“If we do business and recognize normal class size, we will have students we can’t support,” said Kimberly Cooper, a developmental biologist at UCSD and associate director of the PhD program in biology. One of her undergraduate trainees did not take any graduate programs this year. Cooper added that the trainee hopes to be an unpaid volunteer and be able to continue working in the lab “because she wants to do it very badly.” “This is another problem I have – we might go back to a place where research is really only applicable to people with independent finances that can do this.”
Jeremy Berg, former NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences track NIH expenditure T32 Grant– Training grants that directly support graduate and postdoctoral research. Only two new T32 grants have been awarded since February this year. For comparison, 69 grants were issued from February to March last year. While March is not necessarily the month of the peak of the T32 award, the lack of activity involves the future.
Lack of NIH training grants is consistent with the NSF trend, with NSF’s STEM Education Bureau awarding awards It seems to have slowed down A nearly complete stop. Compared to NIH, NSF Fund Research may be non-biomedical by nature and runs a graduate research scholarship program that supports thousands of graduate students each year. GRFP awards are usually presented in April, and it is unclear how this year will be affected. “Send it to students who decide they want a science career and have been waiting for their whole life to go to graduate school is a terrible signal,” Berger said.
Instability in training grant spending, plus NIH’s new policy on overhead costs– Paying for key functions such as laboratory maintenance, equipment and administrative support – not only affected by trainees, but also rely on the laboratories’ faculty to rely on the work of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Ran Blekhman, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, said federal grants provide a large portion of many lab funding, whose lab is almost entirely funded by NIH. This uncertainty forced many scientists, especially those early in their careers, to shift their focus from simply doing science to trying to make their science angry as well as their careers.
Blekhman’s research team, which studies the human microbiome, has been searching for non-federal sources of funding. But, for example, private foundation money does not usually support basic science, nor does it support low independent cost ceilings, and NIH funds usually cover basic science before the new overhead ceiling. “My feeling is that everyone is already watching everywhere,” Blekhman said. “That’s not to say new money that no one realizes.”
Contingency plans abound in order to keep the labs illuminated. Cooper has four NIH proposals in Limbo, and recently helped one of her postdoctoral scholars apply for scholarships in Europe to continue her research. Blekhman is thinking about how many students he can reasonably support in the future and should cut his lab.
Even in the uncertainty, many students remain firmly committed to pursuing a career in science. Robert Schwartz, a university and graduate thesis consultant, said some of the students he worked with have spent several years in European labs, hoping that more U.S. funds will be available in the future. As Fadul figures out which schools to apply, her list of federally funded MD-PHD programs has been shortened, while the list of MD programs (not directly relying on federal funds) has been longer. But the uncertainty is “not stopping me, and I don’t think it won’t stop my peers,” she said.
Meanwhile, Cooper, Blackman and others are focused on ways to better support and educate trainees, not just how federal funding works, but also on how to keep moving forward. “We just want people in the lab to do their own science without surviving,” Cooper said.
