Anushka Dole || Online Editor
In the sunlit Orkin Lab at Harvard Medical School, lab technicians diligently carry out their experiments, pipetting meticulously into Eppendorf tubes. Next door, in a darkened room, a team of researchers are huddled around a fluorescence microscope, tracking how gene‑editing tools can restore crescent-shaped red blood cells into their healthy state—a pathway the Orkin team helped pioneer.
Like the Orkin Lab, countless biomedical research labs across the United States engage in lifesaving research every single day. Their research is now in jeopardy. Funding inconsistencies in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including proposed cuts to indirect costs and the halt in federal funding due to the current government shutdown, threaten to stall progress and could have lasting detrimental effects on both the ongoing research and the communities that rely on it, including Andover.
In April, the NIH cancelled $800 million in grants that it had already approved because the projects didn’t align with the Trump administration’s policies. In July, a federal judge then ruled that the cuts were unlawful, which restored research funding. According to the Boston NPR station WBUR, the US Supreme Court ruled that the NIH can withhold the grants in August.
In addition to withholding the grants, the Trump administration is proposing to significantly reduce funding for “indirect” costs of research, supported by the narrative that the funds “were largely administrative bloat, unrelated to the costs of research.” According to the Harvard Crimson, these indirect funds include costs such as lab construction, research equipment, hazardous waste removal and “countless other very real and necessary costs of research.” For institutions in our own backyard, the impact is tangible: Harvard University stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, a blow that could ripple across its affiliated hospitals—including Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and many more. Across the country, other US institutions stand to lose billions more.
To fully understand the effects of the funding cuts, it’s important to start at the source: with the research itself. Research is a long, iterative process, full of ideas that start small and experiments that may or may not work. Unlike labs and experiments in school, where the outcome is clearly defined and predetermined, research can be filled with dead ends and uncertainties.
It often begins with something as simple as an idea. Dr. Nathan Crook, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University, described a project’s start as the moment you first think of a concept, and the end as the moment you stop actively working or thinking about it
“Normally, you or someone in your lab has a flash of insight… at these early stages, you usually don’t have dedicated funding for it,” he said. Early experiments are often small-scale pilot tests that can be supported by seed-funding (typically around $10,000) from the university, or a research foundation. More senior researchers may have access to discretionary funds – “rainy day” funds to use on early projects that aren’t bound by any specific research question.
Dr. Sara Smaga, an AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow and former Executive Director at the NSF Center for Genetically Encoded Materials, added that this initial stage is the beginning of a longer iterative process.
“In academia, faculty choose what topics they want to study…often a student will collaborate to design their project within their advisor’s topic area,” she explained. “The results of each experiment generate new questions, leading to further hypotheses, even if the initial result is ‘nothing happens!’”
Each experiment can quickly expand into multiple interconnected projects. Each project requires more resources, which are obtained by funding, typically in the form of research grants.
“Let’s say the pilot test goes well, and you get some interesting data,” Crook said. “You will then likely apply for a ‘normal’ research grant using those results as preliminary data. Usually the cool projects are kind of crazy, and the grant reviewers won’t believe that you will be able to do what you are proposing unless you have some sort of proof-of-concept that it is working.”
These grants can come from a variety of sources, including private foundations (such as the Gates foundation or the Chan Zuckerberg Institute), federal funding, internal university funding, state grants, or industry funding.
“Generally, a Principal Investigator (usually the senior faculty member overseeing the lab), will craft a proposal describing what they’d like to study and why, and submit to a funder,” Smaga said. “After submission, proposals are reviewed by a panel of experts in the field, who evaluate each proposal for feasibility and impact. Not every proposal is funded, and sometimes it takes multiple tries to write a proposal that gets chosen for funding.”
If a proposal isn’t funded right away, researchers often continue the project on the side, refining their ideas and re-applying for grants until they can secure official funding. Once secured, labs can expand, hire more researchers, and pursue the project in earnest. Ultimately, the most significant source of funding for research projects—especially in academia—comes from federal funding, typically the NIH.
“Most of the funding in every lab I’ve ever been a part of has come from federal funding,” Smaga said. Crook agreed, stating that “the most important [source of funding] by dollar amount, are federal grants,” and that “federal grants have funded 77 percent of the research in [his] lab.”
This reliance on federal support means that any disruptions in the grant cycle—whether from delays, government shutdowns, or the proposed cuts to indirect costs at agencies like the NIH—can ripple far beyond the walls of a single lab, outpouring from academia to industry, and eventually, impacting the lives of citizens. The money from NIH funding is a key part of funding early-stage projects, like projects being worked on by Smaga and Crook, laying the foundations for industry to develop novel therapeutics.
“Just one example: NIH-funded research on bacterial immune systems gave us gene editing, which is now being used to cure sickle cell and rare genetic diseases,” Smaga said.
Jackie Thompson, who works on targeted cancer treatments at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, agreed. “My current work involves developing cell and gene therapies for cancer,” Thompson said. “These treatments rely on decades of foundational research…that was often NIH-funded.”
For communities like Andover, where students and educators are deeply connected to Massachusetts’ vibrant research ecosystem, those losses hit especially close to home. Sarepta Therapeutics, a biotechnology company with an office in Andover, develops gene therapies that depend on the same fundamental research NIH grants have long supported.
At AHS, the BioBuilder club gives students hands-on experience with synthetic biology research, and the opportunity to work on projects that can be published in a student research journal. While BioBuilder opens doors for aspiring scientists, those doors exist within a larger research ecosystem that relies on consistent federal funding.
“It’s not something that you can just reinstate the funding and think that things are going to pick up as normal,” said Dr. Lindsey L’Ecuyer, the advisor of Andover High School’s BioBuilder club. “When people set up a lab somewhere else, they’re not coming back… it’s going to make it really hard for us to come back from that.”
L’Ecuyer sees the loss trickling down to high school classrooms, mentorship programs, and the students who might have been inspired to pursue science in the first place. “It feels like we’re losing a whole generation of people that would be coming to do research in the U.S.,” she said. “America has been a leading country in scientific research, and it’s going to make it really hard for us to come back from that.”
Crook agreed. “Other countries certainly aren’t reducing research funding, and guess where top scientists—even US citizens—will go? It really hurts our country’s economic…and actual…security to reduce research funding.”
Smaga also worries that America could lose a generation of scientists, and she’s already seen the early signs. “This past cycle, we saw graduate programs responding to funding freezes and future funding uncertainty by admitting fewer students,” Smaga said.
Biomedical research supports far more than scientific discoveries and the university labs that make them: according to the nonprofit United for Medical Research, every dollar of NIH funding generates about $2.56 in economic activity. The stakes of losing consistent funding are clear in places like the federally funded Orkin Lab at Harvard, where gene-editing research is already transforming lives. The lab is a clear example of how federal support fuels the discoveries that save lives, and it continues to inspire students and scientists to pursue the next breakthroughs.
“It’s a challenging time to be in biomedical research, but I’m still optimistic about the field,” Thompson said.
“For students who want to get into science, the advice is simple: start early, get involved, and follow the questions that excite you,” she said. “Even sending an email to a professor whose work interests you can open doors. Despite the obstacles, the next generation of scientists has a real shot at making a difference—and it could be your curiosity that drives the next big breakthrough.”
