Graduate Students Push Back Against Science Funding Cuts

Ms. Morrow, 24, from Powder Springs, Ga., is one of hundreds of people who wrote to their hometown newspapers as part of a national campaign spearheaded this spring by graduate students and scientists who are just starting their careers. They wanted to draw attention to the Trump administration’s research funding cuts that are scuttling grants, shrinking science labs and stopping postdoctoral studies. Administration officials have pointed to the importance of cost-saving and attributed many of the budget cuts to changing scientific priorities. The White House has moved to cancel research in specific areas, like transgender health and climate science, and described some research efforts as wasteful spending. For Emma Scales, a graduate student who studies plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell, the slashed budgets evoked an unpleasant realization. “Oh, my God,” she remembered thinking. “Nobody knows what we do.” This, she added, was partly the fault of scientists — a communication failure that she felt determined to address. “Here I am,” she said. “Let me tell you. I want to show you what it is that I do, and why it’s important.” (Her research on fungal-bacterial endosymbiosis could one day help to protect humans and harvests from dangerous pathogens.) Ms. Scales became one of the organizers of a project called the McClintock Letters, with many to be published on the June 16 birthday of the geneticist Barbara McClintock, who in 1983 became the first woman to be awarded an unshared Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.