Medical News

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.

Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”

Science has always required creativity—people asking and pursuing questions in ways that have never been attempted before, in the hope that some of that work might produce something new. At its most dramatic, the results can be transformative: In the early 1900s, the Wright brothers drew inspiration from birds’ flight mechanics to launch their first airplanes; more recently, scientists have found ways to genetically engineer a person’s own immune cells to kill off cancer. Even in more routine discoveries, nothing quite matches the excitement of being the first to capture a piece of reality. I remember, as a graduate student, cloning my first bacterial mutant while trying to understand a gene important for growth. I knew that the microscopic creature I had built would never yield a drug or save a life. But in the brief moment in which I plucked a colony from an agar plate and swirled it into a warm, sugar-rich broth, I held a form of life that had never existed before—and that I had made in pursuit of a question that, as far as I knew, no one else had asked.

Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.

The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.

Outside of the most obvious effects of grant terminations—salary cuts, forced layoffs, halted studies—the Trump administration’s attacks on science have limited the horizons that scientists in the U.S. are looking toward. The administration has made clear that it no longer intends to sponsor research into certain subjects, including transgender health and HIV. Even researchers who haven’t had grants terminated this year or who work on less politically volatile subjects are struggling to conceptualize their scientific futures, as canceled grant-review meetings and lists of banned words hamper the normal review process. The NIH is also switching up its funding model to one that will decrease the number of scientific projects and people it will bankroll. Many scientists are hesitant to hire more staff or start new projects that rely on expensive materials. Some have started to seek funds from pharmaceutical companies or foundations, which tend to offer smaller and shorter-term agreements, trained more closely on projects with potential profit.

All of this nudges scientists into a defensive posture. They’re compressing the size of their studies or dropping the most ambitious aspects of their projects. Collaborations between research groups have broken down too, as some scientists who have been relatively insulated from the administration’s cuts have terminated their partnerships with defunded scientists—including at Harvard, where Delaney worked as a research scientist until September—to protect their own interests. “The human thing to do is to look inward and to kind of take care of yourself first,” Delaney told me. Instability and fear have made the research system, already sometimes prone to siloing, even more fragmented. The administration “took two of the best assets that the U.S. scientific enterprise has—the capacity to think long, and the capacity to collaborate—and we screwed them up at the same time,” Delaney said. Several scientists told me that the current funding environment has prompted them to consider early retirement—in many cases, shutting down the labs they have run for decades.

Some of the experiments that scientists shelved this year could still be done at later dates. But the new instability of American science may also be driving away the people necessary to power that future work. Several universities have been forced to downsize Ph.D. programs; the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have made many international researchers fearful of their status at universities. And as the administration continues to dismiss the importance of DEI programs, many young scientists from diverse backgrounds have told me they’re questioning whether they will be welcomed into academia. Under the Trump administration, the scope of American science is simply smaller: “When you shrink funding, you’re going to increase conservatism,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale University, told me. Competition and scarcity can breed innovation in science. But often, Ogbunu said, people forget that “comfort and security are key parts of innovation, too.”

Along with champagne and fireworks, nothing is more quintessential to New Year’s than abandoning one’s best efforts at self-improvement. Surveys have found that fewer than 10 percent of Americans who make resolutions stick to them for a year. By the end of February 2024, according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll, about half of respondents who set resolutions had already given up on them. (I’m impressed they lasted that long. My latest resolution was to stop wasting time scrolling, and minutes later I was online, researching what people typically do to spend less time online.)

Clearly, the way Americans have been approaching this whole resolution business—that is, tackling our challenges head-on—simply does not work. If you want 2026 to be different, you have to try something new and bold. So let me offer a counterintuitive piece of advice: To make your New Year’s promise stick this year, consider breaking it before you even get started.

Absurd as it may sound, purposefully working against what you would like to achieve is a well-established intervention in psychology. Paradoxical intent, as it’s known, is commonly used to treat conditions such as insomnia. Imagine that you’re having trouble drifting off at night and lie in bed for hours, desperate for sleep to take hold, which only makes you more anxious and awake. A paradoxical strategy—for example, trying to stay awake—has been shown to be effective at improving sleep, and is a widely used tool in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Some studies suggest that paradoxical intent works in clinical settings in part because it decreases performance pressure, especially among patients who are prone to anxiety. Most people are distressed by the condition or habit they’re seeking treatment for, so they fear that addressing it less than perfectly will result in failure and make them miserable. But when you intentionally seek the failure you fear, you learn pretty fast that nothing catastrophic happens (usually). In some therapeutic situations, paradoxical intent might involve elements of exposure therapy or breaking down daunting projects into smaller, easier tasks, both of which might contribute to its power. A therapist might, for example, encourage an anxious patient who’s been putting off studying for a major exam to review for an insufficient amount of time—say, five minutes each day. But perhaps most valuable of all, paradoxical intent has an absurd, even humorous quality that can jolt you out of an anxiety-induced impasse and help you get what you want.

[Read: Anxiety is like exercise]

No randomized clinical trials have studied the effect of paradoxical intent on New Year’s resolutions. But there’s reason to suspect that it might work. Many New Year’s resolutions fail not because people lack motivation, but because fixating on a goal can initiate a self-defeating cycle of avoidance. Let’s say that you’re sick of procrastinating: You’re in trouble with your boss for not getting projects done on time, and your friends are fed up because you always arrive late. If you resolve to never procrastinate again, the chance of failure is high, which could make you anxious and lead you to stop trying—better to simply give up than to risk failure. So instead of making a punishing schedule of activities, or setting endless alarms to keep yourself on track, at some point this month, try to take as long as you can, working in the least efficient way possible, to complete a low-stakes task such as organizing your closet. Want to save money? Buy one small item you know you’ll immediately regret! Want to spend more time with your friends or get outdoors? Schedule a day to rot alone on your couch with TikTok! The specific prescription matters less than your commitment to temporarily, but wholeheartedly, working against your best interest.

Last year, I tried this theory out on a patient of mine, who had long been out of shape and finally resolved to get fit. He quickly hired a trainer and hauled himself off to the gym, but at the first session, he was overwhelmed by the trainer’s ambitious plan. Discouraged, he quit and did not exercise again for several weeks. So I suggested that he go to the gym and just loll about—if he really wanted, he could try doing just five minutes of low-exertion activity, but nothing strenuous was allowed. My patient laughed at me and pointed out that doing something strenuous is the whole point of exercise. But it did the trick: He returned to the gym and eventually contacted his trainer again.

Paradoxical intent may be a poor fit for other resolutions. If, say, you have a drinking problem and want to stop or cut back on your alcohol consumption, drinking all you want in January would be harmful and ineffective. That’s because problematic drinking is a complex behavior that is driven by powerful neurobiological factors, not primarily by the kind of performance pressure and anxiety that stops people from lifting weights or arriving at dinner on time. Similarly, if you have an eating disorder, deliberately bingeing or restricting would not be for you. But if, like many people, you don’t have such a problem and simply want to cut back on junk food, giving yourself permission to indulge—at least once!—might ease your path to self-control in the long run.

[Read: Quit your bucket list]

In this age of endless self-improvement, perhaps Americans have lost sight of the true purpose of New Year’s: to prepare for a dark, cold season by celebrating with loved ones. Paradoxical intent allows you to embody that hedonistic spirit—in the service of getting a little bit better. Besides, if your New Year’s resolution is statistically doomed to fail, you might as well bungle it on purpose.

After Katie started on Ozempic, she got her hairdresser interested, too. This summer, when they saw each other again, she thought that her hairdresser had lost some weight and that she looked “so great.”

“Are you still on a GLP-1?” she asked, referring to the class of blockbuster drugs that includes Ozempic and obesity meds.

“Actually,” her hairdresser replied, “I’m on a GLP-3.”

Okay, so, technically, there is no such thing as a GLP-3 drug. But “GLP-3” is a name used on the underground market for retatrutide, an obesity drug still being studied by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. As the nickname implies, retatrutide is like a GLP-1 drug—but more, more, more. It’s more effective, has more modes of action, and induces more weight loss. It may in fact be the most powerful weight-loss drug ever created.

When early retatrutide data were presented at a medical conference in 2023, a scientist who was there told me, the usually staid audience burst into spontaneous applause. Two weeks ago, the first of the highly anticipated Phase 3 clinical-trial results corroborated the jaw-dropping initial numbers: Patients lost on average 71 pounds, or 29 percent of their body weight—double what people lose on semaglutide, which is better known as Ozempic or Wegovy. Some trial participants stopped retatrutide early because they had lost too much weight; they stopped, in other words, because the drug was too effective. As of now, retatrutide is still not approved, though. The FDA has yet to subject its safety and efficacy data to close scrutiny. You cannot get retatrutide from your doctor. You cannot buy it at a pharmacy.

