Don’t end student aid to punish universities

At Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, the Hammer Building has twenty stories of laboratories, lecture halls, classrooms, and a library. By day it is bustling but even at 2 a.m. lights are on in some of the labs. That means a Ph.D student or a post-doctoral fellow, say in immunology or embryology, is working. Our student may be watching embryonic cardiac muscle cells bound to a plastic petri dish. Under her microscope, they beat. After a day of classes teaching a histology lab for medical students, and preparing her cells she is tired, but the sight of individual heart cells beating in unison is mesmerizing. How do they do that?

Across the street, surgeons, cardiologists, and anesthesiologists in the Milstein Hospital are transplanting a heart — such operations don’t wait for morning. The patient’s distended heart has been removed and a machine pumps oxygenated blood to his lungs and body. Soon the vessels of the new heart have been sutured to the patient’s vessels, and the transplanted heart starts to beat. These physicians and nurses form one of the great cardiology departments in the world.

If the Trump administration rips vetted research projects from researchers in at least 60 universities from Arizona State to Vanderbilt, they will be punishing the wrong people.

The graduate student’s experiments are basic research — not directed to curing a disease, but to understanding a process. She and her thesis advisor had an idea about how rhythmic beats were established — they did experiments asking whether their idea was feasible and wrote a grant application to the NIH, which has a program for early exciting results. Months later an NIH study section, a jury of 15 of her older peers, was convinced. The funds would be forwarded to the university, and our young researcher will have a fellowship for three years and money for supplies; she can concentrate on the fundamental properties of heart cells. One day she will meet the cardiologists and surgeons at a seminar; they will talk and ask her to come to their group meeting to think about how her ideas can push clinical improvements.

I have a friend at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago who is the Chair of its program in cancer research. He sent me the statistics on improvements in breast cancer treatments, including a branch running clinical trials. These trials are about to be curtailed.

Twenty years ago, the idea was that aggressive treatment — more chemo, more radiation, and surgery — would produce longer survival. That was often an illusion. Now, because of detailed knowledge about how cell division is controlled, the discovery of oncogenes fifty years ago, and advances in genomics and chemistry, the survival times of women with advanced breast cancer are much better. Pharmaceutical companies large and small are vital to this effort but basic research and training researchers and physicians is the function of universities.

The idea that basic research gives rise to clinical progress has had many prophets and apostles, among them Louis Pasteur in the 19th century and Vanevar Bush in the 20th. Bush wrote a classical book called The Endless Frontier about basic science as a precursor to medical or other progress. He was President Roosevelt’s Chief Science advisor and was asking about how the basic science investments of World War II — penicillin, radar, and computers — could be channeled to solve civilian problems. He and Roosevelt opened a new path for research. In many branches of science and medicine and agriculture investigator-initiated research provides the footing for practical advances.

Graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty drive this progress in basic science and engineering departments. I was their Associate Dean at Columbia. They are some of the most energetic and directed people I have met. Many have wanted to do research since high school, and they will spend four of five years getting a PhD or a little less for a Master’s. They will go on to run their own labs, work in industry, create start-ups, and work in public health.

If the Trump administration rips vetted research projects from researchers in at least 60 universities from Arizona State to Vanderbilt, on the grounds that the university administration failed to address antisemitism adequately, they will be punishing the wrong people. There are other ways to deal with that problem, which I do not deny. These kids want to work on serious problems and there is no reason to destroy their dreams.

The grant application structure has been in place since the 1950s. It is very expensive but it works because it mobilizes individual imagination. If it is hijacked, research will stop, the number of graduate and master’s students will decrease, research will stop clinical trials will be cancelled—an age of scientific optimism and progress will be wasted. Cancer, bird flu, Ebola, measles, TB and many other catastrophes will continue when they could have been stopped.

Editor’s Note: On Friday, March 21, Columbia conceded to Trump administration demands, though it remained unclear whether the concessions would be enough to reclaim federal monies.

Richard Kessin is Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He was Associate Dean of the PhD programs hosting 450 students.