During high school, I also fell in love with the human body in Capital High School’s health occupation class, where I learned about medicine by job shadowing at Saint Al’s. I was very excited about treating brain disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease.
In college, I had the opportunity to work in a lab at the University of Utah that screened drugs to treat epilepsy for the government (the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokeunder the National Institutes of Health). This experience helped me realize that biomedical research allowed me to both create and treat patients with brain disorders. This led to my interest in a biomedical research career.
I received a National Science Foundation fellowship in college to do research at Dartmouth, and I got the position in part through DEI goals at NSF that intended to create geographic diversity in science, which gave Idahoans a better chance to get these rewards. I also received a fellowship after college to study with a very famous NIH scientist who started the field of studying how DNA mutations are repaired. My connection to this NIH scientist set up my career so I could train with many great scientists.
Both of these training programs have almost been terminated by this current administration.
NIH labs hire students like me with funding from their budget, which they are trying to cut by 40 percent now. This will hit junior scientists harder, since there are fewer scientists around to train them. These cuts prevent Idaho students from having this same opportunity to learn from the best scientists and to build a scientific career. Idaho will be hit harder, as there will be more competition for the remaining positions and students in other states have more opportunities (even in high school) to do research so they have a better application.
I currently work at the University of California San Francisco, which is one of the best biomedical research institutions in the world. I work with a team developing Alzheimer’s disease drugs that we hope will have fewer side effects than those in clinical trials. We had a COVID grant terminated that was developing methods to characterize drugs that we could not characterize before. While this grant was for COVID, this method sought to improve all types of drug design, including for Alzheimer’s disease. Trump is currently considering cutting all government funding to California universities, which will likely eliminate my job and the jobs of everyone in my lab.
I am at the training step where I apply for professor roles, but these positions require us to show that we can earn and work productively on smaller grants. Unfortunately, most of these funding opportunities for my level were canceled, making it hard for scientists at my level to get their next job.
The decreased funding will also make it harder to keep the job, since it is paid for by grants, and they will be competing against senior scientists with a strong track record. This is leading many young scientists to consider leaving science or the country.
This is a huge drain on America’s science talent, allowing countries like China to take our leadership role in science.
Jennifer Day, Ph.D., is a Boise native who works to develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease at UCSF in San Francisco. She previously trained at places like NIH, OHSU, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
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