“I’m a very by-the-book, ‘The doctor gives it to you; you take it’ kind of person,” Katie told me. (The Atlantic agreed to identify some sources by their first names only for reasons of medical privacy.) When her hairdresser first mentioned retatrutide in the summer, the Phase 3 results weren’t even out. “But she was just like, ‘It was incredible,’” Katie said. When she looked up retatrutide online, she came across people posting “insane” before-and-after photos.

Katie, who is 44, had been prescribed Ozempic by her doctor two years ago, but she was ready for something new: Her co-pay had just shot up from $20 to $700 a month. She was nauseated all the time, but she wasn’t losing any more weight after stalling at 30 pounds. So with her hairdresser’s help, Katie began ordering freeze-dried retatrutide online, mixing the white powder with sterile water, calculating dosages, and injecting herself with needles. She paid only a fraction of what Ozempic had cost her. Six months later, she’s lost another 20 pounds.

The catch, of course, is that her drugs do not come from Eli Lilly, nor do any of the drugs on the entirely unregulated underground market. No one is saying exactly where they do come from, but it’s commonly assumed that unnamed suppliers are copying Eli Lilly’s drug in China.

Over the past year, the underground market has only grown, in both size and visibility. What began with early adopters—many of them bodybuilders and biohackers—using crypto to buy the drug through Chinese contacts on Telegram has morphed into a network of slick websites where U.S. resellers take PayPal or credit cards. On social media, influencers openly hawk affiliate discount codes for “GLP-3” and “reta.” And retatrutide is spreading through old-fashioned word of mouth—like with Katie and her hairdresser—because its effects are just so visible.

The true scope of the underground market is by design difficult to know, but dozens of brands have popped up. Forums and group chats devoted to retatrutide have up to tens of thousands of members. In certain circles, retatrutide is almost normalized. Tyler Simmons, 36, who lives in Northern California and is a bit health obsessed, told me he personally knows 30 to 40 people on retatrutide.

Experts who study counterfeit and copycat pharmaceuticals tell me they cannot think of another drug that gained this level of popularity so fast, before its clinical trials even concluded. The people injecting underground retatrutide have entered—willingly, it seems—into an immense biological and social experiment.

This May, to understand the process, I purchased retatrutide from several online vendors I found easily through social media. (I did not intend to use any of the drugs, The Atlantic’s lawyers would want me to note for the record.) The process was disarmingly casual for something people were injecting into their bodies. It felt, in some cases, just like ordering socks. One vendor sent a Shop-app link to track my package.

There were some obvious signs that these are not entirely aboveboard operations, though. For one, the websites were plastered with disclaimers that their products were for “research use only.” These disclaimers satisfy a legal loophole that allows drug compounds to be sold for lab research but not for human use. Hence, sellers and buyers of retatrutide often refer to this as a “gray market.”  

But in fact, people are plainly buying it to inject themselves. Though I sometimes saw commenters online use the fig leaf of saying “my lab rat” (which were losing comically large amounts of weight for rodents), most were discussing personal use quite openly. And vendors are not always coy about the true purpose. After the Substacker known as Crémieux wrote a popular guide to buying cheap weight-loss drugs—touting retatrutide as his top pick—one vendor, Peptide Partners, sent a discount code to share with readers: “ScrewTariffs” for 15 percent off.

A package I bought from another company, called Nexaph, originated in Indiana, according to the tracking info, but the return address on its label was in Wyoming. That address leads to a strip-mall office registered to an improbable 20,000 businesses. The cheapest retatrutide tends to come directly from China, though, sold via nebulous entities without websites. I bought one batch from a sales rep on Telegram for Jinan Elitepeptide Chemical Co. A week and a half later, I received a box for a face massager, sealed with a sticker that read, in Chinese, “Original packaging. Authentic product.” Inside were the 10 small unlabeled vials of white powder that I had ordered. (No massager, though.) None of the vendors responded to my subsequent request for comment, except R3JUVEN8, which sent me a statement reiterating that its products, including the retatrutide branded as “Radiant Sculpt” on its site, are “exclusively for laboratory research use.”

The vials I purchased came with no further information about who manufactured the powder or where. But China is home to a large, legitimate drug-manufacturing base, meaning it has the expertise to produce retatrutide. And even before retatrutide caught on, vendors linked to China were selling other peptides—a category of compounds that includes the obesity drugs semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound), as well as substances, such as BPC-157, that are popular in fitness and wellness circles. Making another peptide would not be a huge leap; retatrutide as a molecule is not especially difficult for a knowledgeable chemist to copy.

The drug’s molecular structure has been public for years, since Eli Lilly published it in a research paper in 2022. It is essentially a chain of 39 amino-acid building blocks, its shape cleverly designed to fit into the receptors of three different hormones all at once: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. (This triple action is the 3 in GLP-3.) The existing obesity drugs on the market hit GLP-1 receptors or GLP-1 plus GIP receptors. Only retatrutide adds glucagon for the full trifecta.  

Where earlier obesity drugs work primarily through appetite suppression, glucagon seems to also boost metabolism by revving up the liver. Put them together and the triple combo might achieve the best of all worlds: “You get a reduction in food intake, and you can turn the dial up and get a little better energy expenditure,” Jonathan Campbell, an obesity researcher at Duke, told me. In other words, fewer calories in and more calories out.

Scientists knew that retatrutide held promise, but when those astonishing preliminary results were shared in 2023, excitement spilled out from labs into the public. A new and more powerful obesity drug was coming, and some people, it turns out, could not wait.

“I’m a risk-taker,” Elizabeth, 62, told me. When she started buying reta in 2024, she had already tried semaglutide and tirzepatide, but she was eager to get her hands on the most effective drug. Back then, the underground market operated much less openly. She had to find a Chinese sales rep on WhatsApp, then transfer hundreds of dollars for several months of supply.

As a biologist herself, Elizabeth was comfortable working with needles and reading scientific papers. She modeled her dosing regimen on the clinical-trial protocol. When her heart began racing, she accepted it as a documented side effect of retatrutide. She has lost more than 100 pounds in the past two and a half years—first on the two older drugs and the last 50 or so pounds on retatrutide. After a lifelong struggle with obesity, she told me in May, these are “some of the most amazing events of my whole life.”

For that, she was willing to risk not just her money, but the potential downsides—both known and unknown—of taking retatrutide, a novel yet clearly powerful drug. The full Phase 3 clinical-trial results should provide a clearer picture soon, but one noteworthy finding so far is dysesthesia, or odd sensations in the skin, such as burning and pain, that suggest unrest in the nervous system. One in five patients on the highest dose of retatrutide experienced dysesthesia, roughly triple its occurrence among patients taking semaglutide’s current maximum dose.

Retatrutide causes many of the other side effects of drugs in its class, too: nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and more serious ones. Adrian Crook, a fitness influencer on YouTube, made a video about how retatrutide almost landed him in the hospital when his stomach became paralyzed. And Elizabeth says she has lost quite a bit of muscle on the drug. “I’m as weak as a kitten,” she told me.

Then there are the risks of injecting drugs sold for “research use only” on the underground market. These include, but are not limited to, the fact that the vials might contain: a different weight-loss drug or an entirely unknown substance, either benign or harmful; dangerous bacteria or traces of bacteria called endotoxins; the wrong dose, whether too low (and therefore ineffective) or too high (which could cause side effects of alarming intensity, because retatrutide is supposed to be slowly titrated up over as many as 20 weeks as your body acclimates to the drug); or other contaminants, such as solvents used in manufacturing or heavy metals.

“All of this stuff just scares the crap out of me,” Randy Seeley concluded after enumerating the potential dangers to me. Seeley, who studies obesity at the University of Michigan, uses peptides for research in his lab, and even the stuff sourced to legitimate scientific-supply companies doesn’t always work as expected, he said. Compounds manufactured for the petri dish are not held to the same strict standards as those made for human use.

It’s not quite fair to say the underground market comes with zero accountability, though. Certain corners, at least, have developed a robust culture of lab testing. A handful of labs—the Levi Strausses of the peptide gold rush—now specialize in testing these compounds. Many vendors post “certificates of analysis” attesting to their purity and sterility. Buyers can send vials to laboratories themselves, either as part of an organized group test or on their own. Some vendors will even refund batches that fail. Without testing, Marco, 53, told me, he would never have injected retatrutide from the internet. (Marco is his middle name.) The tests may not cover every hypothetical risk, but they make it safe enough to assure him. “There’s a lot of people who just get these things and shoot them,” he said. “I don’t judge them in any way, but I think those people are out of their minds.”

