OWEN MCDONNELL: Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of In The Know, a podcast dedicated to the University of Minnesota. 

The University of Minnesota is ranked 13th in the country when it comes to research. To put it lightly, we do a ton of research, and a lot of it is very important. Our school was responsible for creating the first wearable pacemaker, and the first successful open heart surgery was done here. If any of you listeners are in the sciences, chances are your professors are also part of some sort of research on campus. 

And with research and trials and studies, funding is essential. The federal government funds universities to allow labs to continue to operate and conduct their studies. You may not realize it, but labs need a lot of funding. Money needs to go to pay the employees and students that work there. Their machines used for running tests. Supplies. Water. Lab coats. Both significant and seemingly insignificant parts of a lab need to be funded or else they struggle to stay afloat. 

That’s why when the new Trump administration aimed to limit funding for indirect lab costs, funding for simple things like lab coats and water, universities across the country began panicking to figure out their next move. The administration put a 15% funding cap for indirect costs to all federally funded labs in the United States.

Alik Widge, a principal investigator of the Translational Neuroengineering lab here at the U, talks about how important these indirect costs are for running his lab.

ALIK WIDGE:  “You want how to tell us how this brain stimulation affects humans. Okay, how long is it gonna take? How much is it gonna cost?” And I think about, alright, probably gonna take us a couple years to do that experiment because we’ve gotta recruit people. We’ve gotta figure out some techniques. It’s gonna take a lot of thinking to analyze that data.

I need this many grad students to do it. I need this many postdocs and I come up with a budget and I can tell you, “Okay, well I think I’m gonna need about this many person hours to do that.” But then the thing is all those butts, they need chairs to sit in and they need lights and, you know, running water.

We’ve got this purified water and we’ve got this liquid nitrogen tank and we’ve got these veterinarians who take care of research animals. And we’ve got these clinical facilities where you can bring in a patient if you need blood draw because you need a sample for genomics or whatever else.

So we got these MRI scanners. Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna total up all of that stuff that we just keep around because it’s important infrastructure that lets people do science and all of that stuff. 

MCDONNELL: The Translational Neuroengineering Lab that Widge runs, or TNE, uses engineering to better understand brain processes and creates ways to change them. The lab does research on how to treat mental illnesses and disorders through this neurological engineering. 

Widge says that this type of research is always for the betterment of society, which is why he and many other researchers around the country are so frustrated with the funding cap.

WIDGE: A lot of science is a public good, right? We don’t know when we start doing a project what the answer’s gonna be. That’s why it’s research. If we knew what was gonna happen, it wouldn’t be research. It’d be science class.

So we are doing this because there’s public benefit in knowing the answer to a question. Is it yes or no, or is it A or B, or most likely, well, eh, it’s mostly A, but there’s something funny going on over here. You should probably look at that some more, but I mean, that’s the knowledge that helps us diagnose people better, helps us treat people better, helps us just figure out how the heck did we come to be these complex human beings that we are.

And it’s the same as the, you know, the question of why should we pay for science? Why do our tax dollars go for that is the same question as why should our tax dollars have a University of Minnesota? Why can’t people who want it just pay tuition? Because we understand that, look, there’s people in the world who might be super smart and super capable, but simply their family doesn’t have that kind of money for whatever reason.

And yet it’s a benefit to the whole state if that person gets an education and goes on to do something cool or become part of the workforce or just be a better citizen as a result of that education. So we subsidize having a university and having cheaper in-state tuition.

MCDONNELL: Research at your state university is always doing more good for the world than not, which is why suddenly, a 15% cap on funding for indirect costs is directly hurting the wellbeing of the country. To fully understand how the funding cap works, its easiest to explain it at the dollar level. 

For every $1 that the University of Minnesota gets through grants, they receive an extra 15 cents to cover indirect costs, whereas before the cut, they received 54 cents per dollar. Widge goes more in depth about how important indirect cost funding is and why the 15% cap is so flawed.

WIDGE:  If you add up how much all that stuff costs, it’s a lot. It’s like half the cost, not quite, but close to, it’s actually about a third of the total cost of any research grant that comes in. And so the big and, there’s actually a formula like that’s, that’s not just the university makes up a number that somebody sat down and done the calculations and said, “Hey, this is how much money we actually have to spend to make all this work.” 

So the problem that keeps happening in the past couple months is folks in the administration saying, “We’ve just thought about it and we’ve decided 15% is a fair number. We didn’t consult you. We didn’t do any math. We just decided the 15%.” Oh, well okay. 

Yeah, I know you spend another pile of money, but yeah, you know that’s your problem, not ours. And well, the thing is, we still got that square footage, right? Like somebody’s still gotta pay the power bill for those lights. So we still gotta pay for those veterinarians ’cause I’m using them.

