Lucas Dillard describes himself as sort of a JD Vance, scientist version.
Raised by a single mother in rural Appalachia, he was about to enlist in the Navy when he received a Pell grant that allowed him to go to North Carolina State University.
A work-study requirement delivered a stroke of fortune: a job in a lab with a structural biologist who let him conduct his own research. Those projects got him into a post-baccalaureate program at the National Institutes of Health, where he published papers that helped him get into a Ph.D. program in molecular biophysics at Johns Hopkins.
And last year, his work at Hopkins won a prestigious N.I.H. fellowship that pays the country’s most promising doctoral students to continue their scientific research.
Mr. Dillard’s grant was one of thousands the N.I.H. canceled as it rushed to comply with President Trump’s executive order banning federally funded diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The order accused the programs of using race- and sex-based preferences that it said were “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” and “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.”
But Mr. Trump’s push to end D.E.I. has been a blunt instrument, eliminating highly competitive grant programs that defined diversity well beyond race and gender. Those who have lost grants include not only Black and Latino scientists, but also many like Mr. Dillard, who are white and from rural areas, which are solidly Trump country. The administration has decried universities as hotbeds of liberal elitism, inhospitable to viewpoint diversity. The canceled diversity grant programs were intended to make science less elite, by developing a pipeline from poorer areas of the country that tend to be more conservative.
“I think it’s very different in their minds, who is getting the D.E.I. stuff,” Mr. Dillard said. “People on the right, they don’t realize they’re limiting the opportunity of their own kids by supporting this.”
The Scientific Divide
The sweeping cuts will make it even harder for the United States to develop the next generation of scientific talent. Already, the administration has slashed federal spending on science and slowed the flow of international students that American science has relied on for decades. China and Europe are rushing in, investing heavily in research and industry and trying to lure scientists who have lost grants or visas to work in American labs.
Scientists who run university labs, like professors in general, tend to come from families with higher incomes, their paths smoothed by the advantages of high schools with rigorous courses or parents who can help them get early internships. One recent study found that they are 25 times more likely to have a parent with Ph.D.
The N.I.H. had long recognized this, and its diversity grants cast a wide net to attract people it defines as “underrepresented” in scientific research. The grant Mr. Dillard received was typical: open to students whose parents didn’t graduate from college; those who had been in foster care, homeless, or poor enough to receive food assistance or Pell grants; people with disabilities or from rural areas.
As Mr. Dillard said, “I don’t know anybody else at Hopkins who looks or sounds like me.”
The scientists who have won diversity grants often describe their hometowns as places where suspicion of science and elites runs deep. In Mr. Dillard’s hometown of Canton, N.C., the local feed shop sold out of ivermectin during the Covid pandemic, even as federal health officials warned that it was dangerous and ineffective against the virus.
“If you cut out these diversity measures, you’re going to make science full of people that are very elite,” said Billie Reneker, a doctoral student in developmental biology at Princeton who lost the same grant Mr. Dillard did. “Full of people who have grown up with a large amount of privilege, who were able to work in a lab in high school because their dad was a prof at Cornell.”
Ms. Reneker grew up in rural Georgia. Neither of her parents went to college: Her father is a construction worker; her mother drives a school bus.
She graduated from Georgia College and State University and worked as a lab technician at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School before starting her doctorate. She then had a child, another rarity among her colleagues.
Without the grant, roughly $36,000, she expects to abandon her plans to find a postdoctoral position and become a professor.
Last month, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the N.I.H. to restore about 900 terminated grants, accusing the administration of race and gender bias.
But the judge focused largely on grants canceled because they studied diverse populations, such as H.I.V. prevention among transgender women of color.
His order did not restore hundreds of canceled grants to researchers whose science has nothing to do with D.E.I. Mr. Dillard, for instance, studies tight junctions, the connections between cells that are critical to keeping organs and tissues healthy.
‘A Huge Opportunity Missed’
The N.I.H. has awarded about 1,000 diversity grants a year since the early 1990s. They are highly competitive, generally awarded to the top 20 percent of applicants.
Some paid undergraduates to work in research labs, others paid the salaries of doctoral students, typically less than $50,000 a year. Career transition grants provide up to $1 million over five years for postdoctorates and new professors. Others, to faculty, are multimillion-dollar awards that fund labs for several years.
