“Research is formalized curiosity,” Zora Neale Hurston once said. “It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.”
Who needs to spend public money on that?!
Well, we do. Federal research dollars have fundamentally changed the world, from helping to map the human genome to developing the COVID vaccines to building the internet itself. But the federal government is clawing back a third of a billion dollars — and maybe far more — in already-approved research grants and support for California institutes of higher learning and scientific exploration, according to Grant Watch, data pieced together by two researchers from official sources — and by crowdsourcing from researchers themselves.
It’s a loss measured not simply in dollars — what’s a half-billion here and there when lawmakers seek to add trillions to the national deficit? — but in discoveries.
These grants were approved by the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and the confusion hits Southern California institutions and those toiling in their labs hard. Scientific inquiry into Alzheimer’s, autism, antibiotics and much, much more that might apply to every one of us is suddenly in limbo from San Diego to Davis.
Statewide, the NIH had awarded grants totaling $541.4 million and delivered just $266 million, with the remaining $275 million officially chopped. That’s not all, however. Millions more in National Science Foundation grants — to encourage underrepresented folks to pursue STEM, and cover research project overhead — are also in limbo. About $182.5 million was slated for California institutions, but researchers now expect to lose about half.
California and 15 other states sued the NSF on Wednesday, asserting that the administration is trying to usurp Congress’ power of the purse (Congress had specifically instructed NSF to improve minority representation in the sciences), and that it arbitrarily set 15% as the ceiling for indirect costs, when it usually ranges between 40% and 60%. Back in April, California and those 15 other states sued the Department of Health and Human Services and National Institutes of Health for failing to disperse the grants.
“Over the decades, this funding has brought humanity the eradication of polio, discovery of the gene that causes breast and ovarian cancer and the transformation of HIV from a fatal disease into one people can live with,” said a statement from Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Gutting NIH funding is a deep loss to innovation and progress built upon for decades — and it’s illegal.”
Add to all this hundreds of millions more in cancelled grants for the humanities, arts and other programs in California which run afoul of the new administration’s philosophies.
Hit list
This scientific research hit list, according to the Grant Watch data, includes UC San Francisco, which is slated to lose $72 million; UC San Diego, slated to lose $59.2 million; the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (founded in 1966 to address inadequate medical access in the Watts region of Los Angeles), $36.5 million; UCLA, $15.5 million; Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, $12.7 million; Stanford, $10.5 million; UC Santa Cruz, $9.4 million; UC Davis, $8.3 million: UC Irvine, $5.1 million; UC Berkeley, $4.6 million; USC, $3.7 million; nearly $1 million for CSU San Bernardino; nearly a half-million for CSU Fullerton; and $218,000 for CSU Long Beach.
These figures are the work of two scientists — Scott Delaney at Harvard, and Noam Ross at rOpenSci — who have gathered what STAT has called the most detailed public accounting yet assembled of cancelled grants. It is admittedly incomplete, as information has been erratic and hard to come by.
But it hurts. “As the world’s leading public research institution — and one that has partnered closely with the federal government for the past 80 years — the reduction or elimination of federal research funding would have a particularly profound impact on the University of California,” said Stett Holbrook, spokesman for the UC president’s office.
“Hindering academic research will lead to job loss, limit the creation of new knowledge, slow the development of new cures and solutions to society’s most intractable problems. Cuts to federal research grants will result in immediate broad reductions of personnel and services, including impacts on education, training, delivery of care to patients, basic research, and clinical trials. Cancelled grants, even if eventually restored, can permanently damage time-sensitive work in both basic and clinical research.”
Many of them, predictably, involve research involving minorities, COVID and vaccines. But the universe of axed projects seems vaster, and the losses potentially terrifying.
Autism, sleep, drug-resistant bacteria
Among the projects axed at UCI:
“Antibiotic resistant bacteria pose a global threat to human health and wellbeing. New strategies for combating resistance are urgently needed because current drug development pipelines are not keeping up with the dwindling supply of effective antibiotics…..”
Award: $1.9 million. Outlay: $1.7 million. Axed: $189,330.
“Autism Spectrum Disorder is a prevalent and heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder …. Many brain changes underlying abnormalities in ASD appear in childhood suggesting the possibility for effective therapeutic strategies targeting brain maturation. One candidate therapeutic is the hypothalamic peptide Oxytocin….recent work indicates that treatment in childhood improves social interactions in autistic individuals….”
Award: $2.4 million. Outlay: $1.8 million. Axed: $615,046.
