the United Nations body established to assess the science related to climate change — modern humans have never before seen the observed changes in our global climate, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

Scientists have high confidence that global temperatures will continue to rise for many decades, mainly due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report, published in 2021, found that human emissions of heat-trapping gases have already warmed the climate by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since 1850-1900. 1 The global average temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5 degrees C (about 3 degrees F) within the next few decades. These changes will affect all regions of Earth.

The severity of effects caused by climate change will depend on the path of future human activities. More greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more climate extremes and widespread damaging effects across our planet. However, those future effects depend on the total amount of carbon dioxide we emit. So, if we can reduce emissions, we may avoid some of the worst effects.

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.

Here are some of the expected effects of global climate change on the United States, according to the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports:

Future effects of global climate change in the United States:

U.S. Sea Level Likely to Rise 1 to 6.6 Feet by 2100

Global sea level has risen about 8 inches (0.2 meters) since reliable record-keeping began in 1880. By 2100, scientists project that it will rise at least another foot (0.3 meters), but possibly as high as 6.6 feet (2 meters) in a high-emissions scenario. Sea level is rising because of added water from melting land ice and the expansion of seawater as it warms. Image credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Climate Changes Will Continue Through This Century and Beyond

Global climate is projected to continue warming over this century and beyond. Image credit: Khagani Hasanov, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Hurricanes Will Become Stronger and More Intense

Scientists project that hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates will increase as the climate continues to warm. Image credit: NASA

More Droughts and Heat Waves

Droughts in the Southwest and heat waves (periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks) are projected to become more intense, and cold waves less intense and less frequent. Image credit: NOAA

Longer Wildfire Season

Warming temperatures have extended and intensified wildfire season in the West, where long-term drought in the region has heightened the risk of fires. Scientists estimate that human-caused climate change has already doubled the area of forest burned in recent decades. By around 2050, the amount of land consumed by wildfires in Western states is projected to further increase by two to six times. Even in traditionally rainy regions like the Southeast, wildfires are projected to increase by about 30%.

Changes in Precipitation Patterns

Climate change is having an uneven effect on precipitation (rain and snow) in the United States, with some locations experiencing increased precipitation and flooding, while others suffer from drought. On average, more winter and spring precipitation is projected for the northern United States, and less for the Southwest, over this century. Image credit: Marvin Nauman/FEMA

Frost-Free Season (and Growing Season) will Lengthen

The length of the frost-free season, and the corresponding growing season, has been increasing since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western United States. Across the United States, the growing season is projected to continue to lengthen, which will affect ecosystems and agriculture.

Global Temperatures Will Continue to Rise

Summer of 2023 was Earth's hottest summer on record, 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit (F) (0.23 degrees Celsius (C)) warmer than any other summer in NASA’s record and 2.1 degrees F (1.2 C) warmer than the average summer between 1951 and 1980. Image credit: NASA

Arctic Is Very Likely to Become Ice-Free

Sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is expected to continue decreasing, and the Arctic Ocean will very likely become essentially ice-free in late summer if current projections hold. This change is expected to occur before mid-century.

U.S. Regional Effects

Climate change is bringing different types of challenges to each region of the country. Some of the current and future impacts are summarized below. These findings are from the Third 3 and Fourth 4 National Climate Assessment Reports, released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program .

• Northeast. Heat waves, heavy downpours, and sea level rise pose increasing challenges to many aspects of life in the Northeast. Infrastructure, agriculture, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly compromised. Farmers can explore new crop options, but these adaptations are not cost- or risk-free. Moreover, adaptive capacity , which varies throughout the region, could be overwhelmed by a changing climate. Many states and cities are beginning to incorporate climate change into their planning.
• Northwest. Changes in the timing of peak flows in rivers and streams are reducing water supplies and worsening competing demands for water. Sea level rise, erosion, flooding, risks to infrastructure, and increasing ocean acidity pose major threats. Increasing wildfire incidence and severity, heat waves, insect outbreaks, and tree diseases are causing widespread forest die-off.
• Southeast. Sea level rise poses widespread and continuing threats to the region’s economy and environment. Extreme heat will affect health, energy, agriculture, and more. Decreased water availability will have economic and environmental impacts.
• Midwest. Extreme heat, heavy downpours, and flooding will affect infrastructure, health, agriculture, forestry, transportation, air and water quality, and more. Climate change will also worsen a range of risks to the Great Lakes.
• Southwest. Climate change has caused increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks. In turn, these changes have made wildfires more numerous and severe. The warming climate has also caused a decline in water supplies, reduced agricultural yields, and triggered heat-related health impacts in cities. In coastal areas, flooding and erosion are additional concerns.