Gabrielle Merchant had received a five-year, $3.5 million grant to fund her lab at Boys Town National Hospital in Omaha, where she studies ear infections that lead to hearing loss. She had wanted to apply for funding using the regular grant mechanism — she’d always feared she’d be judged if people knew her background.
But her mentors insisted the diversity version of the grant was intended for scientists like her: She grew up largely in foster care in western Massachusetts. Her mother struggled with addiction and her father left the family when Dr. Merchant was young.
In late May, at the end of her grant’s first year, the N.I.H. sent an email saying she would not receive the remaining money. It included the same generic explanation sent to many others: “Research programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
“The wording was horrible,” Dr. Merchant said. “I worked endlessly hard to get to that point and tried to do everything right. I come from foster care and I went to Harvard, and I never felt like I belonged there.”
With the grant, “I felt for the first time in my whole life that I’d earned my keep, I do belong here — then to have it ripped out from under me.”
Dr. Merchant is also an adjunct at Creighton University in Omaha, in a department that studies hearing loss. Three lab heads there lost diversity grants — two had qualified in part because they are deaf or hard of hearing — meaning the department lost a total of $7 million.
One, Kelsey Anbuhl, who is deaf, was part of the lawsuit against the N.I.H. After the judge’s ruling, she received notice that her grant would be restored. The career transition program that awarded her the grant, however, has been terminated.
Dr. Anbuhl was raised by a single mother in Mobile, Ala., and didn’t know anyone who had gone to college until she went herself. Even with her grant restored, she is still uncertain: “I’m so worried the administration is going to find a way to take them away again. What if I have hired people and they take away the money and I have to fire them?”
Universities, even wealthy ones, can’t afford to bridge all the gaps, meaning research will be abandoned.
That includes the work Nicole Gross had been doing in another lab at Hopkins to understand metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Ms. Gross grew up on a dairy farm in rural Michigan. Her parents did not graduate from college, and she qualified for free and reduced lunch and a Pell grant. A valedictorian in high school and college, she started at Hopkins as a technician and proved her way into the doctoral program.
She had been in line to receive a predoctoral grant that she won by designing a sophisticated experiment that required her to do technically intricate surgery on mice.
Won Jin Ho, who leads the lab, calls Ms. Gross “truly a superstar” and the loss of her project “a huge opportunity missed” for cancer research.
Winning an N.I.H. grant often predicts and drives a successful career, Dr. Ho said, conferring early prestige and identifying the researchers who have innovative ideas that will win future funding.
“A lot of academics is making sure you have momentum,” he said. “People who sort of have exposure to academics from early on in their life tend to perform better.” He sees high school students ask to work in labs, even ending up as co-authors on papers.
Ashley Albright, a postdoc in molecular and cell biology at the University of California-San Francisco, worked at Outback Steakhouse during high school in rural North Carolina and had to drive to another school to take Advanced Placement biology. She lived her formative years in a trailer in her great-grandparents’ backyard. She recalled advancing to the state finals in a science fair with a project on the effects of detergents on algae blooms, displaying a homemade black tri-fold poster.
“Every other person that was there had professional printed posters and had done things in university labs,” Dr. Albright said. She recalled thinking, “I don’t belong here,” the same thought she had in an interview for graduate school, when the icebreaker question was “What do your parents do?” Her father, she replied, worked on cars.
Dr. Albright lost all but half a year of a five-year, $1 million career transition grant.
At Odds Back Home
Many young scientists talk about feeling betrayed by the places that raised them. “I’ve encountered a lot of callousness about my fellowship being terminated,” said Ms. Reneker, at Princeton. People back home tell her “there’s going to be some casualties along the way,” or “there must be some kind of misunderstanding.”
Mr. Dillard wants to work against the anti-science sentiment he sees back home in North Carolina.
For years, he has collected old centrifuges and boxes of pipettes he finds outside the labs at Hopkins, driving 10 hours to donate them to his former high school science teacher.
“These are the kids we are supposed to be propping up,” the teacher, Greg Tucker, said. “It comes back to the whole Make America Great thing again. How did we make America great? It was through science.”
Kate Zernike is a national reporter at The Times.
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