The tests, insofar as they are reliable, do flag problems. According to Finnrick Analytics, a start-up that provides free peptide tests and publicly shares the results, 10 percent of the retatrutide samples it has tested in the past 60 days had issues of sterility, purity, or incorrect dosing. Two other peptide-testing labs, Trustpointe and Janoshik, have said in interviews with Rory Hester, a.k.a. PepTok on YouTube, that they see, respectively, an overall fail rate of 20 percent and a 3 to 5 percent fail rate for sterility alone across all peptides. These are not based on random samples—labs test only what their customers send. On the whole, though, these numbers suggest that, although most of the retatrutide flowing through the underground market is what vendors promise it is, the drugs also fail testing at rates far, far higher than is acceptable in standard drug manufacturing.

As retatrutide has grown in popularity, the people seeking it out are no longer just self-professed risk-takers. “The future of the market is normies,” Hester, who also writes the peptide-focused Substack Gray Market, told me. The world of Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp—what Hester calls the “dark gray” peptide market—is by design somewhat inaccessible. “Your grandmother is not going to go on Telegram,” he said. The customer-friendly U.S.-based sites that he calls “light gray” can appeal to a much larger audience. Hester is putting his money where his mouth is. Earlier this month, he announced that he co-owns the peptide company Crush Research.

But the size of the gray market may be fundamentally at odds with its viability. The bigger it gets, the more people are injecting themselves thanks to a legal loophole, and the harder it may be for authorities to ignore. (The FDA did not respond to a request for comment. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously promised to reverse the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides—along with psychedelics, raw milk, sunshine, and other treatments that “can’t be patented”—though it’s unclear how that applies to retatrutide specifically, which is in fact patented.) And not everyone in the gray market welcomes the attention or the scrutiny that follows. As Finnrick has been posting test results by vendor, its COO, Raphaël Mazoyer, told me, online commentators have accused the company of being an agent of the FDA and the Chinese government. (He denied both.)

A week ago, rumors started swirling, as they periodically do, of a coming U.S. crackdown. Some buyers online dismissed them as an attempt to juice panic buying. Several websites did stop selling retatrutide, though.

The “dark gray” market is not as easily within the grasp of U.S. authorities, but it’s been a turbulent few months there, too. In September, two of the most popular retatrutide suppliers from China abruptly disappeared. Their sales reps stopped replying to messages, stranding buyers who had already paid hundreds of dollars. Rumors later spread of arrests in China. Then, in November, a third vendor’s retatrutide allegedly landed two people in the hospital, according to warnings that spread on social media. The company blamed a raid for interfering with the quality of its drugs. Someone started impersonating its sales rep by using a sneakily similar username. Later, when no further details came out, online commentators started wondering if the hospitalizations were just a hoax. It’s hard to know what is real and what is fake, but that is the nature of an underground market. New vendors keep popping up, like a game of whack-a-mole.

Meanwhile, the frenzy over retatrutide has kicked into even higher gear since the Phase 3 results were announced this month. When the FDA approves the drug, which is widely expected, it will arrive as possibly the most hotly anticipated drug ever. The retatrutide buyers I interviewed said they welcome the legitimate stuff—though they expect it to be incredibly expensive. Marco, whose insurance actually covers obesity drugs, told me he will happily keep buying on the underground market for friends who otherwise can’t afford retatrutide. In any case, he’s stocked up. “I have a year’s supply of reta in my freezer,” he said.

GLP-1 drugs are, in general, meant to be taken indefinitely, but recently, Elizabeth told me she was going to quit retatrutide, at least temporarily. She had reached her goal weight—what she weighed in high school 45 years ago. “Incredible but I feel lousy,” she wrote. She was experiencing both extreme fatigue, which she couldn’t directly attribute to retatrutide, and anhedonia, or an inability to feel pleasure, which is anecdotally linked to GLP-1 drugs in some people. “Would you trade happiness for thinness? Does it have to be one or the other?” she wrote. “At this point, I’m beginning to wonder.” The psychological effect of these drugs really needs to be studied, she added. At this point, a year and a half in, she has been taking retatrutide longer than patients in the concluded clinical trials. She’s hoping to try a lower dose, perhaps one at which she can maintain her weight without feeling so lousy.

Elizabeth has never told her doctor about taking an unapproved drug or buying from the underground market. This whole time with retatrutide, she’s been figuring it out on her own.

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.

Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”

Science has always required creativity—people asking and pursuing questions in ways that have never been attempted before, in the hope that some of that work might produce something new. At its most dramatic, the results can be transformative: In the early 1900s, the Wright brothers drew inspiration from birds’ flight mechanics to launch their first airplanes; more recently, scientists have found ways to genetically engineer a person’s own immune cells to kill off cancer. Even in more routine discoveries, nothing quite matches the excitement of being the first to capture a piece of reality. I remember, as a graduate student, cloning my first bacterial mutant while trying to understand a gene important for growth. I knew that the microscopic creature I had built would never yield a drug or save a life. But in the brief moment in which I plucked a colony from an agar plate and swirled it into a warm, sugar-rich broth, I held a form of life that had never existed before—and that I had made in pursuit of a question that, as far as I knew, no one else had asked.

Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.

The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.

Outside of the most obvious effects of grant terminations—salary cuts, forced layoffs, halted studies—the Trump administration’s attacks on science have limited the horizons that scientists in the U.S. are looking toward. The administration has made clear that it no longer intends to sponsor research into certain subjects, including transgender health and HIV. Even researchers who haven’t had grants terminated this year or who work on less politically volatile subjects are struggling to conceptualize their scientific futures, as canceled grant-review meetings and lists of banned words hamper the normal review process. The NIH is also switching up its funding model to one that will decrease the number of scientific projects and people it will bankroll. Many scientists are hesitant to hire more staff or start new projects that rely on expensive materials. Some have started to seek funds from pharmaceutical companies or foundations, which tend to offer smaller and shorter-term agreements, trained more closely on projects with potential profit.

All of this nudges scientists into a defensive posture. They’re compressing the size of their studies or dropping the most ambitious aspects of their projects. Collaborations between research groups have broken down too, as some scientists who have been relatively insulated from the administration’s cuts have terminated their partnerships with defunded scientists—including at Harvard, where Delaney worked as a research scientist until September—to protect their own interests. “The human thing to do is to look inward and to kind of take care of yourself first,” Delaney told me. Instability and fear have made the research system, already sometimes prone to siloing, even more fragmented. The administration “took two of the best assets that the U.S. scientific enterprise has—the capacity to think long, and the capacity to collaborate—and we screwed them up at the same time,” Delaney said. Several scientists told me that the current funding environment has prompted them to consider early retirement—in many cases, shutting down the labs they have run for decades.

Some of the experiments that scientists shelved this year could still be done at later dates. But the new instability of American science may also be driving away the people necessary to power that future work. Several universities have been forced to downsize Ph.D. programs; the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have made many international researchers fearful of their status at universities. And as the administration continues to dismiss the importance of DEI programs, many young scientists from diverse backgrounds have told me they’re questioning whether they will be welcomed into academia. Under the Trump administration, the scope of American science is simply smaller: “When you shrink funding, you’re going to increase conservatism,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale University, told me. Competition and scarcity can breed innovation in science. But often, Ogbunu said, people forget that “comfort and security are key parts of innovation, too.”

Along with champagne and fireworks, nothing is more quintessential to New Year’s than abandoning one’s best efforts at self-improvement. Surveys have found that fewer than 10 percent of Americans who make resolutions stick to them for a year. By the end of February 2024, according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll, about half of respondents who set resolutions had already given up on them. (I’m impressed they lasted that long. My latest resolution was to stop wasting time scrolling, and minutes later I was online, researching what people typically do to spend less time online.)

Clearly, the way Americans have been approaching this whole resolution business—that is, tackling our challenges head-on—simply does not work. If you want 2026 to be different, you have to try something new and bold. So let me offer a counterintuitive piece of advice: To make your New Year’s promise stick this year, consider breaking it before you even get started.

Absurd as it may sound, purposefully working against what you would like to achieve is a well-established intervention in psychology. Paradoxical intent, as it’s known, is commonly used to treat conditions such as insomnia. Imagine that you’re having trouble drifting off at night and lie in bed for hours, desperate for sleep to take hold, which only makes you more anxious and awake. A paradoxical strategy—for example, trying to stay awake—has been shown to be effective at improving sleep, and is a widely used tool in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Some studies suggest that paradoxical intent works in clinical settings in part because it decreases performance pressure, especially among patients who are prone to anxiety. Most people are distressed by the condition or habit they’re seeking treatment for, so they fear that addressing it less than perfectly will result in failure and make them miserable. But when you intentionally seek the failure you fear, you learn pretty fast that nothing catastrophic happens (usually). In some therapeutic situations, paradoxical intent might involve elements of exposure therapy or breaking down daunting projects into smaller, easier tasks, both of which might contribute to its power. A therapist might, for example, encourage an anxious patient who’s been putting off studying for a major exam to review for an insufficient amount of time—say, five minutes each day. But perhaps most valuable of all, paradoxical intent has an absurd, even humorous quality that can jolt you out of an anxiety-induced impasse and help you get what you want.

