Scientists Say Shutdown is 'Jeopardizing' America's Role in Bioscience

A group representing the American Society for Cell Biology has said the shutdown of the US federal government is worsening conditions for biomedical researchers who rely on government institutions and funding, as well as "jeopardizing" America's role in the world of biosciences.

Stefano Bertuzz, the executive director of the ASCB, said effectively shutting down the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) will have effects that will outlast the weeks of government shutdown.

"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. Americans will pay dearly for these slowdowns, sequestrations, and shutdowns in finding cures and on maintaining economic competitiveness," Bertuzzi said in a statement, adding, "Today I am wondering what U.S. science will look like in a week, a month, five years from now."

Researchers who rely on the NIH for support and guidance have been placed in shaky financial positions, said Don Cleveland, president of the ASCB.

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," Cleveland said.

Cleveland added that grant applications at the Ludwig Cancer Institute at the University of California, San Diego, where he practices, have been stalled, which he said was especially frustrating because of great strides made recently.

"We identified a way to introduce gene silencing therapy to silence a gene in neurodegenerative disease." Cleveland's lab is ready to begin clinical trials of the therapy, but movement is frozen. "We wrote the grant application and now nothing is happening," he said.

Carol Greider, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, said the lack of federal funding is hurting young scientists, which she said is troubling because so many major scientific breakthroughs are made by people just beginning their careers.

"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," she said, adding "A generation of innovators might be lost."