Scientific Research is Getting Cut—and That Should Scare All Americans

If you are a parent of a child with muscular dystrophy, you will want to know what’s happening in Clarissa Henry’s University of Maine research laboratory. 

If you are a person with corneal dystrophy, take hope — a pathway to treatment is developing in Mark Parker’s University of Buffalo lab. 

Sudden cardiac arrest? Self-driving cars? These are among the health and safety issues that NEA Higher Ed members are investigating—and improving—in their university-based laboratories, thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies.

American scientists are awesome. They’re also under attack by the Trump administration. 

“They are undercutting an amazing American tradition of scholarship, of research, of scientific progress that benefits all of us. They want to take that down,” said Fred Kowal, president of the United University Professions, the union of faculty and professional staff in the State University of New York (SUNY) system.

“What is being done is direct harm to research that is already extending and saving lives. It’s research on everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer to diabetes, and it’s going away,” says Kowal. 

“People will die.” 

On February 15, President Trump signed an executive order, cutting funds from the NIH to universities. Within SUNY alone, the cuts mean a loss of $79 million in current grants, including $21 million by June 30. And the same is true at universities across the nation: At Florida State University (FSU), 11 research projects already have been halted. Additionally, NIH stopped reviewing thousands of new grant applications last month. 

People have experimental medical devices in their bodies that need to be removed—but they’ve been cut off from the researchers monitoring them, The New York Times reported last month. 

Jobs are also being lost. This week, about 20 employees at the University of Maine learned the Trump administration has cut federal funding to Maine Sea Grant, a major fisheries organization supporting Maine’s lobstermen, oyster and scallop farmers, salmon industry and other fishers that has relied on federal funding since 1971. Based at the flagship UMaine campus in Orono, Maine Sea Grant had a four-year agreement with the federal government, which went into effect on Feb. 1, 2024, and would have awarded about $4.5 million through Jan. 31, 2028. 

“We have no doubt that this is because our governor stood up to Trump,” says Neil Greenberg, president of the Universities of Maine Professional Staff Association, the NEA-affiliated union representing those 20 people. 

What Happens in the Henry Lab? 

Forty or so years ago, scientists at the University of Utah found an alternative to mice in their laboratories. Meet the zebrafish.

“Fish are a fantastic model!” says Clarissa Henry, University of Maine professor and lab director. Cheaper and faster to grow than mice, most fish also are externally fertilized, which means fertilization happens outside their bodies, in eggs released by female fish into water. Scientists can more easily see as little fish develop, which means they also “can watch disease happen,” says Henry.  

For the past 30 years, Henry and her dedicated teams of students—currently she has four Ph.D. students and 12 undergraduate students—have used the zebrafish to study skeletal muscular development. 

Fun fact: Your grip strength is a better predicator of how long you’ll live, and whether you’ll die of a heart attack or stroke, than any blood test. Muscle strength really matters to human beings. 

In the Henry Lab, which has been funded by NIH since 2004, Henry’s team uses zebrafish and a process called neuromuscular electrical stimulation to understand muscle development, regeneration and degeneration. Their focus is cell-matrix interactions, and how signals between fishes’ muscle cells affect their skeletal muscle development. The goal? “To rigorously investigate what kinds of activities promote muscle health,” Henry explains. 

The implications for humans, especially those with muscular dystrophy (MD), are huge. For years, doctors have told people with MD to avoid exercise. (The opposite of what they tell everyone else!) The cells that should replenish muscle don’t work well for them. So, a hike in the woods, a quick bicycle ride to the store? No. Too risky. But what if that’s not the whole story? 

“We’re challenging the paradigm, and we have a found a mode that improves muscle structure and life span,” says Henry. The next step?  “Partnering with humans and taking it to the next level,” she says.

Unfortunately, Henry’s current NIH funding runs out in June. “I know I’m not the only person in this situation,” she says. “I’ve talked to four other muscle biologists just this week and they’re all shutting down their labs.”

This Research Matters to You and Your Family

Many scientists admit they don’t do a very effective job of communicating what happens in their on-campus laboratories. As a result, Americans may be unaware of the importance of their investigations.

“We, as scientists, as faculty, as professors, need to make it clear to everybody that what we’re doing is important and why it’s important and how it actually impacts people’s lives,” says Eric Shattuck, an FSU biological anthropologist who depends on NIH funds to study how sickness affects physician’s decision-making skills. “Everybody has been sick; everybody understands the implications!”

At the University of Buffalo, Parker’s research focus—which is largely funded by the National Eye Institute, a branch of the federal government’s National Institutes of Health— is a protein known as SCL4A11. This little protein is embedded in a gene first identified about 20 years ago during the Human Genome Project (which, by the way, was funded by the U.S. government!)

Turns out, SCL4A11 is responsible for a corneal disease that causes vision loss in hundreds of thousands of people. The current treatment is corneal transplant: expensive, risky, and requires donors, notes Parker. 

