Persevering With or Without Grants.
Persevering With or Without Grants
The deep cuts to federal funding for scientific research are disheartening and dangerous, but the show must go on.
It is the right time to stop and admit that this has been a disorienting and dispiriting year for researchers. What are, and will be, acceptable topics for investigation have become increasingly unclear. We are like silent film makers who understood the format from another era but now must now adapt to the demands of a new audience—government officials whose tastes and mandates remain murky.
We run through our grant proposal wordings again and again, like movie actors who do take after exhausted take. The old pact has been broken. How many tries will suffice to write a grant in 2025? Can we repurpose unused outtakes or our greatest hits that worked in the past. There is certainly an audience for science fiction (measles cured by antibiotics or cod liver oil), but no one wants to pay for the old script of science anymore.
Conventional consolation seems to miss the point. With “talkies,” movies changed for the better, most people believed. Subjects proliferated, film-making improved. Today, the ambient forces do not favor progress. No one wants to hear from scientists, the silent stars of the past.
New funding has stopped arriving, spending has been limited, hallways and offices have been emptier than in the past. Too many days, academic buildings have the mood of a once-thriving small town that has fallen on hard times. The usual spirited mood of the place has quieted. We try to keep up with the national news that pertains to research but it is the fun-house mirror of the reality we used to inhabit. The distortions are now the facts. Anxiety feels likes a duty. As researchers, it is hard not to be bitter, although we were never promised funding; we didn’t begin this work with any guarantees other than that there existed an open market for ideas.
This summer will be an in-between time for researchers and staff. A time between the big and grave matter of lost grants in the spring, and anticipated deeper cuts in federal funding in the fall. Luckily, investigators are stubborn, determined in their pursuit of knowledge. We will persevere, and will try and try again to offer mastery, methodically planned experiments, and care in the interpretation of outcomes to the cash-depleted market that remains. It is a righteous dispute, this quarrel over knowledge and knowing. It is clear who the nemeses are.
As they say in Hollywood, the show must go on.
Michael D. Stein, MD
Dean Ad Interim
Boston University School of Public Health
mdstein@bu.edu
Previous Public Health Matters are archived at: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/category/public-health-matters/