[Read: Anxiety is like exercise]

No randomized clinical trials have studied the effect of paradoxical intent on New Year’s resolutions. But there’s reason to suspect that it might work. Many New Year’s resolutions fail not because people lack motivation, but because fixating on a goal can initiate a self-defeating cycle of avoidance. Let’s say that you’re sick of procrastinating: You’re in trouble with your boss for not getting projects done on time, and your friends are fed up because you always arrive late. If you resolve to never procrastinate again, the chance of failure is high, which could make you anxious and lead you to stop trying—better to simply give up than to risk failure. So instead of making a punishing schedule of activities, or setting endless alarms to keep yourself on track, at some point this month, try to take as long as you can, working in the least efficient way possible, to complete a low-stakes task such as organizing your closet. Want to save money? Buy one small item you know you’ll immediately regret! Want to spend more time with your friends or get outdoors? Schedule a day to rot alone on your couch with TikTok! The specific prescription matters less than your commitment to temporarily, but wholeheartedly, working against your best interest.

Last year, I tried this theory out on a patient of mine, who had long been out of shape and finally resolved to get fit. He quickly hired a trainer and hauled himself off to the gym, but at the first session, he was overwhelmed by the trainer’s ambitious plan. Discouraged, he quit and did not exercise again for several weeks. So I suggested that he go to the gym and just loll about—if he really wanted, he could try doing just five minutes of low-exertion activity, but nothing strenuous was allowed. My patient laughed at me and pointed out that doing something strenuous is the whole point of exercise. But it did the trick: He returned to the gym and eventually contacted his trainer again.

Paradoxical intent may be a poor fit for other resolutions. If, say, you have a drinking problem and want to stop or cut back on your alcohol consumption, drinking all you want in January would be harmful and ineffective. That’s because problematic drinking is a complex behavior that is driven by powerful neurobiological factors, not primarily by the kind of performance pressure and anxiety that stops people from lifting weights or arriving at dinner on time. Similarly, if you have an eating disorder, deliberately bingeing or restricting would not be for you. But if, like many people, you don’t have such a problem and simply want to cut back on junk food, giving yourself permission to indulge—at least once!—might ease your path to self-control in the long run.

[Read: Quit your bucket list]

In this age of endless self-improvement, perhaps Americans have lost sight of the true purpose of New Year’s: to prepare for a dark, cold season by celebrating with loved ones. Paradoxical intent allows you to embody that hedonistic spirit—in the service of getting a little bit better. Besides, if your New Year’s resolution is statistically doomed to fail, you might as well bungle it on purpose.

After Katie started on Ozempic, she got her hairdresser interested, too. This summer, when they saw each other again, she thought that her hairdresser had lost some weight and that she looked “so great.”

“Are you still on a GLP-1?” she asked, referring to the class of blockbuster drugs that includes Ozempic and obesity meds.

“Actually,” her hairdresser replied, “I’m on a GLP-3.”

Okay, so, technically, there is no such thing as a GLP-3 drug. But “GLP-3” is a name used on the underground market for retatrutide, an obesity drug still being studied by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. As the nickname implies, retatrutide is like a GLP-1 drug—but more, more, more. It’s more effective, has more modes of action, and induces more weight loss. It may in fact be the most powerful weight-loss drug ever created.

When early retatrutide data were presented at a medical conference in 2023, a scientist who was there told me, the usually staid audience burst into spontaneous applause. Two weeks ago, the first of the highly anticipated Phase 3 clinical-trial results corroborated the jaw-dropping initial numbers: Patients lost on average 71 pounds, or 29 percent of their body weight—double what people lose on semaglutide, which is better known as Ozempic or Wegovy. Some trial participants stopped retatrutide early because they had lost too much weight; they stopped, in other words, because the drug was too effective. As of now, retatrutide is still not approved, though. The FDA has yet to subject its safety and efficacy data to close scrutiny. You cannot get retatrutide from your doctor. You cannot buy it at a pharmacy.

“I’m a very by-the-book, ‘The doctor gives it to you; you take it’ kind of person,” Katie told me. (The Atlantic agreed to identify some sources by their first names only for reasons of medical privacy.) When her hairdresser first mentioned retatrutide in the summer, the Phase 3 results weren’t even out. “But she was just like, ‘It was incredible,’” Katie said. When she looked up retatrutide online, she came across people posting “insane” before-and-after photos.

Katie, who is 44, had been prescribed Ozempic by her doctor two years ago, but she was ready for something new: Her co-pay had just shot up from $20 to $700 a month. She was nauseated all the time, but she wasn’t losing any more weight after stalling at 30 pounds. So with her hairdresser’s help, Katie began ordering freeze-dried retatrutide online, mixing the white powder with sterile water, calculating dosages, and injecting herself with needles. She paid only a fraction of what Ozempic had cost her. Six months later, she’s lost another 20 pounds.

The catch, of course, is that her drugs do not come from Eli Lilly, nor do any of the drugs on the entirely unregulated underground market. No one is saying exactly where they do come from, but it’s commonly assumed that unnamed suppliers are copying Eli Lilly’s drug in China.

Over the past year, the underground market has only grown, in both size and visibility. What began with early adopters—many of them bodybuilders and biohackers—using crypto to buy the drug through Chinese contacts on Telegram has morphed into a network of slick websites where U.S. resellers take PayPal or credit cards. On social media, influencers openly hawk affiliate discount codes for “GLP-3” and “reta.” And retatrutide is spreading through old-fashioned word of mouth—like with Katie and her hairdresser—because its effects are just so visible.

The true scope of the underground market is by design difficult to know, but dozens of brands have popped up. Forums and group chats devoted to retatrutide have up to tens of thousands of members. In certain circles, retatrutide is almost normalized. Tyler Simmons, 36, who lives in Northern California and is a bit health obsessed, told me he personally knows 30 to 40 people on retatrutide.

Experts who study counterfeit and copycat pharmaceuticals tell me they cannot think of another drug that gained this level of popularity so fast, before its clinical trials even concluded. The people injecting underground retatrutide have entered—willingly, it seems—into an immense biological and social experiment.

This May, to understand the process, I purchased retatrutide from several online vendors I found easily through social media. (I did not intend to use any of the drugs, The Atlantic’s lawyers would want me to note for the record.) The process was disarmingly casual for something people were injecting into their bodies. It felt, in some cases, just like ordering socks. One vendor sent a Shop-app link to track my package.

There were some obvious signs that these are not entirely aboveboard operations, though. For one, the websites were plastered with disclaimers that their products were for “research use only.” These disclaimers satisfy a legal loophole that allows drug compounds to be sold for lab research but not for human use. Hence, sellers and buyers of retatrutide often refer to this as a “gray market.”  

But in fact, people are plainly buying it to inject themselves. Though I sometimes saw commenters online use the fig leaf of saying “my lab rat” (which were losing comically large amounts of weight for rodents), most were discussing personal use quite openly. And vendors are not always coy about the true purpose. After the Substacker known as Crémieux wrote a popular guide to buying cheap weight-loss drugs—touting retatrutide as his top pick—one vendor, Peptide Partners, sent a discount code to share with readers: “ScrewTariffs” for 15 percent off.

A package I bought from another company, called Nexaph, originated in Indiana, according to the tracking info, but the return address on its label was in Wyoming. That address leads to a strip-mall office registered to an improbable 20,000 businesses. The cheapest retatrutide tends to come directly from China, though, sold via nebulous entities without websites. I bought one batch from a sales rep on Telegram for Jinan Elitepeptide Chemical Co. A week and a half later, I received a box for a face massager, sealed with a sticker that read, in Chinese, “Original packaging. Authentic product.” Inside were the 10 small unlabeled vials of white powder that I had ordered. (No massager, though.) None of the vendors responded to my subsequent request for comment, except R3JUVEN8, which sent me a statement reiterating that its products, including the retatrutide branded as “Radiant Sculpt” on its site, are “exclusively for laboratory research use.”

The vials I purchased came with no further information about who manufactured the powder or where. But China is home to a large, legitimate drug-manufacturing base, meaning it has the expertise to produce retatrutide. And even before retatrutide caught on, vendors linked to China were selling other peptides—a category of compounds that includes the obesity drugs semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound), as well as substances, such as BPC-157, that are popular in fitness and wellness circles. Making another peptide would not be a huge leap; retatrutide as a molecule is not especially difficult for a knowledgeable chemist to copy.