1. IPCC 2021, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis , the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

2. IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

3. USGCRP 2014, Third Climate Assessment .

4. USGCRP 2017, Fourth Climate Assessment .

Related Resources

A Degree of Difference

So, the Earth's average temperature has increased about 2 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century. What's the big deal?

What’s the difference between climate change and global warming?

“Global warming” refers to the long-term warming of the planet. “Climate change” encompasses global warming, but refers to the broader range of changes that are happening to our planet, including rising sea levels; shrinking mountain glaciers; accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic; and shifts in flower/plant blooming times.

Is it too late to prevent climate change?

Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries.

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Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot

Mar 19, 2024 | Microsoft Corporate Blogs

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Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, shared the below communication today with Microsoft employees.

I want to share an exciting and important organizational update today. We are in Year 2 of the AI platform shift and must ensure we have the capability and capacity to boldly innovate.

There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond. Let us use this opportunity to build world-class AI products, like Copilot, that are loved by end-users! This is about science, engineering, product, and design coming together and embracing a learning mindset to push our innovation culture and product building process forward in fundamental ways.

In that context, I’m very excited to announce that Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan are joining Microsoft to form a new organization called Microsoft AI, focused on advancing Copilot and our other consumer AI products and research.

Mustafa will be EVP and CEO, Microsoft AI, and joins the senior leadership team (SLT), reporting to me. Karén is joining this group as Chief Scientist, reporting to Mustafa. I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions.

Karén, a Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Inflection, is a renowned AI researcher and thought leader, who has led the development of some of the biggest AI breakthroughs over the past decade including AlphaZero.

Several members of the Inflection team have chosen to join Mustafa and Karén at Microsoft. They include some of the most accomplished AI engineers, researchers, and builders in the world. They have designed, led, launched, and co-authored many of the most important contributions in advancing AI over the last five years. I am excited for them to contribute their knowledge, talent, and expertise to our consumer AI research and product making.

At our core, we have always been a platform and partner-led company, and we’ll continue to bring that sensibility to all we do. Our AI innovation continues to build on our most strategic and important partnership with OpenAI. We will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI’s foundation model roadmap, and also innovate and build products on top of their foundation models. And today’s announcement further reinforces our partnership construct and principles.

As part of this transition, Mikhail Parakhin and his entire team, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge; and Misha Bilenko and the GenAI team will move to report to Mustafa. These teams are at the vanguard of innovation at Microsoft, bringing a new entrant energy and ethos, to a changing consumer product landscape driven by the AI platform shift. These organizational changes will help us double down on this innovation.

Kevin Scott continues as CTO and EVP of AI, responsible for all-up AI strategy, including all system architecture decisions, partnerships, and cross-company orchestration. Kevin was the first person I leaned on to help us manage our transformation to an AI-first company and I’ll continue to lean on him to ensure that our AI strategy and initiatives are coherent across the breadth of Microsoft.

Rajesh Jha continues as EVP of Experiences & Devices and I’m grateful for his leadership as he continues to build out Copilot for Microsoft 365, partnering closely with Mustafa and team.

There are no other changes to the senior leadership team or other organizations.

We have been operating with speed and intensity and this infusion of new talent will enable us to accelerate our pace yet again.

We have a real shot to build technology that was once thought impossible and that lives up to our mission to ensure the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly. I’m looking forward to doing so with you.

