Voices: I owe my career — including a vital Great Salt Lake discovery — to federal science funding. Don’t let the Trump administration cut it.

Just in time for Pride Month, researchers working diligently towards a long-awaited HIV vaccine were notified last week that their work would be abandoned, setting back decades of investment and progress against the pandemic. This is only one of the latest devastating blows dealt in the ongoing war on science.

Surely you’ve heard by now how science is under siege in the United States. In short, Trump’s proposed FY2026 budget would mark massive and unprecedented budget cuts for the country’s two major science funders: the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

As a Utah scientist, I fear we will not immediately feel the full impact of these abrupt and sweeping cuts to science spending. The consequences will slowly seep into the day-to-day lives of our children and our children’s children, long after this administration has left office.

I immigrated to this country as a child, brought up by a U.S. system full of opportunity and promise. I was the first in my family to graduate from college, and I never really left. Sheer wonder held my hand through the many hurdles of my post-graduate education. Every few years, I stuffed all my earthly belongings into a single backpack, all I needed to start a new lab job at a different university in an unfamiliar city. My story is not atypical of academics in this country. Ever stressed but never bored, I still consider myself lucky to have learned something new every day of my life.

Today, I am an assistant professor of cell and molecular biology at Weber State University. I owe my career — teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientists — to funding for basic science through the NSF and NIH.

In my lab, we study extremophiles, or animals that survive in stressful environments. Research on extremophiles has led to many instrumental surprises. Taq polymerase – a commercial enzyme used to diagnose diseases and amplify DNA from crime scenes – was initially isolated from thermophilic bacteria in the spectacular hot springs of Yellowstone National Park.

To explore the molecular mechanisms of how animals adapt to extreme environments like high heat, high salinity or lack of oxygen, we study organisms such as nematodes and treefrogs, both in the lab and in the field, and use genetics as a tool for discovery.

Fundamentally, a genetic approach shows how things work by breaking the instructions manual and seeing what happens. For instance, we can conduct “forward genetic” screens in laboratory nematodes, wherein we use chemicals and X-rays to randomly mutate their DNA and observe what changes happen to the worms. We can then trace these mutations back to identify which specific genes allow the nematodes to survive in the extreme environment — essentially creating a genetic roadmap of survival.

Terms used to describe this kind of non-hypothesis-driven research are “descriptive research” or “basic science,” in which information is collected without a particular question in mind and analyzed with the goal of finding new patterns.

In an era when pursuing the treatment or cure of specific diseases is a major driver, this type of basic science is not always easy to justify. However, the benefits of basic science are well-documented as a global driver of life-saving care, treatments and technologies. For instance, this system was able to transform decades of basic research on mRNA into safe and effective products — such as the federally supported COVID-19 vaccines — at warp speed. Likewise, recent advancements in curing sickle cell disease and metabolic disease using CRISPR-mediated genome editing were built upon the curious observation of repetitive DNA sequences in bacteria in 1987.

I have seen how basic science research generates fascinating unexpected findings firsthand. In discovering a novel species of nematode in our neighboring Great Salt Lake, we stumbled across symbiotic bacteria which enhance survival in extreme salinity in laboratory nematodes. These cross-kingdom associations could be the key for new questions and methodologies related to extremophile survival and can likely be exploited in the future to benefit plant growth in a changing environment. Unexpected avenues such as these have convinced me of the value of basic science research.

Like planting a seed, the benefits of basic science take time to take root, to grow and to materialize in society. Private firms tend to underinvest in basic science because it benefits society as a whole and in the long term, rather than the firm’s immediate bottom line. But every dollar spent on public science by the NIH ultimately generates $2.56 in economic output. In the long run, these proposed cuts to funding for basic research and development will cost the economy billions annually, just to pad the pockets of the few.

If you value science, please call your representative and urge them to reject Trump’s spending plan.

Dr. Julie Jung is an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at Weber State University. This essay represents her own views, not those of her employers. This article is part of a nationwide effort, called The McClintock Letters, to communicate the role of science funding in society. Click on the citizens for science pledge to give feedback: tiny.cc/sciencepledge.

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