Scientists’ Uncertain Future
U.S. researchers face sudden funding cuts that threaten studies, careers, and scientific progress.
The termination letter arrived in Sabra Klein’s email inbox on March 25, telling her to immediately stop all work on a $10.9 million, five-year grant to research variations in people’s immune responses to COVID-19.
The grant funded the Serological Science Center of Excellence, which Klein, PhD ’98, MS, MA, a professor in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI), had to shut down that day, along with her fellow investigators across the National Cancer Institute’s Serological Sciences Network (SeroNet), which encompassed 25 research institutions. Klein and her co-principal investigator, Infectious Disease Professor Andrea L. Cox, MD, PhD, supported 40 workers across the schools of Public Health and Medicine. Klein had no choice but to immediately let go of four people from her team.
Her project was among 29 cut by NIH reportedly because “the pandemic is over.” (As of early May, 10,679 people in the U.S. have died this year from COVID-19, according to the CDC.) Klein had been in the process of finishing work on the grant, which was expected to end in September. The sudden termination meant that taxpayer-funded research would not be completed, analyzed, and written up for publication, affecting as many as 15 potential papers. The research also was to support her team’s next grant proposal, on the effects of long COVID. “These cuts and anticipations of cuts [are] creating a fundamental sense of instability within our institutions,” says Klein, who has been a scientist for more than 30 years.
It can also be whiplash-inducing: Klein got an email on April 9 reinstating her grant. But it was restored as part of a lawsuit that had resulted in a temporary restraining order. That order expired April 17, though Klein had heard nothing as of April 29. And, she noted in an email, the funding was restored only for SeroNet labs in states that sued.
Klein is not the only one experiencing funding whiplash: All NIH funding for long COVID research was cut one Tuesday in March, but an outcry by advocates led to a partial restoring of grants a few days later. Richard E. Chaisson, MD, a professor in Medicine, Epidemiology, and International Health, had a $200 million tuberculosis research project terminated on February 27 when USAID was dismantled. It was suddenly reinstated, though at reduced funding, by email on March 24.
Deep Cuts
If there were a Scientist Confidence Index, it would be at an all-time low right now. Since the new U.S. administration took office in January, hundreds of NIH grants worth an estimated $3.4 billion when awarded have been canceled or paused for review, with an estimated cost to the economy of 68,000 jobs and $16 billion. The cuts are part of a retrenchment of federal research across multiple agencies. Even before a proposed 40% cut to NIH’s overall budget was leaked in mid-April, the upheaval was certain to discourage young researchers from pursuing science, say public health leaders like Howard K. Koh, MD, MPH, who calls the cuts “absolutely unprecedented.” Koh, former HHS assistant secretary and a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health professor of health policy, says the impact on public health will be even larger. “My fear is that a generation of public health progress is going to go away,” he says.
At Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the Meharry RCMI Research Capacity Core (MRRCC), which provides technical services and support for the school’s researchers, was terminated. The Core is one of the Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. NIMHD has provided funding for Meharry’s center since it was founded, but a week after this year’s annual conference in March, the grant was terminated by email, affecting three staff scientists and three investigators. Josiah Ochieng, PhD, a professor of biomedical science at Meharry who manages the Core, says separate grants for research that rely on MRRCC were also cut, affecting HIV/AIDS and neuroscience projects, among others. “We cannot do our basic bench research. We cannot train our students. Everything is at a standstill,” says Ochieng. But he points out that the bigger picture involves the health of people with chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes. “If you can keep this population healthy, you can help the overall [health] budget. And it helps make sure that nobody’s left behind,” he says.
Nicole Baumgarth, professor in MMI at the Bloomberg School, says she has not lost an NIH grant yet, though she jokes that “it could change any moment!”