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What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

By Sarah Mervosh ,  Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic .” Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. In-person means a district offered traditional in-person learning, even if not all students were in-person.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.

There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.

But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress , an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.

( A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses , with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Some time in person was better than no time.

As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.

Students in hybrid or remote learning, 2020-21

80% of students

Some schools return online, as Covid-19 cases surge. Vaccinations start for high-priority groups.

Teachers are eligible for the Covid vaccine in more than half of states.

Most districts end the year in-person or hybrid.

Source: Burbio audit of more than 1,200 school districts representing 47 percent of U.S. K-12 enrollment. Note: Learning mode was defined based on the most in-person option available to students.

Income and family background also made a big difference.

A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.

But in-person learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.

A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.

Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. Poorest and richest are the top and bottom 20% of districts by percent of students on free/reduced lunch. Mostly in-person and mostly remote are districts that offered traditional in-person learning for more than 90 percent or less than 10 percent of the 2020-21 year.

But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.

That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer .

Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities , also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.

“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, where schools were closed until spring 2021 .

“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.

Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research .

Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.

While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Va., lost significant learning and remain behind.

At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups .

These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.

“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.

Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.

Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers’ unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.

“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021 , a decision Mr. Jordan believes saved lives.

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.

Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.

Though the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.

In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.

“Could we have used data to better guide our decision making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, N.J. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic. ”

The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive . For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the Covid-19 School Data Hub (C.S.D.H.) and American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.) . The A.E.I. data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the C.S.D.H. data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.

An earlier version of this article misstated a job description of Dr. Jeanne Noble. She directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department. She did not direct the Covid response for the University of California, San Francisco health system.

How we handle corrections

Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools. More about Sarah Mervosh

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Francesca Paris is a Times reporter working with data and graphics for The Upshot. More about Francesca Paris

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Watching a solar eclipse without the right filters can cause eye damage. Here's why

Nell Greenfieldboyce

A woman watches an annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023 using special solar filter glasses at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Carlos Tischler/ Eyepix Group/Future Publishing via Getty Images hide caption

A woman watches an annular solar eclipse on October 14, 2023 using special solar filter glasses at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

On April 8, as millions of people try to watch a solar eclipse sweep over North America, eye doctors across the United States will be on high alert.

That's because, while a solar eclipse is a stunning celestial event, it can also be dangerous. Looking at any part of the exposed sun without the right kind of protection can permanently injure the eye's light-sensitive retina.

And if past eclipses are prologue, it's likely that some eclipse-gazers will show up at doctors' offices with significant eye damage.

For April's eclipse, going from 'meh' to 'OMG' might mean just driving across town

In 2017, during the solar eclipse seen across the United States, that happened to multiple people despite abundant media coverage about the danger of looking at the sun when it is anything less than fully and completely covered by the moon.

In New York City, for example, one young woman came to the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, complaining of blurred and distorted vision.

She had peeked up at the crescent sun without eyewear at first, then looked at it longer while wearing what she thought were appropriate eclipse glasses.

Everything you need to know about solar eclipse glasses before April 8

"But the problem was she was handed glasses from someone else," says ophthalmologist Avnish Deobhakta , so she didn't know if the eyewear really met safety standards .

Doctors found a permanent, crescent-shaped wound on her retina; there's no treatment for that kind of injury, which is similar to the kind of light-induced damage caused by pointing a laser into the eye.

Other eclipse-related eye injuries were reported in California and Utah .

Given that more than 150 million people directly viewed either a partial eclipse or a total solar eclipse, however, the number who suffered eye problems may seem relatively small.

Plan to watch the eclipse from a wild mountain summit? Be ready for harsh conditions

"We've got less than 100 cases across Canada and the U.S.," says Ralph Chou , an eclipse eye safety expert with the University of Waterloo in Canada.

But no one knows for sure how many people damaged their eyes in 2017, he says, because not every case gets written up for a medical journal, and people may not seek help for less severe vision troubles.

