Kat Truelson

Looks like NIH grant review panels have been suspended temporarily. Because it takes time to coordinate and schedule a multi-layered grant panel review from experts across the country, what seems like a short delay in review of funding applications could be the difference between survival and shuttering for many valuable research efforts. I started my academic research lab a year before the erratic first Trump presidency and vividly remember the uncertainty of those times. The folks starting their labs now during second term are facing similar challenges. The situation is even more precarious for more established labs that don’t have stable university startup funds remaining and require external funding to continue to pay students, postdocs, & research staff to stay open. This situation highlights that diversification of funding sources for science is good, including for the basic science that sparks so much innovation. This could mean broadening research efforts in other sectors (private for-profit or non-profit R&D). The NIH may be the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world but over-dependence on a single sector so sensitive to political winds is bad. We need nuance and creativity in how to generate value that ensures science-driven progress. Many of us in the private sector are thinking about how to grow the pie and sustain research efforts. Our scientific ecosystem needs to be much more resilient. If you’re an academic researcher worried about your fate, there is a pretty big world out there and a lot of ways to contribute your scientific expertise to advance solutions for humanity. You can invent them too. And if you’re a private entity, you can start to decrease dependence on publicly funded academic research for upstream discovery by expanding impactful basic science activities strategically and sharing more of the outputs openly. Hope this message of agency resonates with those searching for solutions and a place for their energy.