Chapter 1: Why does the government fund research at universities?
This is Planet Money from NPR. Mike Mears is a biologist and an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He runs his own lab. Does everybody wear a white lab coat?
Yeah. If EH&S is listening, yes, everyone's wearing a lab coat.
Okay. He studies how our DNA influences diseases like cancer. And he's been doing pretty great. But lately, university life has been...
We talked about it in a language I don't usually speak. Is there an emoji that best represents how you felt the last few months?
It's shifted. I think in like early February, it was like the panic emoji.
Mike is one of thousands of researchers all around the country who are suddenly at risk of losing their jobs because the Trump administration is cutting or threatening to cut funding for their research. In some cases, huge pieces of it.
The thought of those cuts is panic emoji, crying emoji, or I don't know, poop emoji.
You could work that one in there too, yeah.
If you can't tell, neither one of us is super emoji literate.
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Chapter 2: How have federal funding cuts affected researchers?
I don't know what Washington University is going to look like in six or 12 months. And I think as we think about higher education systemically, we have the same concerns.
Has there ever been a time when this relationship between the federal government and the university has felt so fraught?
Not in my lifetime.
Now, a university is two big things. One, a place where people go to learn, but also it's a research incubator. And the system we have where universities get tons of federal funding has been in place for the last eight decades.
Universities and the federal government entered into an agreement right after World War II. And the purpose was to build the very best scientific research engine in the world. And we did it. And we're concerned that some of the actions that are being taken are going to destroy something incredible that we've built together since the end of World War II.
That story of how we got the system we have today began with this guy named Vannevar Bush.
Vannevar was the first presidential science advisor. He ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war.
The first project that he got famous for is now infamous. He decided to bring some of the best scientific researchers in the country together to develop weapons, specifically a bomb that would be so ferocious no country would ever attack the U.S. again.
That endeavor is not so fondly remembered as the Manhattan Project. And though that project itself was controversial, it threw a spotlight on the power of research. So after the war ended, Vannevar was like, federal government, what else could we develop if we threw some money at the great minds at all these universities? Let's do it. Let's start funding research at universities.
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