By Jason Locasale at Brownstone dot org.

I became a scientist because I was drawn to difficult questions. As a child, I searched for patterns and tried to uncover the deeper logic behind everyday phenomena. That instinct carried me into chemistry and physics, then into a PhD at MIT, where I worked at the intersection of biophysics, engineering, computation, and early AI.

Biology pulled me in because it was full of unresolved problems. It offered a way to answer questions that touched human health in a meaningful way.

When I entered biomedical research at Harvard, I believed science operated on a simple principle: knowledge mattered. I built a research program around metabolism - how nutrients and the environment shape health, cancer, and chronic disease.

My lab developed technologies capable of measuring hundreds of molecules simultaneously, revealing how cells allocate nutrients and make decisions and shaping research directions in many fields.

Over nearly 20 years I published over 200 papers, becoming one of the world's most highly cited scholars, received teaching awards, collaborated across disciplines, contributed to biotechnology, and advised the National Institutes of Health.

I also assumed - naively - that scientific accomplishment offered a degree of protection. If you did good work, if you advanced understanding, institutions would support you. There were early warning signs: jealousy from senior colleagues when my research outpaced theirs; the creeping politicization of academia; hiring and leadership decisions that elevated people for their symbolic value or personal relationships rather than their expertise. But I did what most scientists do: I focused on the work and ignored the noise.

It took far too long to understand how misplaced that belief was. My awakening came through something ordinary: an authorship dispute between two members of my lab at Duke's medical school, where I was a tenured professor. These disagreements happen in every lab and are typically resolved with a straightforward conversation. But this dispute unfolded when universities were reframing their missions around social-justice narratives about power imbalances, recasting accomplished scientists as oppressors and others as oppressed.

What should have been a simple mentoring moment instead became the pretext for a sprawling administrative intervention - something the university could present as vigilance, morality, or progress.

The process quickly detached from reality. Administrators launched what they called a culture review, claiming they needed to assess whether I was aligned with Duke's values. In practice, investigators interrogated people for hours, attempting to elicit any negative phrasing that could be stitched into a narrative.

I was banned from campus, prohibited from discussing my research or what was happening to me, and placed under legal and financial scrutiny. My grants were reassigned to senior administrators who had long been jealous of my accomplishments.

After a couple months of interviews, audits, and surveillance, the investigation concluded with no findings of misconduct. But the damage had already been done. Years of work were disrupted, the careers of my trainees derailed, and student protests about my treatment ignored - even as other forms of activism were eagerly embraced. Eventually I was pressured to sign a compact containing conditions and monitoring requirements that would have made any serious research impossible.

What happened to me was not unique. Variations of the same pattern were unfolding on campuses across the country. Colleagues told me to ignore it, to keep my head down and focus on my work. But opportunities disappeared; whispers filled the void where facts should have been; and I was quietly blacklisted from positions elsewhere. It became clear that something deeper had been happening inside biomedical academia for years: scientific merit and truth had lost their institutional value.

Universiti...