A Conference Security Incident That Became a National Story
The American Diabetes Association spent the weekend absorbing a wave of public fury after its staff physically removed five prominent diabetes researchers from the organization’s own annual meeting on Friday. By Wednesday, ADA chief executive officer Tracey Brown had posted a video apology – a rapid reversal that did little to quiet the questions about how the incident was authorized in the first place.
What the scientists were distributing when they were ejected was not protest literature from an outside group. It was a printed copy of an editorial already published in Diabetes Care, the ADA’s own peer-reviewed journal, which sharply criticizes the Trump administration for the damage it is causing to biomedical research funding and infrastructure.
Who Got Removed and What They Were Doing
The five researchers were not fringe critics crashing a conference. Steven Kahn, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, is the editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care – the very journal that published the editorial in April. He co-authored the piece. Desmond Schatz, a professor at the University of Florida and a former president of the ADA itself, was also among those removed. Three additional leading diabetes scientists were ejected alongside them.
The group was standing outside the conference’s opening session, handing out printed copies of the April editorial to attendees who wanted one. That session was originally scheduled to feature Jay Bhattacharya, who serves as the head of the National Institutes of Health under President Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute. Senior NIH official Rick Woychik stepped in and delivered the address in his place.
The editorial these scientists were distributing pulls no rhetorical punches. Published months before the conference, it argues directly that the Trump administration’s approach to federal science policy is actively destroying the biomedical research ecosystem. Its presence at the ADA meeting was politically inconvenient, particularly given who was originally scheduled to speak. The timing of the ejection – right at the opening session’s door – made the optics difficult to manage once the story moved beyond the conference floor.
There is a particular institutional awkwardness embedded in the whole sequence of events. A journal editor-in-chief being removed from his own organization’s conference for distributing his own journal’s editorial is not a normal occurrence in academic medicine. It suggests either a breakdown in internal communication about what the policy enforcers were actually doing, or a deliberate decision to suppress a piece of work the ADA had already sanctioned by publishing it.
The Apology and What It Leaves Unresolved
Brown’s Wednesday video apology acknowledged that the removal was wrong. It did not explain, at least not with specificity, who ordered the ejection or what policy the scientists were deemed to have violated. An apology that arrives after a weekend of backlash carries a different weight than one that arrives before the story spreads – and the ADA’s response timeline has not gone unnoticed by the research community watching the episode.
The association’s position is now doubly complicated. It published the editorial. It then allowed – or directed – security staff to remove the scientists distributing it. It then apologized for the removal. Each step in that sequence is in tension with the one before it, and the organization has not yet offered a clean account of how those decisions connected to each other.
Science Conferences, Political Speech, and Where Lines Are Being Drawn
The ADA incident did not happen in isolation. Federal research funding has been under sustained pressure, and the scientific community has grown increasingly vocal about what it sees as politically motivated interference with grant-making and institutional priorities. The proposed federal rules allowing grant cancellation at any time have already put research institutions on edge about how to navigate relationships with federal funders while maintaining scientific independence.
Annual conferences for major medical organizations have historically been places where researchers can exchange findings, debate priorities, and occasionally make pointed arguments about policy. The ADA meeting is attended by thousands of clinicians and scientists for whom federal funding decisions are not abstract – they determine which labs stay open, which trials proceed, and which careers survive the budget cycle.
What happened Friday effectively signaled, however briefly, that distributing an already-published peer-reviewed editorial critical of the administration could get you removed from a professional conference. That signal landed hard in a community already watching federal agencies reorganize, downsize, and shift research priorities in ways that align with current political preferences rather than scientific consensus or established funding criteria.
Kahn still holds the editor-in-chief position at Diabetes Care. Schatz is still a former ADA president. The editorial is still published, still accessible, still part of the journal’s record. What is less clear is whether the ADA’s leadership can explain, with any coherence, how a piece of writing it chose to publish became grounds – even briefly – for removing its own authors from its own event.
