The Body Scientific
November 22, 2024
Do Not Hurt Students to Punish Administrators
Richard Kessin
At Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, the Hammer Building has twenty stories of laboratories, lecture halls, classrooms, and a library. By day it is bustling but even at 2 AM lights are on in some of the labs. That means a Ph.D student or a post-doctoral fellow, say in immunology or embryology, is working. Our student may be watching embryonic cardiac muscle cells bound to a plastic petri dish. Under her microscope, they beat. After a day of classes, teaching a histology lab for medical students, and preparing her cells she is tired, but the sight of individual heart cells beating in unison is mesmerizing. How do they do that?
Across the street, surgeons, cardiologists, and anesthesiologists in the Milstein Hospital are transplanting a heart—such operations don’t wait for morning. The patient’s distended heart has been removed and a machine pumps oxygenated blood to his lungs and body. Soon the vessels of the new heart have been sutured to the patient’s vessels, and the transplanted heart starts to beat. These physicians, scientists, and nurses form one of the great cardiology departments in the world.
The graduate student’s experiments are basic research—not directed to curing a disease, but to understanding a process. She and her thesis advisor had an idea about how rhythmic beats were established—they did experiments asking whether their idea was feasible and wrote a grant application to the NIH, which has a program for early exciting results. Months later an NIH study section, a jury of 15 of her peers, was convinced. The funds would be forwarded to the
University, and our young researcher will have a fellowship for three years and money for supplies; she can concentrate on the fundamental properties of heart cells. The President of the University had no part in this. One day our graduate student will meet the cardiologists and surgeons at a seminar; they will talk and she will be invited to their group meeting to think about how her ideas can push clinical improvements. That is how medicine progresses.
I have a friend at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago who is the Chair of its program in cancer research. He sent me the statistics on improvements in breast cancer treatments. These trials are about to be curtailed by cuts to the NIH. Twenty years ago, the idea was that aggressive treatment— more chemo, more radiation, and more surgery would produce longer survival. That was often an illusion. Now, because of detailed knowledge about how cell division is controlled, the discovery of oncogenes fifty years ago, and advances in genomics and chemistry, the survival times of women with advanced breast cancer are much better. Pharmaceutical companies large and small are vital to this effort but basic research and training researchers, physicians and surgeons is the function of universities.
The idea that basic research gives rise to clinical progress has had many prophets and apostles, among them Louis Pasteur in the 19th century and Vanevar Bush in the 20th. Bush wrote a classical book called The Endless Frontier about basic science as a precursor to medical or agricultural progress. He was President Roosevelt’s chief science advisor. Roosevelt asked him asked him how the basic science investments of World War II (penicillin, radar, mathematics, computers and much more) could be channeled to solve peacetime problems. Bush said the effort would collapse unless new efforts were made. And they were. He and Roosevelt opened a new path for research. In many of branches of science, medicine, and agriculture, investigator-initiated research provides the footing for practical advances. The government does not tell them what to do.
Graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty drive this progress in basic science and bioengineering departments. Some years ago, I was their Associate Dean at Columbia. They are some of the most energetic and directed people I have met. Many have wanted to do research since high school, and they will spend four of five years getting a PhD or less time for a still useful Master’s. They will go on to run their own labs in academia, work in industry, create start-ups, and work in public health or agriculture.
If the Trump administration rips vetted research projects from researchers in at least 60 universities from Arizona State to Vanderbilt, on the grounds that the university administration failed to address antisemitism, they will be punishing the wrong people. There are other ways to deal with anti-semitism, which I do not deny. These kids want to work on serious problems and there is no reason to destroy their dreams and our futures.
The grant application structure has been in place since the 1950s. It is expensive but it works because it mobilizes individual imagination. If it is hijacked, research will stop, the number of graduate and master’s students will decrease, clinical trials will be cancelled—an age of scientific optimism and progress will be wasted. Billions of dollars will be wasted. Cancer, bird flu, Ebola, measles, TB and many other catastrophes will continue and expand when they could have been stopped.
Richard Kessin is Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. For five years he was charged with recruiting and mentoring PhD and MD PhD students.