"A lot of them, if they actually happened, were probably relatively minor and, you know, they resolved on their own within weeks or months," says Chou, who says that about half of those who experience significant blurring on the day after an eclipse will recover almost completely.

Some of that recovery may just be the brain learning to compensate and "fill in" the blanks, says Deobhakta, who notes that "there's two eyes, and often there's asymmetric injury. Your brain kind of gets used to it."

The eclipse gives astronomy clubs an opportunity to shine

He notes that there are ways to enjoy the eclipse without looking up at all; everyday household objects like colanders allow you to create pinhole projectors that let you watch an image of the sun becoming more and more crescent-shaped.

"My advice is to not look at the sun, because you may not realize that it is affecting your retina. It does not hurt. It doesn't burn at the time. It's not as if you feel it," says Deobhakta.

If you do choose to look up at the sun when it is partially eclipsed, says Deobhakta, "make sure you really are sure that you have the standard glasses that have the right filters."

The American Astronomical Society has a list of vetted suppliers .

Will you be celebrating the solar eclipse? NPR wants to hear from you

If you still have reliable eclipse viewers from 2017 that are in good condition, those should still work fine, says Chou.

He notes that eclipse viewers usually have a "best by" date on them, but that is to satisfy European regulations related to personal protective equipment.

"It's essentially meaningless because the filters do not age," says Chou. "If you've taken good care of the viewers from 2017, they haven't been crushed or folded or whatever to damage the mountings, then they're perfectly safe to use for this eclipse."

Despite the warnings, some people try to glimpse the partially-eclipsed sun without eye protection, thinking that a quick look won't cause any harm. While an initial glance at the sun may not cause lasting damage, says Chou, repeated peeks do add up.

"At some point, you may tip yourself over the critical threshold," says Chou. "Unfortunately, you don't realize that until far too late."

The eye damage only becomes apparent hours after it occurs. Typically, people wake up the morning after observing an eclipse and see a spot of extreme fuzziness in the center of their field of vision.

There is one time when it's safe to look up at the sun with the naked eye, experts say, and that's when the sun is totally covered by the moon.

This eclipse phase is only visible from the so-called " path of totality ," a stretch of land from Texas to Maine. And the experience of totality doesn't last long — up to four and a half minutes or so, depending on your location.

When the sun is 100% obscured, the sky abruptly darkens and the once-bright sun becomes a dark circle surrounded by a ghostly white ring called the corona.

If people wear super-dark eclipse eyewear during these dramatic moments, they'll miss the whole show.

"People get so concerned to not hurt their eyes, which of course is super important, that they don't take their glasses off when the moon completely covers the sun," says Laura Peticolas , a space physicist at Sonoma State University. "And then they're like, 'I never saw the corona.'"

So knowing when to take the glasses off, and when to put them on, is key.

Chou says that in the last moments before the sun gets totally covered, the thin crescent of the bright sun breaks into discrete points of bright light. These are called " Baily's beads ," and they are the last bits of light from the disk of the sun shining through the valleys on the edge of the moon.

"And as they go out, their disappearance is a signal that it is now safe to remove the filters and look at the sun without a protective filter," he explains.

As soon as the sun starts to re-emerge, the glasses need to immediately go back on.

"It is possible to observe the eclipse in perfect safety," says Chou, who has seen 19 total solar eclipses.

He encourages people to go out and enjoy an event that won't happen again in the United States until 2044, even as he realizes that some people will be too fearful of eye damage.

"I recognize that there are going to be people who just don't trust the science and just don't trust the public service announcements and are just going to ignore the eclipse as much as they can," says Chou. "It's an unfortunate thing."

• eclipse glasses
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TB vaccine may enable elimination of the disease in cattle by reducing its spread

Vaccination not only reduces the severity of TB in infected cattle, but reduces its spread in dairy herds by 89%, research finds.

The research, led by the University of Cambridge and Penn State University, improves prospects for the elimination and control of bovine tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease of cattle that results in large economic costs and health impacts across the world.