The drug’s molecular structure has been public for years, since Eli Lilly published it in a research paper in 2022. It is essentially a chain of 39 amino-acid building blocks, its shape cleverly designed to fit into the receptors of three different hormones all at once: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. (This triple action is the 3 in GLP-3.) The existing obesity drugs on the market hit GLP-1 receptors or GLP-1 plus GIP receptors. Only retatrutide adds glucagon for the full trifecta.  

Where earlier obesity drugs work primarily through appetite suppression, glucagon seems to also boost metabolism by revving up the liver. Put them together and the triple combo might achieve the best of all worlds: “You get a reduction in food intake, and you can turn the dial up and get a little better energy expenditure,” Jonathan Campbell, an obesity researcher at Duke, told me. In other words, fewer calories in and more calories out.

Scientists knew that retatrutide held promise, but when those astonishing preliminary results were shared in 2023, excitement spilled out from labs into the public. A new and more powerful obesity drug was coming, and some people, it turns out, could not wait.

“I’m a risk-taker,” Elizabeth, 62, told me. When she started buying reta in 2024, she had already tried semaglutide and tirzepatide, but she was eager to get her hands on the most effective drug. Back then, the underground market operated much less openly. She had to find a Chinese sales rep on WhatsApp, then transfer hundreds of dollars for several months of supply.

As a biologist herself, Elizabeth was comfortable working with needles and reading scientific papers. She modeled her dosing regimen on the clinical-trial protocol. When her heart began racing, she accepted it as a documented side effect of retatrutide. She has lost more than 100 pounds in the past two and a half years—first on the two older drugs and the last 50 or so pounds on retatrutide. After a lifelong struggle with obesity, she told me in May, these are “some of the most amazing events of my whole life.”

For that, she was willing to risk not just her money, but the potential downsides—both known and unknown—of taking retatrutide, a novel yet clearly powerful drug. The full Phase 3 clinical-trial results should provide a clearer picture soon, but one noteworthy finding so far is dysesthesia, or odd sensations in the skin, such as burning and pain, that suggest unrest in the nervous system. One in five patients on the highest dose of retatrutide experienced dysesthesia, roughly triple its occurrence among patients taking semaglutide’s current maximum dose.

Retatrutide causes many of the other side effects of drugs in its class, too: nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and more serious ones. Adrian Crook, a fitness influencer on YouTube, made a video about how retatrutide almost landed him in the hospital when his stomach became paralyzed. And Elizabeth says she has lost quite a bit of muscle on the drug. “I’m as weak as a kitten,” she told me.

Then there are the risks of injecting drugs sold for “research use only” on the underground market. These include, but are not limited to, the fact that the vials might contain: a different weight-loss drug or an entirely unknown substance, either benign or harmful; dangerous bacteria or traces of bacteria called endotoxins; the wrong dose, whether too low (and therefore ineffective) or too high (which could cause side effects of alarming intensity, because retatrutide is supposed to be slowly titrated up over as many as 20 weeks as your body acclimates to the drug); or other contaminants, such as solvents used in manufacturing or heavy metals.

“All of this stuff just scares the crap out of me,” Randy Seeley concluded after enumerating the potential dangers to me. Seeley, who studies obesity at the University of Michigan, uses peptides for research in his lab, and even the stuff sourced to legitimate scientific-supply companies doesn’t always work as expected, he said. Compounds manufactured for the petri dish are not held to the same strict standards as those made for human use.

It’s not quite fair to say the underground market comes with zero accountability, though. Certain corners, at least, have developed a robust culture of lab testing. A handful of labs—the Levi Strausses of the peptide gold rush—now specialize in testing these compounds. Many vendors post “certificates of analysis” attesting to their purity and sterility. Buyers can send vials to laboratories themselves, either as part of an organized group test or on their own. Some vendors will even refund batches that fail. Without testing, Marco, 53, told me, he would never have injected retatrutide from the internet. (Marco is his middle name.) The tests may not cover every hypothetical risk, but they make it safe enough to assure him. “There’s a lot of people who just get these things and shoot them,” he said. “I don’t judge them in any way, but I think those people are out of their minds.”

The tests, insofar as they are reliable, do flag problems. According to Finnrick Analytics, a start-up that provides free peptide tests and publicly shares the results, 10 percent of the retatrutide samples it has tested in the past 60 days had issues of sterility, purity, or incorrect dosing. Two other peptide-testing labs, Trustpointe and Janoshik, have said in interviews with Rory Hester, a.k.a. PepTok on YouTube, that they see, respectively, an overall fail rate of 20 percent and a 3 to 5 percent fail rate for sterility alone across all peptides. These are not based on random samples—labs test only what their customers send. On the whole, though, these numbers suggest that, although most of the retatrutide flowing through the underground market is what vendors promise it is, the drugs also fail testing at rates far, far higher than is acceptable in standard drug manufacturing.

As retatrutide has grown in popularity, the people seeking it out are no longer just self-professed risk-takers. “The future of the market is normies,” Hester, who also writes the peptide-focused Substack Gray Market, told me. The world of Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp—what Hester calls the “dark gray” peptide market—is by design somewhat inaccessible. “Your grandmother is not going to go on Telegram,” he said. The customer-friendly U.S.-based sites that he calls “light gray” can appeal to a much larger audience. Hester is putting his money where his mouth is. Earlier this month, he announced that he co-owns the peptide company Crush Research.

But the size of the gray market may be fundamentally at odds with its viability. The bigger it gets, the more people are injecting themselves thanks to a legal loophole, and the harder it may be for authorities to ignore. (The FDA did not respond to a request for comment. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously promised to reverse the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides—along with psychedelics, raw milk, sunshine, and other treatments that “can’t be patented”—though it’s unclear how that applies to retatrutide specifically, which is in fact patented.) And not everyone in the gray market welcomes the attention or the scrutiny that follows. As Finnrick has been posting test results by vendor, its COO, Raphaël Mazoyer, told me, online commentators have accused the company of being an agent of the FDA and the Chinese government. (He denied both.)

A week ago, rumors started swirling, as they periodically do, of a coming U.S. crackdown. Some buyers online dismissed them as an attempt to juice panic buying. Several websites did stop selling retatrutide, though.

The “dark gray” market is not as easily within the grasp of U.S. authorities, but it’s been a turbulent few months there, too. In September, two of the most popular retatrutide suppliers from China abruptly disappeared. Their sales reps stopped replying to messages, stranding buyers who had already paid hundreds of dollars. Rumors later spread of arrests in China. Then, in November, a third vendor’s retatrutide allegedly landed two people in the hospital, according to warnings that spread on social media. The company blamed a raid for interfering with the quality of its drugs. Someone started impersonating its sales rep by using a sneakily similar username. Later, when no further details came out, online commentators started wondering if the hospitalizations were just a hoax. It’s hard to know what is real and what is fake, but that is the nature of an underground market. New vendors keep popping up, like a game of whack-a-mole.

Meanwhile, the frenzy over retatrutide has kicked into even higher gear since the Phase 3 results were announced this month. When the FDA approves the drug, which is widely expected, it will arrive as possibly the most hotly anticipated drug ever. The retatrutide buyers I interviewed said they welcome the legitimate stuff—though they expect it to be incredibly expensive. Marco, whose insurance actually covers obesity drugs, told me he will happily keep buying on the underground market for friends who otherwise can’t afford retatrutide. In any case, he’s stocked up. “I have a year’s supply of reta in my freezer,” he said.

GLP-1 drugs are, in general, meant to be taken indefinitely, but recently, Elizabeth told me she was going to quit retatrutide, at least temporarily. She had reached her goal weight—what she weighed in high school 45 years ago. “Incredible but I feel lousy,” she wrote. She was experiencing both extreme fatigue, which she couldn’t directly attribute to retatrutide, and anhedonia, or an inability to feel pleasure, which is anecdotally linked to GLP-1 drugs in some people. “Would you trade happiness for thinness? Does it have to be one or the other?” she wrote. “At this point, I’m beginning to wonder.” The psychological effect of these drugs really needs to be studied, she added. At this point, a year and a half in, she has been taking retatrutide longer than patients in the concluded clinical trials. She’s hoping to try a lower dose, perhaps one at which she can maintain her weight without feeling so lousy.

Elizabeth has never told her doctor about taking an unapproved drug or buying from the underground market. This whole time with retatrutide, she’s been figuring it out on her own.

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.

Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”

Science has always required creativity—people asking and pursuing questions in ways that have never been attempted before, in the hope that some of that work might produce something new. At its most dramatic, the results can be transformative: In the early 1900s, the Wright brothers drew inspiration from birds’ flight mechanics to launch their first airplanes; more recently, scientists have found ways to genetically engineer a person’s own immune cells to kill off cancer. Even in more routine discoveries, nothing quite matches the excitement of being the first to capture a piece of reality. I remember, as a graduate student, cloning my first bacterial mutant while trying to understand a gene important for growth. I knew that the microscopic creature I had built would never yield a drug or save a life. But in the brief moment in which I plucked a colony from an agar plate and swirled it into a warm, sugar-rich broth, I held a form of life that had never existed before—and that I had made in pursuit of a question that, as far as I knew, no one else had asked.

Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.

The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.

Outside of the most obvious effects of grant terminations—salary cuts, forced layoffs, halted studies—the Trump administration’s attacks on science have limited the horizons that scientists in the U.S. are looking toward. The administration has made clear that it no longer intends to sponsor research into certain subjects, including transgender health and HIV. Even researchers who haven’t had grants terminated this year or who work on less politically volatile subjects are struggling to conceptualize their scientific futures, as canceled grant-review meetings and lists of banned words hamper the normal review process. The NIH is also switching up its funding model to one that will decrease the number of scientific projects and people it will bankroll. Many scientists are hesitant to hire more staff or start new projects that rely on expensive materials. Some have started to seek funds from pharmaceutical companies or foundations, which tend to offer smaller and shorter-term agreements, trained more closely on projects with potential profit.

All of this nudges scientists into a defensive posture. They’re compressing the size of their studies or dropping the most ambitious aspects of their projects. Collaborations between research groups have broken down too, as some scientists who have been relatively insulated from the administration’s cuts have terminated their partnerships with defunded scientists—including at Harvard, where Delaney worked as a research scientist until September—to protect their own interests. “The human thing to do is to look inward and to kind of take care of yourself first,” Delaney told me. Instability and fear have made the research system, already sometimes prone to siloing, even more fragmented. The administration “took two of the best assets that the U.S. scientific enterprise has—the capacity to think long, and the capacity to collaborate—and we screwed them up at the same time,” Delaney said. Several scientists told me that the current funding environment has prompted them to consider early retirement—in many cases, shutting down the labs they have run for decades.

Some of the experiments that scientists shelved this year could still be done at later dates. But the new instability of American science may also be driving away the people necessary to power that future work. Several universities have been forced to downsize Ph.D. programs; the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have made many international researchers fearful of their status at universities. And as the administration continues to dismiss the importance of DEI programs, many young scientists from diverse backgrounds have told me they’re questioning whether they will be welcomed into academia. Under the Trump administration, the scope of American science is simply smaller: “When you shrink funding, you’re going to increase conservatism,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale University, told me. Competition and scarcity can breed innovation in science. But often, Ogbunu said, people forget that “comfort and security are key parts of innovation, too.”

Along with champagne and fireworks, nothing is more quintessential to New Year’s than abandoning one’s best efforts at self-improvement. Surveys have found that fewer than 10 percent of Americans who make resolutions stick to them for a year. By the end of February 2024, according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll, about half of respondents who set resolutions had already given up on them. (I’m impressed they lasted that long. My latest resolution was to stop wasting time scrolling, and minutes later I was online, researching what people typically do to spend less time online.)

Clearly, the way Americans have been approaching this whole resolution business—that is, tackling our challenges head-on—simply does not work. If you want 2026 to be different, you have to try something new and bold. So let me offer a counterintuitive piece of advice: To make your New Year’s promise stick this year, consider breaking it before you even get started.

Absurd as it may sound, purposefully working against what you would like to achieve is a well-established intervention in psychology. Paradoxical intent, as it’s known, is commonly used to treat conditions such as insomnia. Imagine that you’re having trouble drifting off at night and lie in bed for hours, desperate for sleep to take hold, which only makes you more anxious and awake. A paradoxical strategy—for example, trying to stay awake—has been shown to be effective at improving sleep, and is a widely used tool in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Some studies suggest that paradoxical intent works in clinical settings in part because it decreases performance pressure, especially among patients who are prone to anxiety. Most people are distressed by the condition or habit they’re seeking treatment for, so they fear that addressing it less than perfectly will result in failure and make them miserable. But when you intentionally seek the failure you fear, you learn pretty fast that nothing catastrophic happens (usually). In some therapeutic situations, paradoxical intent might involve elements of exposure therapy or breaking down daunting projects into smaller, easier tasks, both of which might contribute to its power. A therapist might, for example, encourage an anxious patient who’s been putting off studying for a major exam to review for an insufficient amount of time—say, five minutes each day. But perhaps most valuable of all, paradoxical intent has an absurd, even humorous quality that can jolt you out of an anxiety-induced impasse and help you get what you want.

[Read: Anxiety is like exercise]

No randomized clinical trials have studied the effect of paradoxical intent on New Year’s resolutions. But there’s reason to suspect that it might work. Many New Year’s resolutions fail not because people lack motivation, but because fixating on a goal can initiate a self-defeating cycle of avoidance. Let’s say that you’re sick of procrastinating: You’re in trouble with your boss for not getting projects done on time, and your friends are fed up because you always arrive late. If you resolve to never procrastinate again, the chance of failure is high, which could make you anxious and lead you to stop trying—better to simply give up than to risk failure. So instead of making a punishing schedule of activities, or setting endless alarms to keep yourself on track, at some point this month, try to take as long as you can, working in the least efficient way possible, to complete a low-stakes task such as organizing your closet. Want to save money? Buy one small item you know you’ll immediately regret! Want to spend more time with your friends or get outdoors? Schedule a day to rot alone on your couch with TikTok! The specific prescription matters less than your commitment to temporarily, but wholeheartedly, working against your best interest.

Last year, I tried this theory out on a patient of mine, who had long been out of shape and finally resolved to get fit. He quickly hired a trainer and hauled himself off to the gym, but at the first session, he was overwhelmed by the trainer’s ambitious plan. Discouraged, he quit and did not exercise again for several weeks. So I suggested that he go to the gym and just loll about—if he really wanted, he could try doing just five minutes of low-exertion activity, but nothing strenuous was allowed. My patient laughed at me and pointed out that doing something strenuous is the whole point of exercise. But it did the trick: He returned to the gym and eventually contacted his trainer again.

Paradoxical intent may be a poor fit for other resolutions. If, say, you have a drinking problem and want to stop or cut back on your alcohol consumption, drinking all you want in January would be harmful and ineffective. That’s because problematic drinking is a complex behavior that is driven by powerful neurobiological factors, not primarily by the kind of performance pressure and anxiety that stops people from lifting weights or arriving at dinner on time. Similarly, if you have an eating disorder, deliberately bingeing or restricting would not be for you. But if, like many people, you don’t have such a problem and simply want to cut back on junk food, giving yourself permission to indulge—at least once!—might ease your path to self-control in the long run.

[Read: Quit your bucket list]

In this age of endless self-improvement, perhaps Americans have lost sight of the true purpose of New Year’s: to prepare for a dark, cold season by celebrating with loved ones. Paradoxical intent allows you to embody that hedonistic spirit—in the service of getting a little bit better. Besides, if your New Year’s resolution is statistically doomed to fail, you might as well bungle it on purpose.

After Katie started on Ozempic, she got her hairdresser interested, too. This summer, when they saw each other again, she thought that her hairdresser had lost some weight and that she looked “so great.”

“Are you still on a GLP-1?” she asked, referring to the class of blockbuster drugs that includes Ozempic and obesity meds.

“Actually,” her hairdresser replied, “I’m on a GLP-3.”

Okay, so, technically, there is no such thing as a GLP-3 drug. But “GLP-3” is a name used on the underground market for retatrutide, an obesity drug still being studied by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. As the nickname implies, retatrutide is like a GLP-1 drug—but more, more, more. It’s more effective, has more modes of action, and induces more weight loss. It may in fact be the most powerful weight-loss drug ever created.

When early retatrutide data were presented at a medical conference in 2023, a scientist who was there told me, the usually staid audience burst into spontaneous applause. Two weeks ago, the first of the highly anticipated Phase 3 clinical-trial results corroborated the jaw-dropping initial numbers: Patients lost on average 71 pounds, or 29 percent of their body weight—double what people lose on semaglutide, which is better known as Ozempic or Wegovy. Some trial participants stopped retatrutide early because they had lost too much weight; they stopped, in other words, because the drug was too effective. As of now, retatrutide is still not approved, though. The FDA has yet to subject its safety and efficacy data to close scrutiny. You cannot get retatrutide from your doctor. You cannot buy it at a pharmacy.

