“Science Is a Public Good”

The federal government has terminated numerous federally funded grants and contracts to Harvard and is scaling back investments in scientific and medical research across the country. In this series, Harvard Medical School scientists discuss how these actions are affecting their research and their labs.

I became interested in science as an undergraduate. 

One summer, I won a small fellowship to work with a scientist who was collecting ancient shark fossils in a prehistoric bay in Montana. We camped in the middle of nowhere. Every day we’d wake up and dig in the blistering sun. It was incredibly exciting — you’d open up a rock and find a fossil that no one had seen for 300 million years. It gave me the feeling of being part of something bigger than myself. That experience dramatically shifted my trajectory.

I started out teaching high school science, but I realized it wasn’t scratching my research itch — I wanted to figure out new stuff. I applied to every open research assistant job at the universities nearby and got hired by an immunology lab. As soon as I started working there, I realized that I loved immunology and wanted to pursue it as a career. Research is about bringing some new bit of knowledge to the world. It’s also fun. Every day is a puzzle, whether I’m asking big questions about data or trying to fix a broken piece of equipment.

I am trained in biology, and I co-lead an immunology lab with my husband, Alon Oyler-Yaniv, who has a background in theoretical physics. Unlike most organs, the immune system is everywhere in your body — it’s circulating — so it needs an intricate system of communication between cells. To understand how the immune system works, we need to understand how immune cells communicate to coordinate such a far-reaching, system-wide response.

We think that our work will help scientists develop better immune therapies for cancers and other hard-to-treat diseases.

We study the “communicators” of the immune system — the small signaling proteins released by immune cells. These proteins persist in the body and can have powerful inflammatory effects. On the one hand, they’re critical in helping the immune system fight off pathogens and cancer. On the other hand, these proteins can have negative effects because they divert cells and organs from their regular jobs, forcing them to switch gears and focus on immune response, taking away cellular resources. We’re investigating the factors that control how far these proteins spread and how long they last.

Ultimately, we hope that our findings will help us understand chronic inflammation, which is a big problem but remains poorly understood. To come up with ways to reduce chronic inflammation, we have to learn more about how it works on a basic biological level. We think that our work will help scientists develop better immune therapies for cancers and other hard-to-treat diseases.

We launched our lab during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it has been a tumultuous road. We had to build from the ground up and train students on basic experimental techniques that they didn’t have the opportunity to develop during remote learning. Then, just when we felt like the lab was taking off and hitting its stride, the Trump administration took over. We applied for an R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a highly competitive grant that represents a big funding milestone for a new lab. Our proposal included contributions from every single person in the lab and got high scores from the scientific panel of reviewers. It was on its way to being funded when the government banned all future federal funding to Harvard. It was jarring to have so many people work so hard on something for so long and then have it taken away. It was a real emotional and moral blow for the lab. We felt like we had something important to offer the world, and our peers agreed, but then it was like, nope.

We’re already seeing a major ramp down in experiments in the lab, and it’s slowing our progress. There are many interesting questions that we no longer have the resources to answer. The biggest challenge, though, is the people. Our lab is made up of many international folks, and their status is up in the air. How can they focus on an experiment they want to do three months from now when they don’t know if they’ll have to leave the country before then?

Others in the lab are also dealing with uncertainty about their future. The level of distraction is unbelievable. It’s been difficult as a mentor to provide leadership and reassurance when we can’t really tell people that everything is going to be OK. We just don’t know. We’ve also had to renege on multiple offers to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are already here and ready to work. It’s gutting to have a vision of where the lab is going and then realize we won’t be able to do work we thought we’d be able to do.

We’re trying to get creative and apply for money from private foundations, but those grants are small compared to an R01 grant, and the application process is time-consuming. It takes time away from research and mentorship and dealing with the personal crises that many of our trainees are experiencing. For me, as a junior faculty member, it feels like an exercise in futility. I don’t have existing industry connections that I can use to secure more funding. I don’t have a start-up that I can focus more of my time on. I think the impact on younger investigators has been intense.

I feel deeply that science is a public good — and because it’s a public good, it should be funded primarily by the taxpayers, who are the ones to benefit from the work. Sometimes it’s hard to see how basic science will be converted into a treatment or something that will directly benefit humanity. However, it’s important to remember that most breakthroughs are the culmination of a huge, collaborative effort that takes place over many years. Science is not one person figuring out a major unanswered question.

As a scientist, you are one of the people who takes your little rock and puts it on the giant rock pile of human knowledge. All that knowledge together is what allows the next question to be asked, the next breakthrough to be made.

Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is an assistant professor in the HMS Department of Systems Biology.