Chemistry needs its mission

What a year. There has certainly been a lot to take stock of. The US and other countries have seen disruption.Cuts to research grants and the deletion of public datasets have far-reaching consequences—and not just because research, as we have seen with messenger RNA advances, can be a fragile long game. The shifts in policy have also stirred debate about academic freedom, regulatory overreach. and research mobility. Where the US lands on these topics has consequences for the rest of the global chemical enterprise.That is before we consider the economic consequences of the “reshoring agenda.” Or the ethical consequences of cuts to federal programs like USAID (US Agency for International Development). According to a tracker by Brooke Nichols, a Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeler, the global impact of cuts to aid efforts has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.Research agendas and budgets should of course be subject to scrutiny, and it is the prerogative of every government to articulate an agenda for economic growth as it relates to R&D and—yes—spending on international aid. It’s tragic, though, that any debate in the US this year has been so polarizing and brutally swift.But it helps to put developments in the US in context, if we look at the science itself. The past 12 months have seen the increasing influence of artificial intelligence. And a number of stories demonstrated how AI is making the scientific endeavor both faster and ever-more subject to fraud or misrepresentation.The crisis of replication, as it