“I’m a very by-the-book, ‘The doctor gives it to you; you take it’ kind of person,” Katie told me. (The Atlantic agreed to identify some sources by their first names only for reasons of medical privacy.) When her hairdresser first mentioned retatrutide in the summer, the Phase 3 results weren’t even out. “But she was just like, ‘It was incredible,’” Katie said. When she looked up retatrutide online, she came across people posting “insane” before-and-after photos.

Katie, who is 44, had been prescribed Ozempic by her doctor two years ago, but she was ready for something new: Her co-pay had just shot up from $20 to $700 a month. She was nauseated all the time, but she wasn’t losing any more weight after stalling at 30 pounds. So with her hairdresser’s help, Katie began ordering freeze-dried retatrutide online, mixing the white powder with sterile water, calculating dosages, and injecting herself with needles. She paid only a fraction of what Ozempic had cost her. Six months later, she’s lost another 20 pounds.

The catch, of course, is that her drugs do not come from Eli Lilly, nor do any of the drugs on the entirely unregulated underground market. No one is saying exactly where they do come from, but it’s commonly assumed that unnamed suppliers are copying Eli Lilly’s drug in China.

Over the past year, the underground market has only grown, in both size and visibility. What began with early adopters—many of them bodybuilders and biohackers—using crypto to buy the drug through Chinese contacts on Telegram has morphed into a network of slick websites where U.S. resellers take PayPal or credit cards. On social media, influencers openly hawk affiliate discount codes for “GLP-3” and “reta.” And retatrutide is spreading through old-fashioned word of mouth—like with Katie and her hairdresser—because its effects are just so visible.

The true scope of the underground market is by design difficult to know, but dozens of brands have popped up. Forums and group chats devoted to retatrutide have up to tens of thousands of members. In certain circles, retatrutide is almost normalized. Tyler Simmons, 36, who lives in Northern California and is a bit health obsessed, told me he personally knows 30 to 40 people on retatrutide.

Experts who study counterfeit and copycat pharmaceuticals tell me they cannot think of another drug that gained this level of popularity so fast, before its clinical trials even concluded. The people injecting underground retatrutide have entered—willingly, it seems—into an immense biological and social experiment.

This May, to understand the process, I purchased retatrutide from several online vendors I found easily through social media. (I did not intend to use any of the drugs, The Atlantic’s lawyers would want me to note for the record.) The process was disarmingly casual for something people were injecting into their bodies. It felt, in some cases, just like ordering socks. One vendor sent a Shop-app link to track my package.

There were some obvious signs that these are not entirely aboveboard operations, though. For one, the websites were plastered with disclaimers that their products were for “research use only.” These disclaimers satisfy a legal loophole that allows drug compounds to be sold for lab research but not for human use. Hence, sellers and buyers of retatrutide often refer to this as a “gray market.”  

But in fact, people are plainly buying it to inject themselves. Though I sometimes saw commenters online use the fig leaf of saying “my lab rat” (which were losing comically large amounts of weight for rodents), most were discussing personal use quite openly. And vendors are not always coy about the true purpose. After the Substacker known as Crémieux wrote a popular guide to buying cheap weight-loss drugs—touting retatrutide as his top pick—one vendor, Peptide Partners, sent a discount code to share with readers: “ScrewTariffs” for 15 percent off.

A package I bought from another company, called Nexaph, originated in Indiana, according to the tracking info, but the return address on its label was in Wyoming. That address leads to a strip-mall office registered to an improbable 20,000 businesses. The cheapest retatrutide tends to come directly from China, though, sold via nebulous entities without websites. I bought one batch from a sales rep on Telegram for Jinan Elitepeptide Chemical Co. A week and a half later, I received a box for a face massager, sealed with a sticker that read, in Chinese, “Original packaging. Authentic product.” Inside were the 10 small unlabeled vials of white powder that I had ordered. (No massager, though.) None of the vendors responded to my subsequent request for comment, except R3JUVEN8, which sent me a statement reiterating that its products, including the retatrutide branded as “Radiant Sculpt” on its site, are “exclusively for laboratory research use.”

The vials I purchased came with no further information about who manufactured the powder or where. But China is home to a large, legitimate drug-manufacturing base, meaning it has the expertise to produce retatrutide. And even before retatrutide caught on, vendors linked to China were selling other peptides—a category of compounds that includes the obesity drugs semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound), as well as substances, such as BPC-157, that are popular in fitness and wellness circles. Making another peptide would not be a huge leap; retatrutide as a molecule is not especially difficult for a knowledgeable chemist to copy.

The drug’s molecular structure has been public for years, since Eli Lilly published it in a research paper in 2022. It is essentially a chain of 39 amino-acid building blocks, its shape cleverly designed to fit into the receptors of three different hormones all at once: GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. (This triple action is the 3 in GLP-3.) The existing obesity drugs on the market hit GLP-1 receptors or GLP-1 plus GIP receptors. Only retatrutide adds glucagon for the full trifecta.  

Where earlier obesity drugs work primarily through appetite suppression, glucagon seems to also boost metabolism by revving up the liver. Put them together and the triple combo might achieve the best of all worlds: “You get a reduction in food intake, and you can turn the dial up and get a little better energy expenditure,” Jonathan Campbell, an obesity researcher at Duke, told me. In other words, fewer calories in and more calories out.

Scientists knew that retatrutide held promise, but when those astonishing preliminary results were shared in 2023, excitement spilled out from labs into the public. A new and more powerful obesity drug was coming, and some people, it turns out, could not wait.

“I’m a risk-taker,” Elizabeth, 62, told me. When she started buying reta in 2024, she had already tried semaglutide and tirzepatide, but she was eager to get her hands on the most effective drug. Back then, the underground market operated much less openly. She had to find a Chinese sales rep on WhatsApp, then transfer hundreds of dollars for several months of supply.

As a biologist herself, Elizabeth was comfortable working with needles and reading scientific papers. She modeled her dosing regimen on the clinical-trial protocol. When her heart began racing, she accepted it as a documented side effect of retatrutide. She has lost more than 100 pounds in the past two and a half years—first on the two older drugs and the last 50 or so pounds on retatrutide. After a lifelong struggle with obesity, she told me in May, these are “some of the most amazing events of my whole life.”

For that, she was willing to risk not just her money, but the potential downsides—both known and unknown—of taking retatrutide, a novel yet clearly powerful drug. The full Phase 3 clinical-trial results should provide a clearer picture soon, but one noteworthy finding so far is dysesthesia, or odd sensations in the skin, such as burning and pain, that suggest unrest in the nervous system. One in five patients on the highest dose of retatrutide experienced dysesthesia, roughly triple its occurrence among patients taking semaglutide’s current maximum dose.

Retatrutide causes many of the other side effects of drugs in its class, too: nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and more serious ones. Adrian Crook, a fitness influencer on YouTube, made a video about how retatrutide almost landed him in the hospital when his stomach became paralyzed. And Elizabeth says she has lost quite a bit of muscle on the drug. “I’m as weak as a kitten,” she told me.

Then there are the risks of injecting drugs sold for “research use only” on the underground market. These include, but are not limited to, the fact that the vials might contain: a different weight-loss drug or an entirely unknown substance, either benign or harmful; dangerous bacteria or traces of bacteria called endotoxins; the wrong dose, whether too low (and therefore ineffective) or too high (which could cause side effects of alarming intensity, because retatrutide is supposed to be slowly titrated up over as many as 20 weeks as your body acclimates to the drug); or other contaminants, such as solvents used in manufacturing or heavy metals.

“All of this stuff just scares the crap out of me,” Randy Seeley concluded after enumerating the potential dangers to me. Seeley, who studies obesity at the University of Michigan, uses peptides for research in his lab, and even the stuff sourced to legitimate scientific-supply companies doesn’t always work as expected, he said. Compounds manufactured for the petri dish are not held to the same strict standards as those made for human use.

It’s not quite fair to say the underground market comes with zero accountability, though. Certain corners, at least, have developed a robust culture of lab testing. A handful of labs—the Levi Strausses of the peptide gold rush—now specialize in testing these compounds. Many vendors post “certificates of analysis” attesting to their purity and sterility. Buyers can send vials to laboratories themselves, either as part of an organized group test or on their own. Some vendors will even refund batches that fail. Without testing, Marco, 53, told me, he would never have injected retatrutide from the internet. (Marco is his middle name.) The tests may not cover every hypothetical risk, but they make it safe enough to assure him. “There’s a lot of people who just get these things and shoot them,” he said. “I don’t judge them in any way, but I think those people are out of their minds.”

