Trump administration funding cuts threaten young scientists

Now, amid massive cuts to scientific research, Padrusch feels their dreams slipping away. On May 2, their 26th birthday, a lab supervisor gently pulled Padrusch aside and suggested they look for other jobs because of the precarious path ahead for scientific research.

The Mount Holyoke engineering grad is seriously considering a dramatic career switch — a welder or electrician, anything with more security. “A part of me would die,” Padrusch said, “and always be haunted by all that I’ve lost.”

Across New England and the country, thousands of budding scientists have awoken to a stark new reality, one they never could have imagined just six months ago. Funding for laboratories that focus on everything from the genetic causes of aging to cancer is drying up. Jobs in biomedicine are vanishing. Medical schools are rescinding offers of admission and once-thriving scientific internship programs are shutting down for lack of money.

In university hallways, cafes, and cafeterias, from Cambridge to Providence, students are commiserating and strategizing over their increasingly precarious futures. The Boston Globe interviewed more than two dozen young scientists since March who say they are weighing whether to leave the United States for jobs abroad — or abandon scientific research entirely — because of the Trump administration’s widening assault on the nation’s public health and biomedical research institutions.

“We are about to witness a massive brain drain,” said André Isaacs, a professor in the chemistry department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. “Young people will simply not go into the sciences if this continues.”

The main driver are drastic cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s premier biomedical agency and the lifeblood of scientific research. In its first four months in office, the Trump administration has slashed hundreds of grants for training and other initiatives that support students just starting to pursue careers in biomedical research. The NIH also has dramatically scaled back new grant awards — effectively locking many young researchers out of the scientific profession.

The cumulative impact of the grant cuts are staggering.

The number of new NIH grant awards for early career researchers has, since the start of the year, plummeted by 43 percent, to 1,556 from an average of 2,709 over the same period in the previous nine years, according to an analysis performed for the Globe by STAT, the Globe‘s sister publication. All told, early career researchers have received $177 million less in grant funding so far this year than they did over the same months in the previous nine-year period, the analysis found.

And that’s just new grants. The Trump administration also has terminated 565 previously awarded, early-career grants that, combined, are worth some $630 million, according to a separate analysis done for the Globe by Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross of rOpenSci, a statistical analysis firm for the sciences. Those grant terminations have the potential to eviscerate studies on cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, they found.

“This feels like a betrayal, that we‘re gutting the core of what makes America great,” Delaney said.

While early-career grants are typically smaller than those to established academics, their cancellations can be a career killer.

That’s because many universities and research institutions require a track record of success in earning federal funding as a condition of employment. What’s more, many young scientists do not earn a salary, so rely on those early-career grants for income; their stipends pay for everything from groceries to rent. And once an NIH grant is cut, students often have nowhere else to turn, because they lack the skills or academic track records to compete for grants from private foundations, according to academic researchers.

Beyond the grant cuts, more universities are suspending admissions to graduate programs, freezing hiring, and rescinding job offers. In New England, at least a dozen major schools and universities — including MIT, Harvard, and Dartmouth — are cutting back graduate admissions and PhD slots. All have cited uncertainty about their financial futures due to billions of dollars in funding cuts.

“The doors are rapidly closing, and no one knows if they will ever open again,” said Alexandria Barlowe, a first-year doctoral student at Boston University who is studying neurological disorders.

Courtney Baird, a doctoral student at Brown University, does not know where she will be living in a week. Her well-laid plans for the future were crushed in April when the Trump administration announced it froze $1 billion in research funding to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. The Cornell laboratory that had promised her a job studying health policy and aging — “my absolute dream job,” she said — called her in early May to say her hiring would be postponed indefinitely.

Now Baird is running out of time and money.

Funding for her doctoral position at Brown runs out at the end of this month, as does the lease on her apartment. She is scouring for health consulting jobs or positions at universities that haven’t been hit with funding cuts, while also preparing to defend her PhD dissertation next month. As for housing, Baird says she and her partner are looking into affordable Airbnbs for the short term; but if she doesn’t find a job, they may be forced to move into her parents’ home in Philadelphia.

