Viewpoint From our Founding Director
This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Business Journal as “Harvard researcher op-ed: Cutting science will cause outsized pain to Mass. economy.”
By Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.
America is the economic powerhouse to which all other nations aspire. What allowed us to pull ahead of others in this race was our ability to innovate and develop breakthrough technologies that the world’s consumers wanted to buy. Personal computers, iPhones, optical fibers, the internet, genetic engineering, and most recently, artificial intelligence, are prime examples. All these advances allowed us to build entirely new industries that outpaced our competitors in areas ranging from high-speed communication and web-based commerce to biotechnology-enabled drug discovery. But none of these commercial breakthroughs would have occurred without discoveries and technology innovations that were birthed in American universities and research hospitals.
Over the past two months, we have seen the Trump administration systematically cut and slash investments in all areas of science and engineering, with a major focus on biomedical research. I know this firsthand, as I was one of the first Harvard faculty members to receive stop-work orders requiring that I immediately cease all research activities on two major research programs. Our work focused on developing drugs that could prevent injury caused by radiation exposure from a nuclear attack or reactor accident or from long-term space flight, which could help to enable a manned mission to Mars.
But many other researchers at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern — and other universities in virtually every state across our country — has been negatively impacted by the overt cancellation of research grants or the surreptitious cessation of payments on invoices for past and ongoing work.
At the same time, their international students and staff have been terrorized, causing many to seek new opportunities outside the of United States. As a result, a rapidly accelerating brain drain has begun.
At the same time, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is shifting from using a scientific evidence–based approach to confront healthcare challenges to one that appears to be based on opinion and conjecture. This shift is unfortunately reminiscent of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. Trofim Lysenko, a pseudoscientist who did not believe in genetic inheritance, was able to stifle advances in biology for decades solely because his ideas aligned with Stalin’s communist ideology. As a result, the United States and other Western nations flew past the Soviet Union during the biotechnology revolution, and Russia has failed to reap the health benefits and financial payback it generated.
Why should you care if science funding shrinks and academic institutions are under attack?
In the 16 years since the Wyss Institute at Harvard was founded, we have filed over 4,500 patents, negotiated 145 licenses with industry, launched almost 70 startup companies, and enabled the creation of nearly 2,000 new jobs — not only in Massachusetts but across the country. And we are merely a small part of Harvard.
A retrospective study in 2015 reported that alumni of MIT alone were responsible for launching more than 30,000 new companies employing more than 4.5 million people, which generated almost $2 trillion in annual revenues globally. And this is not just “elite” universities. A 2022 report found that the University of Alabama at Birmingham is the state’s largest employer and it contributed more than $12 billion to the local economy. Now multiply these numbers by every major university currently being attacked by the Trump administration. This is why you should be worried.
Indirect costs are cost of doing business
There are two other less obvious concerns. The U.S. government has proposed to drastically reduce the indirect costs it provides to universities, which cover their facilities and administrative costs. Indirect costs are normally negotiated by the government based on detailed reporting of financial records and expenses needed to keep research operations going at each institution. This can vary greatly in major cities versus rural locations given differences in lease and building costs as well as competitive salary scales. Cutting this type of support for research indiscriminately is like asking a master chef to continue to serve haute cuisine without allowing the restaurant to include the costs of heat and air conditioning, tablecloths, silverware, gas for their stoves, or salaries for their waiters, dishwashers, accountants and tax preparers in their meal prices. Indirect costs are the real costs of doing business in science.
While the Trump administration is squeezing resources necessary to support and execute biomedical research, it is also now proposing to tax university endowments. This might seem fair to the average reader, but most endowment funds are earmarked for very narrow uses and not easily redirected to cover costs of lost government research grants. More concerning for economic growth is that university endowments and the annuities of their faculty and staff are major sources of funding for venture capital companies and other investment firms. In other words, our government is simultaneously slowing the scientific innovation pipeline that invents new technologies and also constraining funds necessary to translate them into commercial products that can birth new industries and improve the health of people and our planet.
We are at the dawn of a new age, in which biotechnology and artificial intelligence are merging, and those who figure out to harness these advances will win big. But we need to bring full force to bear on this huge opportunity by increasing investment in science and leveraging the incredibly successful partnership we have had between government and academia for the past 75 years. We shouldn’t be dismantling it. Otherwise, we will be left behind in the next technology wave. And this will hurt our economy and your pockets — and not just students and scientists working late into the night in their labs.