“Sleep is crucial for memory consolidation and its benefit is most commonly thought to occur via the reactivation of memories, thereby strengthening the neural infrastructure supporting them….The goal of the proposed project is to improve our fundamental understanding of memory processes by developing an empirically-based framework…. Aim 2 will attempt to reinstate a suppression context during sleep to effectively weaken memories. This effort will inform future work on alleviating memory-related symptoms in clinical populations suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Award: $848,012. Outlay: $686,189. Axed: $161,823.
“One of the most recent and significant public health problems deals with addressing vaccine hesitancy and mis/disinformation. As new types of vaccines become effective and available, and bundled together, it becomes increasingly important that researchers and health departments learn how to best communicate to the public the correct science behind vaccines. Black/African American and Latinx populations might be especially impacted by misinformation due to health inequity and low health literacy....”
Award: $683,352. Outlay: $17,475. Axed: $665,877
Also cancelled: probes into the underpinnings of addiction, diabetes, mRNA processing.
Hypertension, diabetes, Alzheimer’s
Axed at UCLA:
“UC END-DISPARITIES will address the inequitable multilevel factors that promote cardiometabolic disease, including hypertension, diabetes, atherosclerotic vascular disease and chronic kidney disease. These conditions … disproportionately affect low-income, minoritized, and other marginalized groups in the highly diverse and contiguous region of Los Angeles County and Orange County.”
Award: $14 million. Outlay: $8.5 million. In limbo: $5.5 million.
“As advanced age is the most significant risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, targeting detrimental age-related processes may lead to effective therapies…. Our findings may also lead to novel therapeutic approaches to counteract aging, AD and related dementias.”
Award: $4.7 million. Outlay: $1.2 million. Axed: $3.5 million.
Also axed: research into tuberculosis, diabetes during pregnancy and several projects to ignite interest in STEM among underrepresented students.
Cancer, stem cells
Axed at USC:
“Age is the major risk factor for most chronic human diseases…. Neural stem cells are particularly vulnerable to cellular aging and undergo functional decay in the mature brain…. A central goal in regenerative medicine for Alzheimer’s disease is to determine the factors that rejuvenate endogenous neural stem cells and augment cognition….”
Award: $3.1 million. Outlay: $1.9 million. Axed: $1.1 million.
“The first line of treatment for several cancer patients is surgical debulking which can suffer from poor tumor localization resulting in lengthy incomplete surgeries and repeat visits. Our objective is to provide physicians with an entirely new multimodal molecular imaging strategy….”
Award: $1.4 million. Outlay: $1 million. Axed: $337,296.
Two projects at Cal State Fullerton aimed to recruit more underrepresented students into STEM fields (Awards: $1.6 million. Outlay: $1.1 million. Axed: $486,761), as did one at Cal State Long Beach (Award: $1.1 million. Outlay: $850,760. Axed: $217,726) and one at Cal State San Bernardino (Award: $2.1 million. Outlay: $1.2 million. Axed: $881,103).
It hurts. “Indeed, the loss of grant funding will negatively impact our educational mission and the broader social benefits derived from this work,” said Jim Milbury, spokesman for Cal State Long Beach.
‘Unconstitutional’
And California says it’s illegal.
“Over the decades, global competition has threatened to undermine America’s preeminent position in STEM,” the states’ suit against the NSF says.
“Since at least 1980, Congress has recognized that for the United States to maintain its competitive edge, the nation would need to encourage and prepare people from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM to acquire skills and pursue careers in science and engineering fields. Congress consequently declared that ‘the highest quality science over the long-term requires substantial support, from currently available research and education funds, for increased participation in science and technology by women and minorities.’ “
Congress not only authorized such programs — it expressly directed NSF to pursue them, it said. Despite that, a new “Priority Directive” was posted to the NSF website in April, acknowledging that “NSF priorities are . . . modulated by statutory directives” and then ignoring Congress’ marching orders. Projects focusing on “subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities,” it said. Even though those priorities are Congress’ to set.
The new directive violates the separation of powers, the suit argues. The Constitution “exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress, not the President,” it said.
The bottom line, Harvard/Grant Watch’s Delaney told STAT, is not everybody has the same opportunity to be healthy. “I hope this isn’t naive, but I don’t think that trying to help folks with Alzheimer’s be healthier, have better days, should engender controversy,” he said.
“These grants are the manifestations of a life’s worth of work. You terminate that and now everybody’s ready to fight. It takes a minute, right? …You get the wind knocked out of you. But then when you get up, you’re ready to go, frankly, in a way that people weren’t before.”