So we still gotta pay for the freaking MRI scanner ’cause I’m using it. So if we built that stuff based on a federal commitment and a negotiation and a contract we signed with them and they suddenly yank it, well, it’s the same like if anybody else promised to pay you a certain amount and then suddenly said, “Yeah, yeah, it changed my mind, bro. I just don’t feel like it. That’s too expensive.”

MCDONNELL: Widge says that the reason the new administration chose the number 15 for the cap was because private grants often cap their indirect cost funding at 15%. The difference is that private grants only add up to about a couple million dollars in total. 

The families that give these private grants want their money to go toward paying a grad student’s salary or a smaller, less expensive project rather than simply indirect costs. In 2023, the federal government gave over $600 million to the University of Minnesota for lab funding. 

Because the cost cap has been in effect since February 10, labs have had to make adjustments in how they operate. Widge talks about the two possible options the U of M has to keep its labs alive. 

WIDGE: I mean, what will happen is simple. We won’t be able to afford the things we use to do research unless we do one or two things.

One, jack up tuition on you kids, and then sort of fund research on your backs and that doesn’t seem particularly fair given how many students have to take out loans and how ridiculous student debt is, so I can’t say as I favor that solution, or B, what we start doing is every time a faculty member uses any kind of university resource for anything, we charge them an extra fee.

So the university starts charging me rent on my lab space and starts charging me my electric bill every month and starts charging me a vet bill every month. In which case we’d be right back to exactly what the indirect cost calculation was supposed to prevent. So either we spend a lot less money on actual research, or we make life miserable for somebody else in the university. That’s kind of our only two options if the indirect costs go away.

MCDONNELL: The bottom line is that our labs are spending so much less on the actual research part compared to what we did previously. 

Not only has the government cut funding for universities drastically, it has also rescinded millions of dollars in previously awarded grants. The grants terminated affect research in DEI, transgender issues and in the U’s case, vaccine hesitancy.

WIDGE:  Yeah, so this is my junior colleague Michael Bronstein over in psychiatry. Great guy, right? Dual trained as a computer scientist and psychologist like this, the just. Super smart, and basically what he studies is false or fixed or maladaptive beliefs. He wants to know why do we believe things that just aren’t true, that are actively bad for us, and why do we hold onto those beliefs when faced with absolute evidence to the contrary? 

So these got so, and that matters because this is of course conspiracy theories, but this is also things like, why does someone start to believe that the only way to relieve their pain is to die by suicide? When help might be available to them, if they were willing to sort of bend that rigid worldview a little bit.

Why does a person with schizophrenia become absolutely convinced of a delusional idea? Like someone’s talking to them, to talking to them through their watch, or that they’re being persecuted by a specific entity or through a specific kind of radio wave. Where does this come? Where does this all come from?

And one things he noticed is because a lot of people with serious mental illnesses are vulnerable to false beliefs, they’re especially vulnerable to vaccine misinformation and the, oh, this has preservatives, or this has microchips, or nanobots or whatever. And because they’re especially vulnerable to these fixed false beliefs.

As you said, it had vaccine in it, and all vaccine related research was canceled by the Secretary of Health Consumer Services, Robert Kennedy, because he feels that fundamentally vaccine research, as it’s done, is incorrect because it doesn’t focus on are vaccines bad for us. And I mean, this is a general problem is he’s got a lot of fixed false beliefs, but he is a very wealthy person in a position of power and now the rest of us get to live by his fixed false beliefs, which is not great. 

MCDONNELL: Widge also mentions that many of these researchers and lab workers often have to leave the industry entirely and find new jobs to support themselves. Three of his best team members at TNE are preparing to quit.

WIDGE:  I’ve had three of my best people all tell me, “Hey, I’m not gonna be here next year. I need to find another job because I just cannot handle the level of uncertainty that’s existing right now. I’m just preemptively quitting.” Even though there’s money for me, even though I like the work we’re doing, I’m just gonna abandon it because I’m panicking too much to be willing to work here anymore. And that’s right, that’s talent I’ve spent years developing.

These are people who are not just colleagues, but friends and great employees who understand exactly what to do, and they’re all leaving just because of the chaos that’s being sown. And I’m one lab, losing some, losing my three best people. What about everybody else? Like you multiply that times the tens of thousands and if not hundreds of thousands of science labs in the country.

MCDONNELL: Widge says his colleague who was working on vaccine research is also in the “what do I do now” group of researchers. 

Robert F. Kennedy’s vaccine research purge is not the only thing he has been changing since being in office. Since becoming the Secretary of Health Consumer Services, he has laid off more than a quarter of the National Institute of Health’s scientists, a majority of them being women and minorities.

