Five prominent diabetes researchers were physically removed from the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans on Friday for handing out copies of a journal editorial that criticized the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific research. According to Ars Technica, security grabbed the scientists, stripped their lanyards, and barred them from the rest of the conference. The ADA says they broke its code of conduct. The scientists say it’s censorship.
This is a research story, not a product launch, but it lands squarely on the AI and science community because it’s about who gets to speak inside the institutions that fund and publish the work.
What happened
The five were standing outside a room where NIH director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to speak. Bhattacharya cancelled, and another NIH official took his place. The reprints they were distributing came from an editorial published April 29 in Diabetes Care.
Those removed, as detailed in Ars Technica:
- Steven Kahn, University of Washington professor and editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care, who co-authored the editorial
- Desmond Schatz, former ADA president, University of Florida
- Aaron Kelly, pediatrics professor, University of Minnesota
- Justin Ryder, Northwestern University
- Irl Hirsch, University of Washington
“They physically grabbed us, forced us out of the conference center, and now are telling us we can no longer attend this meeting,” Kelly told MedPage Today, which first reported the incident. “They’re taking our lanyards. It really has come to this in America. Censorship is real.”
The ADA’s side
The association confirmed it removed five registered scientists and said they violated its conduct code. “These attendees were escorted out by our onsite event security because they demonstrated behavior not consistent with this code of conduct,” the ADA media team said. The group added that the men were “respectfully given the opportunity to cease this behavior and chose not to.”
What stands out here is the code itself. The ADA’s rules explicitly list “protesting” as disruptive conduct that “will not be tolerated,” alongside harassment and threats. So handing out a peer-reviewed editorial got lumped in with the same category as intimidation.
Why this matters
Scientific conferences have long been the place where researchers argue in the open. The editor-in-chief of the host journal getting frog-marched out for sharing his own publication is a sharp break from that norm. When the people running the field decide that circulating a published opinion counts as misconduct, the chilling effect reaches well past diabetes care.
For anyone working in AI research, the parallel is hard to miss. Much of the field runs on the same federal funding pipelines, the same NIH and university grants, and the same publish-and-debate culture now under pressure. The administration’s moves on research funding have been reshaping budgets and priorities for months. What changed Friday is that the dispute moved from spreadsheets to security guards.
What to watch next
A few things worth tracking:
- Whether the ADA reverses course. Public pressure on a host organization that ejected its own journal editor could force a statement or an apology.
- How other scientific societies respond. Conference codes of conduct that classify “protesting” as bannable conduct are common. Expect researchers to start reading the fine print.
- The funding fight underneath it. This incident is a symptom. The real story is the ongoing squeeze on federal research dollars, and that affects AI labs, medical research, and university work alike.
The scientists framed it as a call to action. “America needs to stand up. Scientists, stand up. Physicians, stand up,” Kelly said. Whether that rallying cry produces a louder response from the broader research community, or just a quieter one, is the open question. Full details are available at the original Ars Technica report.