Distributing Science at a Science Conference
Five of the country’s top diabetes researchers walked into the American Diabetes Association’s annual conference in New Orleans on Friday. They were carrying reprints of an editorial published in the ADA’s own journal, Diabetes Care.
They left in police escort. Badges confiscated. Banned from the meeting.
Their crime: handing out paper copies of words the ADA had already published.
Let me repeat that slowly. The editor-in-chief of the ADA’s journal was physically removed from the ADA’s conference for distributing the ADA’s own content. Steven Kahn, professor at UW, editor of Diabetes Care, co-author of the editorial — thrown out by security. Alongside him: former ADA president Desmond Schatz, Aaron Kelly, Justin Ryder, and Irl Hirsch. All leading scientists. All physically grabbed, marched out, and stripped of their credentials.
The editorial they were handing out? It’s called “It Is No Longer Enough to Stand Idly By”. Published April 29 in Diabetes Care. It’s a blunt critique of the Trump administration’s ongoing dismantling of American scientific research — budget cuts, political interference, the slow strangulation of the NIH and CDC. The authors argue that scientists have been too polite for too long, and that silence in the face of a deliberate assault on evidence-based policy is complicity.
The ADA’s response was to call security.
The organization’s statement cites their code of conduct: no “disorderly or disruptive conduct such as protesting.” Handing out reprints outside a room where NIH director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to speak counts as protest, apparently. Never mind that Bhattacharya canceled. Never mind that the reprints contained the exact same words the ADA had already published and distributed itself.
Aaron Kelly, one of the ejected scientists, told MedPage Today: “They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting. They’re taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real.”
And here’s the twist that makes this whole thing a perfect Rube Goldberg machine of irony: the editorial these scientists were ejected for distributing contains this exact passage:
“It is no longer enough to stand idly by or work behind the scenes with lawmakers… We can no longer afford complacency and fear. We must all act now!”
The ADA literally proved the editorial’s thesis by trying to suppress it.
This is what happens when institutions become brand managers instead of mission operators. The ADA exists to advance diabetes research and care. But when its own leadership publishes a call to action that might upset the political winds, the organization’s reflexes kick in not as a scientific body, but as a PR department. Protect the brand. Silence the dissent. Call security.
The online backlash has been swift. The editorial’s page views spiked. Scientists on Bluesky and X are furious. Kahn has written to the ADA asking to be readmitted — he’s still scheduled to speak and chair a session. The same people who had him physically removed still have him on the agenda. Nobody in that building seems to have looked in a mirror all day.
Science has never thrived on politeness. It thrives on disputation, on uncomfortable evidence, on people who refuse to shut up because the data says something inconvenient. When a medical society escorts its own editor-in-chief out of the building for distributing published research, it’s not enforcing a code of conduct. It’s admitting that it values institutional comfort over scientific integrity.
The editorial asked scientists to stop being afraid. The ADA showed them exactly why they were right to be.
Sources: Ars Technica, MedPage Today, Diabetes Care editorial (DOI: 10.2337/dci26-0068)