The tests, insofar as they are reliable, do flag problems. According to Finnrick Analytics, a start-up that provides free peptide tests and publicly shares the results, 10 percent of the retatrutide samples it has tested in the past 60 days had issues of sterility, purity, or incorrect dosing. Two other peptide-testing labs, Trustpointe and Janoshik, have said in interviews with Rory Hester, a.k.a. PepTok on YouTube, that they see, respectively, an overall fail rate of 20 percent and a 3 to 5 percent fail rate for sterility alone across all peptides. These are not based on random samples—labs test only what their customers send. On the whole, though, these numbers suggest that, although most of the retatrutide flowing through the underground market is what vendors promise it is, the drugs also fail testing at rates far, far higher than is acceptable in standard drug manufacturing.

As retatrutide has grown in popularity, the people seeking it out are no longer just self-professed risk-takers. “The future of the market is normies,” Hester, who also writes the peptide-focused Substack Gray Market, told me. The world of Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp—what Hester calls the “dark gray” peptide market—is by design somewhat inaccessible. “Your grandmother is not going to go on Telegram,” he said. The customer-friendly U.S.-based sites that he calls “light gray” can appeal to a much larger audience. Hester is putting his money where his mouth is. Earlier this month, he announced that he co-owns the peptide company Crush Research.

But the size of the gray market may be fundamentally at odds with its viability. The bigger it gets, the more people are injecting themselves thanks to a legal loophole, and the harder it may be for authorities to ignore. (The FDA did not respond to a request for comment. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previously promised to reverse the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides—along with psychedelics, raw milk, sunshine, and other treatments that “can’t be patented”—though it’s unclear how that applies to retatrutide specifically, which is in fact patented.) And not everyone in the gray market welcomes the attention or the scrutiny that follows. As Finnrick has been posting test results by vendor, its COO, Raphaël Mazoyer, told me, online commentators have accused the company of being an agent of the FDA and the Chinese government. (He denied both.)

A week ago, rumors started swirling, as they periodically do, of a coming U.S. crackdown. Some buyers online dismissed them as an attempt to juice panic buying. Several websites did stop selling retatrutide, though.

The “dark gray” market is not as easily within the grasp of U.S. authorities, but it’s been a turbulent few months there, too. In September, two of the most popular retatrutide suppliers from China abruptly disappeared. Their sales reps stopped replying to messages, stranding buyers who had already paid hundreds of dollars. Rumors later spread of arrests in China. Then, in November, a third vendor’s retatrutide allegedly landed two people in the hospital, according to warnings that spread on social media. The company blamed a raid for interfering with the quality of its drugs. Someone started impersonating its sales rep by using a sneakily similar username. Later, when no further details came out, online commentators started wondering if the hospitalizations were just a hoax. It’s hard to know what is real and what is fake, but that is the nature of an underground market. New vendors keep popping up, like a game of whack-a-mole.

Meanwhile, the frenzy over retatrutide has kicked into even higher gear since the Phase 3 results were announced this month. When the FDA approves the drug, which is widely expected, it will arrive as possibly the most hotly anticipated drug ever. The retatrutide buyers I interviewed said they welcome the legitimate stuff—though they expect it to be incredibly expensive. Marco, whose insurance actually covers obesity drugs, told me he will happily keep buying on the underground market for friends who otherwise can’t afford retatrutide. In any case, he’s stocked up. “I have a year’s supply of reta in my freezer,” he said.

GLP-1 drugs are, in general, meant to be taken indefinitely, but recently, Elizabeth told me she was going to quit retatrutide, at least temporarily. She had reached her goal weight—what she weighed in high school 45 years ago. “Incredible but I feel lousy,” she wrote. She was experiencing both extreme fatigue, which she couldn’t directly attribute to retatrutide, and anhedonia, or an inability to feel pleasure, which is anecdotally linked to GLP-1 drugs in some people. “Would you trade happiness for thinness? Does it have to be one or the other?” she wrote. “At this point, I’m beginning to wonder.” The psychological effect of these drugs really needs to be studied, she added. At this point, a year and a half in, she has been taking retatrutide longer than patients in the concluded clinical trials. She’s hoping to try a lower dose, perhaps one at which she can maintain her weight without feeling so lousy.

Elizabeth has never told her doctor about taking an unapproved drug or buying from the underground market. This whole time with retatrutide, she’s been figuring it out on her own.

For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.

Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

In an email, Andrew Nixon, the deputy assistant secretary for media relations at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, disputed that assertion, writing, “The Biden administration politicized NIH funding through DEI-driven agendas; this administration is restoring rigor, merit, and public trust by prioritizing evidence-based research with real health impact while continuing to support early-career scientists.”

Science has always required creativity—people asking and pursuing questions in ways that have never been attempted before, in the hope that some of that work might produce something new. At its most dramatic, the results can be transformative: In the early 1900s, the Wright brothers drew inspiration from birds’ flight mechanics to launch their first airplanes; more recently, scientists have found ways to genetically engineer a person’s own immune cells to kill off cancer. Even in more routine discoveries, nothing quite matches the excitement of being the first to capture a piece of reality. I remember, as a graduate student, cloning my first bacterial mutant while trying to understand a gene important for growth. I knew that the microscopic creature I had built would never yield a drug or save a life. But in the brief moment in which I plucked a colony from an agar plate and swirled it into a warm, sugar-rich broth, I held a form of life that had never existed before—and that I had made in pursuit of a question that, as far as I knew, no one else had asked.

Pursuing scientific creativity can be resource intensive, requiring large teams of researchers to spend millions of dollars across decades to investigate complex questions. Up until very recently, the federal government was eager to underwrite that process. Since the end of the Second World War, it has poured money into basic research, establishing a kind of social contract with scientists, of funds in exchange for innovation. Support from the government “allowed the free play of scientific genius,” Nancy Tomes, a historian of medicine at Stony Brook University, told me.

The investment has paid dividends. One oft-cited statistic puts the success of scientific funding in economic terms: Every dollar invested in research and development in the United States is estimated to return at least $5. Another points to the fact that more than 99 percent of the drugs approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019 were at least partly supported by NIH funds. These things are true—but they also obscure the years or even decades of meandering and experimentation that scientists must take to reach those results. CRISPR gene-editing technology began as basic research into the structure of bacterial genomes; the discovery of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs depended on scientists in the late ’70s and ’80s tinkering with fish cells. The Trump administration has defunded research with more obvious near-term goals—work on mRNA vaccines to combat the next flu pandemic, for instance—but also science that expands knowledge that we don’t yet have an application for (if one even exists). It has also proposed major cuts to NASA that could doom an already troubled mission to return brand-new mineral samples from the surface of Mars, which might have told us more about life in this universe, or nothing much at all.

Outside of the most obvious effects of grant terminations—salary cuts, forced layoffs, halted studies—the Trump administration’s attacks on science have limited the horizons that scientists in the U.S. are looking toward. The administration has made clear that it no longer intends to sponsor research into certain subjects, including transgender health and HIV. Even researchers who haven’t had grants terminated this year or who work on less politically volatile subjects are struggling to conceptualize their scientific futures, as canceled grant-review meetings and lists of banned words hamper the normal review process. The NIH is also switching up its funding model to one that will decrease the number of scientific projects and people it will bankroll. Many scientists are hesitant to hire more staff or start new projects that rely on expensive materials. Some have started to seek funds from pharmaceutical companies or foundations, which tend to offer smaller and shorter-term agreements, trained more closely on projects with potential profit.

All of this nudges scientists into a defensive posture. They’re compressing the size of their studies or dropping the most ambitious aspects of their projects. Collaborations between research groups have broken down too, as some scientists who have been relatively insulated from the administration’s cuts have terminated their partnerships with defunded scientists—including at Harvard, where Delaney worked as a research scientist until September—to protect their own interests. “The human thing to do is to look inward and to kind of take care of yourself first,” Delaney told me. Instability and fear have made the research system, already sometimes prone to siloing, even more fragmented. The administration “took two of the best assets that the U.S. scientific enterprise has—the capacity to think long, and the capacity to collaborate—and we screwed them up at the same time,” Delaney said. Several scientists told me that the current funding environment has prompted them to consider early retirement—in many cases, shutting down the labs they have run for decades.

Some of the experiments that scientists shelved this year could still be done at later dates. But the new instability of American science may also be driving away the people necessary to power that future work. Several universities have been forced to downsize Ph.D. programs; the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies have made many international researchers fearful of their status at universities. And as the administration continues to dismiss the importance of DEI programs, many young scientists from diverse backgrounds have told me they’re questioning whether they will be welcomed into academia. Under the Trump administration, the scope of American science is simply smaller: “When you shrink funding, you’re going to increase conservatism,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational biologist at Yale University, told me. Competition and scarcity can breed innovation in science. But often, Ogbunu said, people forget that “comfort and security are key parts of innovation, too.”