How do you anticipate the field changing in the wake of recent funding cuts?

“I’m not out of money. But with an uncertain future, I’m not going to be hiring new people. That’s having a big impact. You can’t quantify it. I’m worried. As for the larger trends … I’m at a large public university, with lots of undergrads. There are concerns about changes in the funding situation in universities like ours. Especially if international students can’t get visas for undergraduate and master’s programs in the U.S., it will completely wreck training and pedagogy. In-state students, if they can’t get financial aid to attend even if they got in, that will impact our ability to educate them. These are longer-term [concerns] but very real.”
—Bing Wen Brunton, professor of biology, University of Washington

“[The field will] dwindle in the U.S., grow elsewhere.”
—Albert Cardona, professor of physiology, development and neuroscience, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge

“We’ve seen no ripples from the funding uncertainty yet. Several colleagues are looking to leave the U.S. or leave academia, but in those cases I don’t think it is purely with NIH. It is just the bit of a last drip that makes them choose it. It has not yet weighed that heavily. Everyone in the U.S. is looking carefully and wondering what will happen.”
—Martijn Cloos, associate professor of bioengineering, University of Queensland

“From an evolutionary point, this is a time of natural selection. The most resilient will continue to succeed, to do great science, reshaping the priorities of science. We can’t give opportunities to the less talented, so they must change their pathway. Part of science will suffer, with new priorities, but there will also be a mechanism where those who are able to do survive, to be creative intellectually, to reshape the science in a way that is aligned with the current climate.”
—Luana Colloca, professor of pain and translational symptom science, University of Maryland School of Nursing

“People are leaving and getting let go. Every institution is letting folks go. Grants are being terminated. Or they are just not hiring, because expected funding just didn’t come in. They are accepting fewer grad students and research personnel. The timing could be an intermediate, and maybe in a few years we’ll be fine. Maybe it will be restored to some level. Or it could be a complete decimation of science in this country. It’s hard to predict.”
—Elva Diaz, professor of pharmacology, University of California, Davis

“My worry is that fewer U.S.-born students will apply for graduate school, and that this will be compounded by fewer international applicants. This could be a major hit to the U.S. science labor force.”
—Thomas Fischer, associate professor of psychology, Wayne State University

“Well, there’s also a whole other set of issues around foreign students in the United States, which is another looming catastrophe, because I think if the current administration has its way, we might see a massive reduction in foreign students, and those are sometimes the best students. And it would just really damage our whole ecosystem in addition to, you know, putting aside even just the issues of money.”
—Samuel Gershman, professor of psychology, Harvard University

“Science looks like it’s going to hell. It’s what’s going to happen in the next few years. It’s unpredictable, but things look very bad. Since the ’70s, our universities and their scientific endeavor have grown on government investment in research. And if that’s gone, then a lot of people, I mean young scientists who have just begun their careers and have already invested 10 years of education, they’re going to have the rug pulled out from under them.”
—Rhanor Gillette, professor emeritus of molecular and integrative physiology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“As a director of graduate studies, I oversee recruitment of new and incoming graduate students, and the question that has consistently come up in the last recruitment cycle from almost everybody, and that I had not heard before in any previous year is, ‘Is neuroscience still a good career to go into?’ Should I do this? I like the idea of becoming a neuroscientist, but would it be smarter to look elsewhere and do something else?’ And so, I think that risk is, of course, enormous. Universities and labs can, to some extent, compensate for a shortfall in money. But losing talent, of course, in the next generation of scientists, that’s a damage that, if it occurs, cannot be easily reversed.”
—Jorg Grandl, associate professor of neurobiology, Duke University

“It will reduce the number joining and likely reduce the number that attain career success and tenure.”
—Charles Hoeffer, associate professor of integrative physiology, Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado Boulder

“I think the scale of my research will be dramatically reduced.”
—Nicholas Priebe, professor of neuroscience, University of Texas at Austin

“America has always led in science. Suddenly we have an artificially imposed setback, a reduction of forces. The consequences are that this crop of applicants to my lab is just exceptional. I’m absolutely sure that these applicants would have applied and easily gotten what they wanted in the U.S. Europe is capitalizing on it.”
—Drew Robson, research group leader, systems neuroscience and neuroengineering, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