Widge says that the mass layoffs have caused communication issues with the NIH.

WIDGE:  Frankly we have no idea who’s gone. Like I, it’s not like you get an announcement saying, “Oh hi, this person, they were the program officer you interacted with, or they handled this, they’re being laid off.” You find out about it when you try to email them because you’ve got a question about something you’re doing and you get a bounce email and then you’re like, “Uh, so I’m talking to who exactly?” And the answer is, “Oh, we don’t know. We haven’t figured out how to sign that function yet.”

MCDONNELL: For Widge, and many others like him, this is a time of complete uncertainty, however this time is extremely stressful for incoming and aspiring grad students as well.

WIDGE: Thankfully, our university’s still admitting. I mean, a lot of places have just shut down admissions entirely and said, “Well, until we know we’re just not taking anybody this year at all, good luck. Go somewhere else or stay in your current job.” So it already cascades just we, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with any of the grants that I’ve got pending.

And so I’ve had to tell people who write to me saying, “Dr. Widge, can I explore with you the possibility of doing a PhD in your lab?” I have to tell them, “I’m sorry, but I’m unable to have those conversations with anybody right now because there’s so much uncertainty about whether I’d be able to pay you.”

Any money I’m able to get has to go to paying the people who are already working with me because, you know, they come first. They made a commitment to me. We just have so little. I mean, this is where the unpredictability and just the lack of any knowledge of what we can tell people, what commitments we can make to people. It’s a huge problem.

MCDONNELL: One incoming grad student who works in Widge’s TNE lab, Delilah Pineda, talks about her application experience and how the funding freeze had affected her mindset when applying.

DELILAH PINEDA:  I think really the difference between this year and previous years were like, I guess offer admissions wise. There was just a bunch of in uncertainty. ‘Cause I think, you know, the whole funding freeze really impacted everyone like this year or like the beginning of this year.

That’s really when it was, at least I saw the most effect because I heard stories of, you know, universities like, deferring people or resending their offers. And so there was just a lot of, I guess, uncertainty around like, offer letters or rejection letters. There’s just a lot of uncertainty, I think is the main like theme in this whole process.

MCDONNELL: “Uncertainty” really is the word that sums up what is going on right now. For those who are unaware, graduate students in science like Pineda spend many years working in a lab after a year of classes to get their masters. With so much up in the air about lab funding, Pineda says that the circumstances for her future in lab work are not ideal.

PINEDA: I feel like I can’t really do much about it, to be honest. Like unfortunately, a lot of the burden falls on us as trainees and PIs as like, faculty members. And unfortunately I just don’t know how much we can do about like, administration level, funding circumstances, but I just think it’s not ideal. Unfortunately, that’s the state of the circumstances right now, and we just gotta get through it.

MCDONNELL: Even with the uncertainty surrounding Pineda’s line of work, she says that pushing through the hardships is what is important to her.

PINEDA: I mean, yeah, it’s definitely one of like the circumstances right now really make you think like, should I keep going on?

Personally, I haven’t really thought of a concrete backup plan. I don’t know if other people have, but it definitely makes you wonder. But again, I think, I think there’s power in sticking through it, you know? 

 MCDONNELL: Something that Pineda finds important is community engagement programs, another thing that is receiving massive funding cuts as well. 

PINEDA: A lot of community engagement programs are being cut because of funding cuts, and I think that particularly is also dangerous just because, as you mentioned, a lot of like the science cuts. Funding cuts are because people aren’t really informed in what science is. And if you’re cutting all of these programs that are meant to inform the public about what science is, you’re just like, it’s just a negative feedback loop. It’s terrible. So I do wanna highlight that. And that is happening unfortunately just everywhere.

MCDONNELL: An example of community engagement that Pineda mentioned was a program that brought people like her to elementary and middle schools to talk about neuroscience and how the brain works in hopes to get kids excited about science. 

Finally, Pineda talks about speaking out against administrative decisions like these and how people can make an impact with their voices.

PINEDA: Multiple protests have been held nationwide and so there’s definitely value in that and speaking out against it. But when, I guess, so when the group of people speaks out there, there’s more power in that than like just an individual, you know? ‘Cause it’s like, when I think about myself, it’s like, “How can I change current administration?”

Like going up against people in power is kind of crazy when you think about on an individual level. And so I think the power comes from people coming together and especially in what they believe in. So like science community coming together and holding those protests and really just trying to get the word out there.

MCDONNELL: This episode was written by Owen McDonnell and produced by Kaylie Sirovy. Thanks so much for listening, and be sure to leave any questions, comments, or concerns in our email inbox at [email protected].

I am Owen McDonnell, and this has been In The Know.