Since 2020, Nobel Prize winner Carol Greider has worked as a UCSC professor researching telomeres, snippets of DNA code that influence aging and cancer. Within a year, she might have to shutter her lab, she said.

“I’m in a little bit of a more privileged position,” she said — others have six months or less before they could run out of money. 

Friday, Greider and more than 200 UCSC faculty, students and supporters circled next to the Science and Engineering Library as thousands across the country joined a “Stand Up for Science” day of protest. Though the public support was encouraging, her fears remain.

“The situation is very dire,” she said. “It’s as dire as it could be.” 

De facto freeze 

Although the university pays professors’ salaries, most of its biomedicine and technology research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The grants typically last two to five years, and pay for research supplies and wages for hundreds of UCSC graduate students and staff researchers.

Soon after the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January, the administration announced wide-ranging freezes to congressionally-approved funding. Two federal judges have since ordered temporary holds on those freezes.

But money for new biomedical research remains held up by directives to the NIH that effectively halted meetings to consider new grants. In late February, the agency announced that some meetings would resume — but later stages of grant review are still on hold.

“There’s so much uncertainty about when will this end? Will it go back to normal? What will the new normal be?” said Karen Ottemann, chair of the UCSC microbiology and environmental toxicology department.

Some grants that consider LGBTQ+ health or diversity initiatives have been terminated altogether. One of Ottemann’s colleagues at another university had a grant to research Alzheimer’s in transgender people rescinded, she said.

UCSC’s biomedical labs are set to admit fewer graduate students than planned, Ottemann said. Within months, some may have to lay off grant-funded research staff, she said. 

Across the university, about 1,000 employees are supported by federal grants, said UCSC Assistant Vice Chancellor Scott Hernandez-Jason.

If grants run short, graduate students that have been paid for research might need to seek university-funded teaching assistant positions — but it’s uncertain if there would be enough for everyone. Hernandez-Jason did not respond to questions about whether the university could pay graduate students as teaching assistants if they lose grant funding. 

“We are focused on encouraging agencies to return to grant review and we’re not going to engage in what-if scenarios,” he said.

First-year doctoral student Erin Jeffs is searching for a research lab to join, and hoping to find one with enough money to fund her. “It’s a really hard and difficult time to be an early-career scientist right now,” she said.

Greider said she worries that if lab funding dried up, some students may not be able to complete their programs. Professors could have to stop research altogether. “I think that we are at the precipice where a number of faculty are going to be in that position,” she said.

Greider and other faculty said they also worried that janitors, accountants and other support staff could be laid off. On Feb. 7, the agency announced heavy cuts to overhead rates, which pay for university facilities and administration. A U.S. District Court judge has paused the cut while the court considers its fate. 

Meredith McPherson, a Santa Cruz-based U.S. Geological Survey physical scientist at right, was researching reefs and coral decline when she was fired in February as part of recent federal layoffs. She stands with her family at a March 7 Stand Up for Science rally at the UC Santa Cruz Coastal Science Campus. (Mark DeGraff — Santa Cruz Local)

Stymied research

UCSC scientists have pioneered discoveries in cellular biology, DNA sequencing and cancer that have paved the way for new tests and treatments. Decades of UCSC research on the cellular molecule RNA “laid the foundation for the COVID vaccine,” said molecular biology professor Needhi Bhalla.

Stalled research wouldn’t just delay the university’s discoveries. In time, it could also suffocate the biotech industry, a major economic engine for the state and an important high-wage sector in Santa Cruz County. 

Some biotech companies receive federal grants, but even those who don’t receive federal dollars rely on federally-funded research to spur their advances.

University research is “taken and adapted by biotech and pharmaceutical companies to become the treatments,” said Ottemann. “Everything starts in an academic lab.”

Several UCSC-educated scientists have started their own biotech companies in Santa Cruz. 

The university “has been the catalyst of the entire biotech scene in Santa Cruz,” said UCSC graduate Charles Vaske. “Without university research, none of this would ever happen.” 

In 2011, Vaske used his doctoral research to co-found a startup that studied DNA in cancer cells. Now a consultant, Vaske said many biotech industry leaders haven’t spoken up about the cuts for fear of retaliation from federal regulators. 

“When you have a drug that you know might save thousands of people’s lives and bring in billions of dollars for the company, you don’t do anything that might risk that,” he said. “In a time when people are getting petty revenge for the most minor of comments, people are very quiet.” 

UCSC professor Ed Green has founded three biotech companies, and helms a UC initiative to help others do the same. In the short term, the uncertainty in academia could push more people into industry, Green said. But he said he’s “not going to freak out” about possible long term changes to federal science funding.

“I don’t know what it’s going to look like on Monday, much less next year, or in five years,” he said. 

The main entrance to UC Santa Cruz. (Nik Altenberg — Santa Cruz Local file)

Student impacts

Many NIH grants could eventually come through if federal regulators pick up the pace of review. But some programs to diversify scientific research have been shuttered altogether.

Fabiola Avalos-Villatoro is a UCSC graduate student whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Central America in the 1990s. She’s a participant in the university’s federally-funded Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, which provides mentorship, tuition and a salary to underrepresented biomedical grad students. 

With Bhalla, the microbiologist, Avalos-Villatoro researches sexual reproduction and fetal development — work that could shed light on the causes of miscarriage, cancer and Down syndrome. 

The opportunity has now vanished for future students. “It sends this chilling message about whose lives are valued,” said Bhalla. “If we’re not supposed to be specifically recruiting from every walk of life to become scientists, what does that mean about who science is meant to serve?”

And another diversity-based grant Avolos-Villatoro spent a month honing an application for no longer exists. The experience has “been horrible for me,” she said. “I want to stay in research, either academia or government research, but now it’s like, is it going to exist when I graduate?”

Have you been affected by federal policy changes? Let us know. Email [email protected] or [email protected].

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