This is the first study to show that BCG-vaccinated cattle infected with TB are substantially less infectious to other cattle. This remarkable indirect effect of the vaccine beyond its direct protective effect has not been measured before.

The spillover of infection from livestock has been estimated to account for about 10% of human tuberculosis cases. While such zoonotic TB (zTB) infections are most commonly associated with gastro-intestinal infections related to drinking contaminated milk, zTB can also cause chronic lung infections in humans. Lung disease caused by zTB can be indistinguishable from regular tuberculosis, but is more difficult to treat due to natural antibiotic resistance in the cattle bacteria.

TB remains endemic in many countries around the world, including in Europe and the Americas, where its control costs farmers and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The study is published today in the journal Science .

In the study, carried out in Ethiopia, researchers examined the ability of the vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), to directly protect cattle that receive it, as well as to indirectly protect both vaccinated and unvaccinated cattle by reducing TB transmission. Vaccinated and unvaccinated animals were put into enclosures with naturally infected animals, in a novel crossover design performed over two years.

"Our study found that BCG vaccination reduces TB transmission in cattle by almost 90%. Vaccinated cows also developed significantly fewer visible signs of TB than unvaccinated ones. This suggests that the vaccination not only reduces the progression of the disease, but that if vaccinated animals become infected, they are substantially less infectious to others," said Andrew Conlan, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine and a corresponding author of the study.

Using livestock census and movement data from Ethiopia, the team developed a transmission model to explore the potential for routine vaccination to control bovine tuberculosis.

"Results of the model suggest that vaccinating calves within the dairy sector of Ethiopia could reduce the reproduction number of the bacterium -- the R 0 -- to below 1, arresting the projected increase in the burden of disease and putting herds on a pathway towards elimination of TB," Conlan said.

The team focused their studies in Ethiopia, a country with the largest cattle herd in Africa and a rapidly growing dairy sector that has a growing burden of bovine tuberculosis and no current control program, as a representative of similarly situated transitional economies.

"Bovine tuberculosis is largely uncontrolled in low- and middle-income countries, including Ethiopia," said Abebe Fromsa, associate professor of agriculture and veterinary medicine at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and the study's co-lead author. "Vaccination of cattle has the potential to provide significant benefits in these regions."

"For over a hundred years, programs to eliminate bovine tuberculosis have relied on intensive testing and slaughtering of infected animals," said Vivek Kapur, professor of microbiology and infectious diseases and Huck Distinguished Chair in Global Health at Penn State and a corresponding author of the study.

He added: "This approach is unimplementable in many parts of the world for economic and social reasons, resulting in considerable animal suffering and economic losses from lost productivity, alongside an increased risk of spillover of infection to humans. By vaccinating cattle, we hope to be able to protect both cattle and humans from the consequences of this devastating disease."

Professor James Wood, Alborada Professor of Equine and Farm Animal Science in the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine, noted that despite TB being more prevalent in lower-income countries, the United Kingdom, Ireland and New Zealand also experience considerable economic pressures from the disease which continues to persist despite intensive and costly control programmes.

Wood said: "For over twenty-years the UK government has pinned hopes on cattle vaccination for bovine tuberculosis as a solution to reduce the disease and the consequent costs of the controls. These results provide important support for the epidemiological benefit that cattle vaccination could have to reduce rates of transmission to and within herds."

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Cambridge . The original text of this story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Abebe Fromsa, Katriina Willgert, Sreenidhi Srinivasan, Getnet Mekonnen, Wegene Bedada, Balako Gumi, Matios Lakew, Biniam Tadesse, Berecha Bayissa, Asegedech Sirak, Musse Girma Abdela, Solomon Gebre, Tesfaye Chibssa, Maroudam Veerasami, H. Martin Vordermeier, Douwe Bakker, Stefan Berg, Gobena Ameni, Nick Juleff, Mart C. M. de Jong, James Wood, Andrew Conlan, Vivek Kapur. BCG vaccination reduces bovine tuberculosis transmission, improving prospects for elimination . Science , 2024; 383 (6690) DOI: 10.1126/science.adl3962

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