National opinion: The folly of cutting research funding from universities

Like many alumni, I look back fondly on my memories from my years at the University of Arizona, but I rarely think about football tailgates or homecoming parades. Instead, I think about hours spent in the research laboratory. The University brings more to our community than sports or even undergraduate education; it also receives hundreds of federal grants to conduct research, including, in 2023, $197.8 million in federal grants from the National Institute for Health and $45 million from the National Science Foundation. From lifesaving biomedical studies at the medical college to environmental experiments in the Biosphere, the research at the University of Arizona benefits not just our local community, but the world. And for myself, having the opportunity to work in laboratories and clinical settings as an undergraduate was a huge source of inspiration, leading me to pursue my PhD.

But the validity of this research has recently been called into question by the federal government. As budget cuts follow countless departments, the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health have been forced to halt grant funding for ongoing scientific studies and to severely limit the opportunities available for new work. Training grants for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers have been dinged, too.

The vast majority of scientists in this country rely on federal grants to complete their research. For even the simplest studies, recruiting and collecting data from participants can cost thousands of dollars — at the very least to keep the lights on in research buildings and pay staff. For medical studies that require the use of specialized equipment or long-term follow-ups, the budget for a single study can easily reach into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Researchers, from PhD students to staff coordinators to faculty members at universities, work long hours to write grant applications, design and run experiments, train new scientists, publish papers on our findings, and disseminate our conclusions to the community. Although working in academia can seem like a glamorous job, most of us are overworked and underpaid. Yet, despite the chance of earning a higher salary working in nearly any other job, we stay. We love the research we do, the chance to answer big questions about our world, and the opportunity to help people by doing so.

Already, only four months into federal cuts, scientific and medical progress has halted and stuttered, leaving critical gaps. In addition, although this atmosphere of funding fear has seeped into every scientific discipline, particularly affected are those scientists who research concepts related to gender or race. This includes studies of maternal and prenatal health, differences in health outcomes between races, work on menstrual and hormonal cycles, and certainly any research on discrimination, racism, or immigration. Without these crucial experiments, our picture of the world is skewed, making it difficult to produce the medical advances or changes in social policy that can improve health outcomes and quality of life for everyone in our community — marginalized or not.

For thousands of scientists like me, these past few months have been devastating. Grant proposals — some of them years in the making — have been abruptly shut down. Experiments are paused mid-stream. Promising careers are stalling before they begin. We’re watching not only our own work unravel, but the entire scaffolding of scientific progress destabilize in real time.

But when scientific research is defunded, it’s not just researchers who suffer — it’s patients awaiting new treatments, families exposed to environmental hazards, and communities whose voices and vulnerabilities are erased when studies on equity are dismissed as unnecessary. What we are losing is not only data, but possibility: the possibility of safer medicine, cleaner water, smarter policy, and a more just world.

Publicly funded science has always been about serving people. Now, we need the people to fight for it. If we want a future where our health, environment, and knowledge are protected, we must demand that our elected officials treat science not as expendable, but as essential.