BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

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Decision tree that has been sent to Program Officers at NSF

These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.

The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we're now

Policing research on trauma. If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word "biased" gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of these terms, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA