Shutdown and scientific researchASCB: U.S. scientific research will "pay dearly" for shutdown
The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) added its voice to those of other scientific and professional groups in warning that the federal government’s partial shutdown will hurt patients, researchers, and especially the U.S. research effort, long after an agreement to end the impasse is reached. “As America keeps hitting the brakes on scientific research, we are, in effect, accelerating the damage done to our continued leadership in global bioscience, in health outcomes and in the economic power that we have always derived from basic research,” Dr. Bertuzzi, executive director of the ASCB said. “Americans will pay dearly for these slowdowns, sequestrations, and shutdowns in finding cures and on maintaining economic competitiveness.”
Leaders of more and more scientific and professional groups are warning that the now week-long federal government’s partial shutdown will hurt patients, researchers, and especially the U.S. research effort long after an agreement to end the impasse is reached.
RedOrbit reports that the shutdown is taking its toll on many research projects, some of which have been going on for many years. Alarmed researchers have pointed out the possible loss of decades worth of research, as one small hiccup in the system may well compromise entire experiments.
Stefano Bertuzzi, Ph.D., executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and ASCB president Don W. Cleveland, Ph.D., of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of California, San Diego, joined with other ASCB leaders at a National Press Club discussion to highlight the shutdown’s pernicious effect on scientific research.
The ASCB leaders said the shutdown could jeopardize America’s lead in global medical research and bioscience. As federal funding for biology research was stopped, many labs have been forced abruptly to halt their projects. This has effectively destroyed the momentum these researchers have spent years building and could mean the end of their work in some cases, according to the ASCB.
“As America keeps hitting the brakes on scientific research, we are, in effect, accelerating the damage done to our continued leadership in global bioscience, in health outcomes and in the economic power that we have always derived from basic research,” Dr. Bertuzzi said.
Dr. Bertuzzi noted that many researchers and laboratories receive their funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These organizations are now closed, and so too is the research being done in the affected laboratories.
“Today I am wondering what U.S. science will look like in a week, a month, five years from now,” Dr. Bertuzzi said, adding: “Americans will pay dearly for these slowdowns, sequestrations, and shutdowns in finding cures and on maintaining economic competitiveness.”
Dr. Cleveland said that the NIH shutdown has put him and other researchers who rely on NIH funding into an untenable position: “We have some reserves and we are running on those reserves but (long term) we have nothing to keep the team together but public funding and philanthropic organizations.”
RedOrbit notes that several recent discoveries by ASCB members brought attention to the world-leading cell biology research done in the United States – but that the shutdown has cut off funding for the research work undergirding these discoveries.
Dr. Cleveland said his laboratory last month identified a method for silencing a gene in neurodegenerative disease, and lined up a research partner to launch a clinical trial. “We wrote the grant application and now nothing is happening,” he lamented. “We need public support.”
Nobel Prize winner and ASCB member Carol Greider, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, said the shutdown does only affect research being done today, but it also threatens research to be done in the future by younger generations.
“It’s often assumed that the dollars they’re talking about are for fancy equipment but the bulk of the funding in my lab goes to training the future scientific leaders. This training is truly in jeopardy with the decreased funding,” said Greider.
“The shutdown shows where the real deficit is: in the failure of elected officials to take action to fund American priorities,” Mary Woolley, president and CEO of the research funding advocacy group Research!America, said in a statement. “The deficit seems to be a deficit of common sense.”
She added:
Clearly, biomedical and health research — already compromised via sequestration — is not the only priority placed at risk by the impasse, but it is a critical one. From limiting access to clinical trials to undermining the ability to protect our food supply or investigate disease outbreaks, Americans are put at unnecessary risk when government employees are furloughed.
— Read more in John Fleischman, “From Slowdown to Shutdown – U.S. Leadership in Biomedical Research Takes a Blow, Says ASCB” (ASCB, 10 October 2013); and Michael Harper, “Top 5 Ways The Government Shutdown is Affecting Science,” RedOrbit (7 October 2013)
