Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Interview by Emily Anthes
Erin Hecht: The lab studies brain-behavior evolution. We’re interested in dogs because there are these different lineages that are bred for different behavioral profiles, like hunting or herding or guarding. That’s kind of like evolution in a jar. It’s a way to look at how evolution produces behavioral traits by changing the brain.
We use M.R.I. scans, which are noninvasive, to look at brain organization. What makes different breeds of dogs behave differently and have predispositions for different types of work? What makes a scent-detection dog really good at learning its job but a service dog really good at learning a totally different set of skills?
This is science that is valuable for understanding how brains learn, but it’s also valuable on a very practical level — for creating better service dogs and helping family dogs be healthier and happier. This is a type of science that has an impact that most people could see in their homes.
There are about 500,000 service dogs currently in the United States, which are used by people with mobility and sensory limitations, psychiatric disabilities like PTSD or panic disorder, autism and neurodevelopmental conditions, diabetes, epilepsy, and severe allergies. Each of those dogs can cost $50,000 or more to train, and the failure rate can be around 50 percent. The waiting list to receive a service dog can be years long.
We’re trying to identify biomarkers that will make that process more effective. If we can identify successful learners earlier, we can shorten that time for people getting the dogs that they need.
We’ve collected more than half of our scans. We’ve already identified signatures of trainability and human-directed communication. So we’re finding important information. And now there’s just no money.
This is a type of science that has an impact that most people could see in their homes.
We’re making really hard decisions about what scans we collect. And there will be less data. We will probably have less solid conclusions.
Our grants were recently reinstated, but Harvard is strongly expecting them to be canceled again in the near future. We were warned not to count on the continued access to these funds.
We can’t really ramp back up to where things were before, because if I did that, if or when the grants are re-canceled, we would have a bunch of costs we can’t cover. So instead, I’m trying to collect a little bit of new data to allow us to have things to analyze in what I anticipate will be a longer dry spell ahead.
We’ve also lost two postdocs. They both left due to not feeling comfortable with the visa situation. They just didn’t feel safe. One of the postdocs was studying how early life stress impacts dogs and how that rewires their brains. So that’s something else that we now don’t have money or people to do.
If people want this type of research, if they want better knowledge about service dogs and how dogs’ minds work, there has to be funding for it.
Erin Hecht is an assistant professor of human evolutionary biology and the director of the Canine Brains Project at Harvard University.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
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