As a scientist, Erin Morrow’s focus is cerebral — literally. She studies the brain, investigating the interplay of memory and stress.
But when Ms. Morrow, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, sat down to compose a letter in defense of science, she decided to write from the heart.
Hers is attached to a pacemaker, implanted a few years ago to manage an atrioventricular block that made her pulse stutter.
“Science saved my life,” Ms. Morrow wrote in a letter to the editor that was published this month in The Marietta Daily Journal, a Georgia newspaper. “My happy ending wouldn’t have been possible without decades of U.S. research,” she added.
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.
So far, Ms. Scales said, more than 550 people said they were submitting letters to a newspaper. Some may not be accepted, while others have already appeared or may be published later.
But public advocacy can be hard for researchers who are more accustomed to spreadsheets, scientific jargon and second-guessing.
“This is very much outside of their comfort zone,” said Isako Di Tomassi, a graduate student at Cornell who also worked to organize the campaign. (She studies Phytophthora infestans, a microbe that masquerades as a fungus. It was a major driver of the Irish potato famine, and it remains a threat today.)
The McClintock project was organized by science policy clubs at universities across the United States, including the Advancing Science and Policy Club at Cornell, with help from Science Homecoming, a similar project for scientists and faculty members.
The organizers said that the project focused on smaller newspapers so that the letters would feel like personal conversations rather than public broadsides.
“Publishing in local newspapers gives us a chance to speak directly to the people who raised us, the people we grew up with, the people who, in many cases, we are working for,” said Miles Arnett, a graduate student studying bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. (His work, on the mechanics of cellular regeneration in the intestine, could one day improve treatments for inflammatory bowel disorder and Crohn’s disease.)
In a letter he submitted to a newspaper in Massachusetts, Mr. Arnett wrote about growing up in Worcester, Mass., a hub for life sciences, and said that the federal funding cuts would deal a serious blow to his hometown.
Similarly, in a letter that Ms. Di Tomassi submitted to a newspaper in Philadelphia, she wrote that her experiences with food service in the city — working at a restaurant and volunteering at a shelter — informed her scientific focus on food insecurity.
Ms. Scales wrote about the sand crabs, moon snails and sunny days she enjoyed as a child on the beaches of Sea Bright, N.J. The federal funding cuts, she said, could threaten the nearby James J. Howard Marine Sciences Laboratory.
In interviews, they and other graduate students noted the difficulties of writing around an uncertain future: How do you defend research projects whose benefits can take so many years to materialize?
It took centuries for scientists to understand the role of electricity in the human heart. Bit by bit, their discoveries paved the way for pacemakers like the one that saved Ms. Morrow. She hopes, in turn, that her work in cognitive neuroscience will one day help people who are suffering from post-traumatic stress.
She had been considering a career in the federal government — perhaps in the mental health division of the National Institutes of Health. Now, she is not so sure. “I just feel like that’s being gutted and decimated right now,” she said.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
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