From Slowdown to Shutdown
A senior researcher who can't get an
answer from a shutdown NIH about a proposed clinical trial on a
neurodegenerative disease, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who fears that a
generation of innovators will be lost, and a young investigator wearied at the
lab by endless funding cuts and frustrated at home by the halt to promising
research into a genetic disorder that affects her daughter -- these are the
leaders and members of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) who today
told a press conference at the National Press Club that the
"temporary" shutdown of the federal government is making an already
bad situation far worse for biomedical researchers and jeopardizing America's
long-term leadership in global bioscience.
ASCB Executive Director Stefano
Bertuzzi, PhD, told reporters that shutting down the driving engines of
American bioscientific research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and
the National Science Foundation (NSF), will have effects well beyond the days
or weeks the Capitol Hill standoff lasts.
Dr. Bertuzzi said, "Americans
will pay dearly for these slowdowns, sequestrations, and shutdowns in finding
cures and on maintaining economic competitiveness."
Dr. Bertuzzi added, "Today I am
wondering what U.S. science will look like in a week, a month, five years from
now."
ASCB President Don W. Cleveland,
PhD, from the Ludwig Cancer Institute at the University of California, San
Diego, said that the NIH shutdown has put researchers like himself, who rely on
NIH guidance and support, 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," said Dr. Cleveland.
Ironically, last month was a great
one in his lab, Dr. Cleveland told reporters. "We identified a way to
introduce gene silencing therapy to silence a gene in neurodegenerative
disease." His lab has a collaborator lined up to start a clinical trial.
"We wrote the grant application and now nothing is happening. We need public
support."
Carol Greider, PhD, ASCB member,
winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, and Daniel Nathans Professor and
Director of Molecular Biology & Genetics, John Hopkins University, said
that the shut down and cutbacks are especially cruel on the young scientists
training in her lab.
"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."
Dr. Greider said that when she was
doing the research on telomeres, the repetitive nucleotide sequences that mark
the end of chromosomes, that won her the Nobel Prize, the NIH
"success" rate on grants was 30%. "Now it's 15%. Breakthroughs usually
come through the youngest generation," said Dr. Greider. "A
generation of innovators might be lost. We can surely do better. We must."
"I represent the younger
generation of scientists," said Rebecca Burdine, PhD, ASCB member,
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, and
mother of a child affected by Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder that recent
NIH-funded research has linked to a mistake in genomic imprinting.
"My generation has been feeling
the strain of the NIH budget for over a decade. You're fighting for a pool of
money with people who are just as brilliant, just as ambitious, and have just
as good ideas," she said. "This prevents really good science from
being done. I've seen many of my peers spiraling down the drain. They are
slowly shutting down their labs and leaving science."
Beyond the impact on her own career,
Dr. Burdine said that the slowdown and now the shutdown are hurting her child.
"My daughter has Angelman's syndrome," she explained. Because NIH-funded
research identified the cause of Angelman's as a mistake in genomic imprinting,
new therapies are possible.
"This is a disease that we
could treat and potentially cure," said Dr. Burdine. "The only thing
keeping my daughter from living a seizure-free life is money. It's like the
government threw a concrete brick at a group of people already treading water.
My daughter is one of the ones affected by this."
The current shutdown, said Dr.
Bertuzzi, only adds insult to injury, putting the future of America's long-term
leadership in bioscience in doubt. The shutdown comes on the heels of a nine
stagnant years of virtually flat NIH and NSF budgets, falling purchasing power
for America's biomedical research labs, and unprecedented low
"success" rates for grant applications.
The sequester forced a flat 5.1%
across-the-board cut on NIH spending and set off what Bertuzzi described as
"near panic" among America's young bioscientists, the graduate
students and postdoctoral research fellows, who increasingly fear that basic
biology research is not an attractive career path in this country.
ASCB Director of Public Policy Kevin
Wilson outlined a growing list of impacts from the NIH and NSF shutdowns.
"We are here today because the shutdown of the federal government is dragging
on in the second week," Wilson said. The damage is already clear at the
NIH where outside researchers can no longer submit grants and peer review of
proposals is at a stop.
The situation is similar at the NSF,
Wilson said, where no new funding initiatives or grants will be issued, the NSF
peer review process is halted, reviews of existing grant applications can't be
submitted and there will be no payments made during the closure, including
no-cost extensions, funding transfers, or supplemental funds.
The haste and waste of the federal
shutdown, said Wilson, could be seen on the first day of the NIH shutdown. NIH
scientists were given four hours to mothball their labs before being sent home.
"Critical research at the NIH has been put on ice, sometimes
literally," said Wilson.
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American
Society for Cell Biology (2013, October 8). From slowdown to shutdown: US
leadership in biomedical research takes a blow, experts say.ScienceDaily.
Retrieved October 9, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131008152220.htm