The lobby of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, where researchers say pauses to federal grants have stifled science. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Earlier this year, Dr. Avtar Roopra, a professor of neuroscience at UW-Madison, published research that shows a drug typically used to treat arthritis halts brain-damaging seizures in mice that have a condition similar to epilepsy. The treatment could be used to provide relief for a subset of people with epilepsy who don’t get relief from other current treatments.

But even as the culmination of a decade-long project was making headlines as a possible breakthrough for the 50 million people worldwide with epilepsy, Roopra’s research was put on hold because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President Donald Trump has stopped reviewing grant requests. 

Now, months after his funding was paused, Roopra says he is facing the choice between cutting corners in experiments to save costs or laying off research staff — which comes with its own loss of years of experience and institutional knowledge. 

“Experiments are being trimmed down,” Roopra says. “So the perfect experiment, which is what every experiment must be, we’re now trying to reanalyze and say, ‘Well, can we get by with less?’ If we do, we’re not going to have the perfect answer, and that’s always a danger.”

Roopra’s lab is currently working on an experiment comparing data from healthy mouse brains to diseased brains and, ideally, he’d have ten of each. But to save costs he now has to use three of each. The result is that the conclusions that can be made from the data are less certain, which only creates more expenses in the long term. 

“What that means is we’ll still get some data, but the confidence we have in our conclusions will be drastically reduced,” he says. “And so any experiments we then decide to do based on that will be on more shaky ground, and experiments further on that will be on even shakier ground. And so you have this propagating knock-on effect, but ultimately, the conclusions you get, they’re going to have to be interpreted cautiously, whereas, if we did the perfect experiment for which we were expecting funds, we would have robust data, robust conclusions. We could move forward, forthright into trials.”

Science is expensive, Roopra says, because results have to be replicated many times. Cutting grant funding, as the Trump administration has done, results in austerity measures at labs and universities. Those budget cuts mean experiments aren’t repeated as many times, which means data isn’t as complete and results in less work reaching the end goal — treatments that improve people’s lives. 

Roopra says that when a patient sees a doctor and is prescribed a drug, that is just the tip of an iceberg, underneath which are the thousands of hours of research and millions of dollars spent at pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials and university departments testing theories.

“So it’s actually going to cost everybody more money if we do it this way, because we have to go back,” he says. “And once this moves to clinical trials, which is our goal, if we don’t have the very best, the most solid foundation for doing so, if that trial goes ahead and it fails, it may never be done again. Because trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars, you’ve got to get it right the first time. So that’s what this new normal looks like.”

Roopra’s work is just one research focus in one department on one campus. Wisconsin institutions alone receive about $750 million annually from the NIH. The Medical College of Wisconsin has lost at least $5 million in research grants since Trump took office. 

The cuts affect “every lab, every department, and we’re very biomedical-research centric, but it’s also happening outside of biomedical research,” Dr. Betsy Quinlan, chair of UW-Madison’s neuroscience department, says. “It’s happening in physics and it’s happening in engineering. It’s happening to all research, environmental science.”

Researchers in Wisconsin have had at least $26.8 million in expected grant funding terminated, according to data compiled by Grant Watch, a project to track cuts to grant funding at the NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF). 

“I’ve heard a lot of panic in the community as if the support that the federal government has for science has ended and that science is no longer the priority,” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said at an event at the Medical College of Wisconsin earlier this month. “One of the reasons I was delighted to be able to come here was to assure people that is not true.”

Nonetheless, among the terminated grants here in Wisconsin are projects to study science misinformation in Black communities, how to engage the public in water stewardship in urban areas such as Milwaukee, the effect of technology on children’s development, the cardiovascular side effects of hormone treatment on transgender men and ways to increase HIV prevention measures among gay men in rural areas. 

“It’s vital that we adopt reforms, real reforms in the research enterprise of this country, so that we depoliticize it, ground it in reality and build a culture of respect for dissent and free speech,” Bhattacharya said.

But discoveries can come from unexpected places, says Quinlan, who warns that the top-down approach to approving research grants that the administration appears to be moving toward will stifle scientific exploration. 

“If the agency says, ‘Here’s a very narrow range of things we will fund,’ it will squash all creativity and real discovery, because real discovery comes when you see something that is unexpected and you follow the unexpected lead,” she says. 

While the cuts to grants are having an immediate impact on research in Wisconsin, there are also concerns about morale among lab staff and a “brain drain” as researchers choose to leave the U.S.  or even abandon science entirely. 

“The biggest problem I think most researchers are facing is the uncertainty and decline in morale that these changes have wrought,” Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, says. “These are extremely real and fairly devastating effects on the research community in terms of what’s already happened, almost every week there’s a wave of NIH termination. No one feels their grant is going to continue for sure. That’s a difficult way to do research.”

For decades, scientists have come from all over the world to work in the U.S. Now cuts to grants and the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies are changing that. Last week, after decisions from a number of judges, the Trump administration walked back an effort to cancel the visas of 27 students at University of Wisconsin schools. Roopra says those fears hurt research. 

“Every minute that that researcher is worried is a minute they’re not thinking about the science,” says Roopra, whose work has also focused on breast cancer. “And so what it looks like is a continuous, chronic fear, which pushes us to think about maybe looking at other options, which we’d rather not do.”