By definition

It's time to learn the word of the day

One of my favorite memes reads “People who confuse entomology and etymology bug me so much that I have no words.” It’s a beautiful blend of definition, with a side of pun, that ideally results in educational humor.

I read another word origin today. During the black plague, Italy would make boats stay off the coast for 40 days before being allowed to dock. This period referred to quaranta giorno was the basis for our modern term of quarantine. Doesn’t that make quarantine seem much more interesting?? Now, when I’m importing mice, I’m going to imagine them scurrying around a boat off the coast of Italy.

You’re probably not familiar with the “The Boys.” It’s a comic book series co-created/written by Garth Ennis and co-created/drawn by Darick Robertson. The basic premise is that there is version of our world where a lot of people have superpowers, but unlike most comic depictions, the series builds on the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely and the supes, as they’re called in the series, behave with absolute disregard for human life. Supes are employed by a company called Vought-American that uses them for entertainment and propaganda, and of course for profit. Vought also controls a lot of politicians and thus the government, which, with super-powered enforcement, amounts to terrorism and fascism. The Boys are a sometimes-clandestine team that is tasked with monitoring the supes and trying to stop them when possible. In 2007, when the series started, it was hard to imagine a country that was being run by a malevolent corporation. Now, not so much. It would really be nice if sometime in our educational process, we taught kids how to distinguish between cautionary tales and how-to manuals.

Anyway, the reason I brought up The Boys is that I’ve always wondered what inspired Vought in the comics and if it had anything to do with the current malevolent Vought in government who was an author of Project 2025 and who, partnered with the Musky purge of 2025, has done more to damage the scientific institutions in this country than anyone else. Remarkably, Vought-American was based on a real American company that did aeronautics sometime in the past. I was hoping there was a deeper connection there that would have prompted a re-reading.

The real evil Vought is doing a great job of slowing science. The rate of new NIH grant funding, how many grants are issued per week, has slowed to less than 15% of historical rates. This is not even across institutes; some are issuing apace and some are more drastically affected. You would think that cancer research would be uniformly supported but NCI has been greatly affected. To catch up, grants would need to be issued at 4-5x the normal rate. Remember, the government’s FY26 is already half over.

Slowing payouts on grants is an asset to a budget manager who doesn’t believe in the impoundment control act; if the money is not spent by the end of the FY, I’m sure there will be some effort to simply keep that money. This is paired with increases in multi-year funding of grants that erodes the budget by paying out entire grants in the first year. In FY25, even though most (but not all) of the NIH budget was paid out, there were thousands of fewer grants because of the way grants were funded.

The outcomes here are as predictable as they are disheartening. More than 90,000 scientists have left or been removed from positions in the US government. $2.5B in NIH research has been wiped out. Scientists will continue to leave their fields and discoveries will never be made. We should never stop tracking what we have lost.

The Boys also spawned a couple of live action series streaming on Amazon. The fifth and final season of The Boys starts April 8^th. The series is gory and often disgusting. And yet, it is still less appalling than the intentional destruction of medical research. Especially when we don’t seem to have any Boys.