“We’re just losing some of our best scientists to other countries. Everybody who has a dual passport is trying to get out. So, it’s gonna be a very serious brain drain to Canada and Europe and other places in the next few years; that’s gonna be a major issue. My international students can’t focus on their work because they’re worried if they’re going to be deported or not, and they’re spending huge amounts of time doing paperwork to try to see if they can stay in the country or not.”
—Gregory W. Schwartz, professor of ophthalmology, neuroscience and neurobiology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University

“In the short term, a huge challenge is whether science institutions are going to be crippled by changes in science funding. In particular, how young people will be going into science, into doing basic science as a career. Science is an exciting thing to do, but if all institutions are contracting dramatically in the next few years, it will drive away the talent. Also, the lack of international students … Our change in the ability to attract the brightest from the whole world, which is being deliberately destroyed by the current administration, is going to cripple U.S. science. We’ve benefited enormously by having the best in the world come to be scientists. That’s obviously gonna change. It’s less attractive. That is a huge threat.”
—Michael Stryker, professor of physiology, University of California, San Francisco

“My biggest worry is our next generation of rising scientists, how they are going to be really impacted by this current funding climate. If there is no funding, there are no jobs, what’s their future? Are we losing all those talented scientists to other countries?”
—Lin Tian, scientific director, Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience

“I do not think you can underestimate the real, incredible sadness of this moment and what an effect it is going to have. There is no question whatsoever that the total number of jobs that are available that are federally funded is going to contract over the next 10 years because of what has happened this year. It is going to be extremely difficult to recover from this. And whether those jobs are present in industry is not clear either. So, you are going to train people in science, and they are going to go do other things, and I think that is the way that is going to be now.”
—Anne West, professor of neurobiology, Duke University School of Medicine

“The path isn’t clear at the moment. There are promising funding proposals for AI. But neurobiology tells us more about AI’s potential than many realize. Hopefully, both can be supported with that understanding.”
—Michael Bruchas, professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology, University of Washington

“The NIH has already said from a policy standpoint that they would like to do less animal research and more human research, whatever that means. I can certainly see shifts in priorities that will hold the field back, especially if also there is this emphasis on translational work where the focus has to be on diseases. And of course, most of us that work in the field would love to have an impact on disease, but we also think that we just don’t know where those discoveries are going to come from. And my personal bias for sure is that we need to understand how the brain works to be able to fix it.”
—Jason Shepherd, professor of neurobiology, University of Utah

“Of my students before, half would go to into academia, half to industry. Now it’s three-quarters to industry. A similar thing among postdocs. It’s an exodus. If they cut the budget, you can’t support all the faculty. It will trickle down and push them to Big Pharma. That will hurt academic science. They don’t make fundamental discoveries. That’s academia’s area, research where there is no agenda.”
—Benjamin Deneen, professor and Dr. Russell J. and Marian K. Blattner Chair, Baylor College of Medicine

“In the ’40s and ’50s, before we had really scaled up federal funding for research a ton, it was companies like Bell Labs and others that just went all in on research, right? They just spent huge amounts of money, by today’s standards, on research with no obvious product implication, and people speak pretty warmly about what that did for science in the U.S. So maybe we’re just entering another era like that as we shrink down federal funding.”
—Joshua Dudman, senior group leader, Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

“Significantly less research funding, and I have considered moving to the private sector.”
—Brad Ferguson, assistant research professor of neurology, University of Missouri

“The field will contract, with many labs disappearing due to lack of funding. Big drain of junior scientists leaving the field (and science). Survivors will be the labs with significant private funding (that is, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators).”
—Ueli Rutishauser, professor of neurosurgery and Board of Governors Chair in Neurosciences, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

“It’s hard to overstate how perilous this is. It’s not just the workforce. It’s basic science as a concept, because the clear idea is that the federal government is no longer giving out money for basic or any research whatsoever, meaning we’re all supposed to work for private companies—Google, X or Neuralink or whatever. And because that’s where all the money is going. That’s where the federal government is giving the money to and has for a long time. And the problem with that is that within a for-profit environment you cannot do basic research, because basic research has a truth motive and not a profit motive. And so, if those two things are at odds, the profit motive is going to win out in an industry context; versus in a basic-science context, ideally, the truth motive wins out. And so, the goal of basic science is to discover truths. And that’s only possible in a nonprofit environment. And so that’s really the beginning and the end of it.”
—Jan Wessel, Clement T. and Sylvia H. Hanson Family Chair and professor of psychological and brain sciences, University of Iowa