At the same time, Baird has not ruled out the possibility of leaving the country for Europe — where countries have been dangling offers of financial aid to lure talented and disaffected scientists from the United States.

“The most stressful part is having to potentially make life-altering decisions in the matter of weeks,” Baird said. “I love my parents, but I didn’t go to school for 20 years to end up living with them.”

For Claire Thibodeau, a junior chemistry major at Holy Cross, the choice this year was stark: Either pursue a scientific internship overseas or spend another summer stocking shelves at the L.L. Bean store back home in Lebanon, N.H. — the job she had last summer. Several of the US schools that she applied to, including the University of Michigan and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, abruptly canceled their internship programs due to funding constraints.

So one day after taking her final exam, Thibodeau boarded a plane for France, where she landed a spot at an institute near Paris that conducts environmental research. “I’m really excited about going to another country, but it’s not what I had in mind,” she said. “It’s important to build connections and that’s hard to do overseas.”

At Harvard University, the focal point of the Trump administration’s sustained assault on higher education, anxiety over funding cuts is so pervasive that students are organizing impromptu meetups at parks and along the Charles River to decompress.

Yet the topic of their shrinking career options is unavoidable.

“Every lunch, water break, coffee hour, walk home, five minutes between experiments … has become about the cuts to research funding and what is each person’s backup plans,” said Adam Sychla, a Harvard Medical School postdoctoral research fellow working on a team developing programmable treatments for everything from cancer to the common cold. “We‘re just pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and pivoting.”

Colleen Reynolds, a postdoc at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been tracking alerts for research positions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands since the Trump administration slashed millions of dollars in federal funding from her institute, where she studies reproductive health. “Many of us are going through a lot of grief, just grappling with how rapidly this has all changed,” she said.

On a sunny afternoon recently, four twentysomething scientists eased into their familiar seats at the bustling second-floor cafeteria in the New Research Building on Harvard Medical School’s sprawling campus on Longwood Avenue in Boston. Aside from being laboratory partners, they are members of the Viromics Journal Club, a tightknit circle that discusses provocative new scientific articles on the study of viruses. Their lunchtime discussions veer from promising treatments for HIV to how the warming climate is accelerating the spread of mosquito-borne viruses.

The young scientists are keenly aware of Harvard Medical School’s storied history of scientific discovery. They work near the former faculty office of Nobel Prize-winning scientist John Enders, whose trailblazing research in the 1950s and ’60s led to the development of vaccines for polio and the measles — sparing millions from misery. Also nearby, scientists made some of the most pivotal discoveries in the fight against AIDS, turning it from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition.

Between bites of homemade sandwiches and salads, talk quickly turned to the Trump administration’s assault on science — and career options abroad. One researchers mentioned seeing a posting on Instagram extolling laboratory jobs in Australia. “Melbourne is a pretty cool place!” proclaimed one researcher, who asked not to be identified because he is on a visa and fears being targeted. Another said he was exploring options in Brazil.

At one point, Sychla, a member of the group, asked if anyone had heard any positive news on the scientific funding front. For a long minute, the four scientists just stared at each other in silence.

Alexandra Stanton, a member of the journal group and a virologist at Harvard Medical School, recalled the moment she decided to commit her life to researching viruses. As an undergraduate, she joined a class trip to South Africa to learn about the spread of HIV. While in a crowded hospital, she spotted an emaciated patient with HIV dying alone in a hallway — with no one there to help him.

“I think most of us got into studying viruses because we wanted to alleviate human suffering,” Stanton said. “Now it feels like we are all living at the whim of the Trump administration.”

In Worcester, Padrusch is trying to keep her childhood dream of becoming a scientist alive. On a recent morning, shafts of light poured through the lab’s tall windows and reflected off vials as they gazed through a microscope at thousands of tiny worms fed with bacteria. Padrusch doesn’t expect to discover a major medical cure, but understanding how genes react to bacteria can help other scientists make breakthrough discoveries.

“Sometimes it feels like a thousand bright flames are getting extinguished, one by one,” Padrusch said of the cuts to research grants. “But this is our lives, you know? Most of us are going to keep pushing on until we‘re told we can’t.”

Chris Serres can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @ChrisSerres.