“What we’re hoping to do, with a better understanding of the disease, is learn how to intervene before the cornea becomes diseased, to get in there and stop it from happening,” he says. An ideal therapy would “be small molecules, applied via eye drops. The cornea is very susceptible to drug delivery.” 

Meanwhile, Parker’s colleague, physiologist Brian Weil, studies heart failure. Until about 10 or 20 years ago, cardiologists generally believed hearts failed when they stopped beating. In other words, the pump was the problem. Now, scientists understand that there are two kinds of heart failure; the second involves the stiffening of heart muscles. “In this newer identified form, the heart pumps normally, but doesn’t fill as effectively with blood in between heartbeats. Generally, that’s because of a stiffening of the heart muscle,” explains Weil.

Using experimental models—and funding from NIH and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—Weil and his team of Ph.D. students are figuring out how that stiffening develops and how it can be treated. “This form of heart disease is as deadly as the other form, but unlike the other form, it doesn’t have any effective treatments,” he adds.

Weil and his team also are tackling the issue of sudden cardiac arrest, which affects 600,000 people in the U.S. alone, each year. “It’s devastating. And if we can make even a little bit of impact, it’ll really go a long way toward helping people have extra years with their loved ones,” he says.

Private Corporations Aren’t Doing This Work

The experimentation that happens on university campuses is very different than what might happen in labs run by Big Pharma or Big Tech or any other big corporation where the bottom line is profitability.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst), computer scientist Scott Niekum is the director of the Safe, Confident, and Aligned Learning + Robotics Lab. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, is funded by the federal government through the National Science Foundation and is all about safety.

“When I was a graduate student, AI was kind of a backwater that nobody took seriously. Because nothing really worked yet!” Niekum recalls. Today, it does—but he’s one of the only American scientists figuring out its reliability and safety. 

“This isn’t just self-driving cars, but a wide range of products—everything from robots to large-language models to the use of AI face-recognition to make criminal arrests. Whatever you think about these applications, at the very least, we want these technologies to do their job and not make egregious errors that affect people’s lives.”

Yes, there’s a ton of money in AI right now. “But there’s not much money in AI safety,” Niekum notes. “The money is going toward new capabilities, toward big and exciting things. Making it safe is not exciting. There’s probably one researcher working on safety for every 100 working on new capabilities, and that one [safety researcher] typically relies on federal funding… 90-plus percent of my funding is federal.”

Long-Term Investments in Science and Discovery

Corporations also don’t care about basic science, also known as fundamental or bench science. “Basic STEM work in biology, physics, biochemistry is upstream of so many other innovations: space exploration, drug discovery!” Shattuck notes. But, he notes, it can take decades for that basic research to lead to profits.

In Josh Kelley’s University of Maine lab, his team studies the basic science of cell signaling—how cells detect information outside themselves and turn that info into an outcome inside the cell. This is basic science. Specifically, Kelley studies “G Protein-Coupled Receptors,” or GPCRs. “They’re so central to how we function as organisms that 35 percent of all FDA-approved drugs target GPCRs,” he says.

But the idea that Kelley will have a new drug next year is laughable. His goal is to understand GPCRs’ signaling pathways, using baker’s yeast—yes, the same yeast involved in your cinnamon raisin toast. Eventually, that understanding will help him to ask more and more targeted questions about neuron development. 

Twenty years ago, when Kelley was getting his Ph.D., he studied nuclear transport—how molecules move in and out of a cell nucleus. “When I started grad school, there were no diseases involving nuclear transport defects, and I would constantly get asked, ‘why are you studying this?’ And I was like ‘it’s a basic process, it’s bound to matter,’” he recalls.

He was right. It did. Today we know nuclear transport is involved in many diseases, including premature aging, Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, and ALS. “Now we can look back and tell you exactly how it matters!”

“With basic science, you’re really making long-term investments because you don’t know which thing is going to change the world and make people better,” says Kelley. “And drug companies aren’t doing this because they can’t afford to spend 20 years on it.” 

The bottom line, as Weil notes, is that “a lot of innovation isn’t very profitable at first,” notes Weil. If the federal government doesn’t fund the professors doing this work, it doesn’t happen.

This is Not a Temporary Setback

Today’s research is in danger. Tomorrow’s research is also in danger. Already, major U.S. universities have announced they’re not taking on new graduate students; they can’t commit to supporting them. 

Many NEA Higher Ed members who are graduate assistants will lose their current jobs—and future degrees—when federal funding to their labs ends. This will be devastating to them. “It’s not like you just move on. If you have to leave a Ph.D. program before you get your Ph.D., you lose years of your life,” says Kelley. 

It’s also a huge blow to the future of American science. “Right now, we have three Ph.D. students," says Weil. "The idea is all of them will take all the knowledge and expertise we have, set up their own labs, and then multiply the impact by making their own discoveries."

Says Kowal: "American scientists have always given us a better chance at a long and healthy life. They've given us hope. What this administration is doing is extinguishing hope."