Baumgarth, DVM, PhD, director of the Lyme and Tickborne Diseases Research and Education Institute, says one possible source of funding for research into vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for Lyme disease disappeared when the Department of Defense cut funding for research on tickborne illnesses. That was a potential $7.5 million pool for researchers like her, gone. She has a grant proposal for research into a treatment for Lyme disease in limbo, awaiting NIAID to convene a study session. Nationwide, some $77 million in NIH grants for Lyme disease research are currently on hold.
Given the funding uncertainty, Baumgarth says MMI decided to support only four new PhD students instead of eight.
Amplify individual decisions like this across academic science, and it could cause graduate students and early career scientists to change careers, warns Joanne Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “The threat to the ability of the U.S. to remain a global leader [in science] is very real,” Carney says. She notes that the cuts will damage U.S. capacity for science and could cause early career researchers to change careers or leave the country, at a time when China in particular is vying for scientific primacy. While foundations might help plug some gaps, and it’s possible that the pharmaceutical industry could boost R&D spending, Carney and others say they will not be able to make up for all the lost U.S. government funding.
Over there?
Some scientists are looking to other countries to continue their work. More than 75% of 1,608 scientists who responded to a March poll in Nature said they were considering leaving the U.S. Other countries sense opportunity: France’s Aix-Marseilles University launched a “Safe Place for Science” campaign with three years of funding for 20 U.S. researchers and got almost 300 applicants. The European Union, Canada, and Australia have also launched recruitment efforts to attract scientists, especially those early in their careers. Meharry’s Ochieng said he and a number of colleagues received unsolicited offers to apply for 58 open science jobs at Qatar University.
A lab director at Germany’s Max Planck Institute posted on LinkedIn, “If you are seriously thinking of leaving the USA … [w]e are always on the look-out for new colleagues.” Patrick Cramer, PhD, who runs the Planck Institute, a publicly funded research organization, is actively pushing to hire more scientists and seeking donors to sponsor joint U.S.-German projects. Even so, he’s realistic about the limits of luring away U.S. scientists. He told German media that “the idea that the balance of power will be shifted by a few more jobs for U.S. scientists in Germany or Europe is completely unfounded.”
China may be the most aggressive country about recruiting new talent. Ardem Patapoutian, PhD, a neuroscientist at Scripps Institute who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, recently wrote in CNN that he had been offered 20 years’ worth of funding to move his lab to China. He declined but said, “That such offers are becoming increasingly attractive should be a wake-up call.”
Brace for Impact
The real effects for everyday people, as measured by health outcomes, won’t be felt this year or even during the next four years, says Baumgarth. She’s frustrated at the lack of outcry from the pharmaceutical industry, which relies on NIH to fund basic research that turns into drugs like Ozempic. The blockbuster drug “was considered too risky for industry. … It was NIH funding that brought it to the point that it had payoffs,” she says. Research areas and scientists deemed expendable, and young scientists not hired today—these are waves eroding the foundations of knowledge, she says.
Baumgarth notes how her native Germany was at the forefront of physics and medicine in the 1920s and has never been able to recapture that leadership. “Once it’s gone it doesn’t come back,” she says.
Neither do lost lives, noted Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear during a recent call with the media. The University of Kentucky stands to lose more than $40 million in NIH funding for work on cancer treatments, heart disease, children’s illnesses, and opioid addiction. “Oftentimes research is treatment as well. There are immediate human impacts on people that we love,” says Beshear.
There is hope that U.S. science will fend off or find ways around these funding cuts, says Jennifer B. Nuzzo, DrPH ’14, SM, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. Her center is unusual in that it has never had government funding, so its work is not directly affected. But she is concerned for public health research.
Communicating the impact and reach of research is a major component of the fight, she says, praising scientists who are applying their skills to launching grant trackers and impact maps, and writing op-eds. Scientists everywhere have to talk about what it is they actually do, she says, even if it’s just with their neighbors. “This situation gives us an opportunity” to make the case for how science helps society, she says.
She acknowledges that scientists have a lot of work to do to address negative public perceptions. But she’s heartened by the response she’s seeing. Says Nuzzo, “I will never bet against the U.S. scientific community.”