NIH Cuts Hit Young Scientists the Hardest

David Baker, professor of biochemistry, University of Washington; director, Institute for Protein Design

[Editor’s note: David Baker gave this speech to Seattle community leaders Mar. 10, at a celebration of his 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]

Let me just briefly tell you how innovation arises in biomedicine and where drug discoveries come from.

A large percentage of the innovation is made at universities by graduate students and postdocs. Often, they take their ideas and spin out biotech companies, and the biotech companies further develop these and the ideas eventually transition to pharmaceutical companies.

It might be surprising to many people that most of the innovation doesn’t happen in the big companies. It happens at universities. The universities also train the workforce for the biotech and the pharmaceutical companies.

So there’s this idea that cutting funding can maybe revitalize a company.

My main message tonight is that exactly the opposite is true for science. That’s because of the critical role that graduate students and postdocs play.

In face of uncertainty about funding, universities are cutting way back on graduate school admissions. For example, in my department, the acceptance rate, the number of students admitted has gone down by more than a factor of two. That’s true across the country.

It’s going to be much harder for students next year who want to pursue careers in science to become scientists. Next, because of the way in which program managers have been fired, there’s a lapse in renewing the flow of funding, so labs are stuck without funding, which makes it very, very hard for the graduates and postdocs in research labs.

Now, because of the uncertainty, universities are imposing hiring freezes. That’s happened in the University of Washington School of Medicine. It is a very reasonable response, because we don’t know where the money is coming from.

That means new postdocs can’t be hired. It’s also means individual labs don’t know if they’re going to have funding. And then finally, for postdocs transitioning to become faculty members, faculty job searches are being canceled across the country. Again because of this uncertainty.

The cumulative effect of this uncertainty is way out of proportion to the amount of funding saved. It doesn’t actually save that much money to have all this uncertainty. It just wreaks havoc on a system which then has to behave conservatively, because it can’t pay people if there isn’t money coming in.

There’s a final aspect to this, which is, many, many outstanding researchers come to the United States from foreign countries. With this uncertainty, the US is getting less attractive as a place to stay. So people are having to return to their home countries. So the US is losing out on all this talent.

I’m telling you this to give you a few more talking points with people that you’re speaking with. I think these things could really have a very long-term effect, a negative effect, not just in biomedicine, but across science overall.

The bottom line is that uncertainty is really bad for science. It hits people at the most delicate time in their career. It hits early on, like when undergraduate students want to become graduate students, or graduate students want to become postdocs or postdocs who want to become faculty members.

That’s the message to spread. Now we’ll move on to more positive things.

David Baker is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington and director of the Institute for Protein Design.