Radical budget cuts are threatening not just US science, but its way of life

(Image: Spike Gerrell)

PESTILENCE, war, famine, death. I recently came face-to-face with all four at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a rare viewing of Albrecht Dürer’s 15th-century woodcut Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In Dürer’s time fear of the apocalypse loomed large. It wasn’t so different when I was a child. Fear of nuclear Armageddon was a constant presence, but it helped fuel the US government’s investment in science and science education, propelling the country to the top – and directly benefiting me.

Now the fears of the 1960s have receded, the US government – or parts of it – are reopening the door to the four horsemen through a radical retrenchment of the science programme.


Scientists are sometimes criticised for exaggerating the importance of their work, but I think they underplay it. Science is the main force that keeps the horsemen at bay. The US still leads the world in science spending overall. But if the spectacular shrinkage of government science funding continues, we will be inviting all four of them into our homes.

If the shrinkage of science funding continues, we will be inviting the four horsemen into our homes

Pestilence is what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about, and it has done a good job. Deadly childhood illnesses have largely been eliminated, chiefly through vaccination. Smallpox is gone; polio is almost gone. Many non-infectious diseases are also in retreat: coronary heart disease mortality has fallen substantially in the US for decades, cancer rates are declining and cures for many cancer types are taken for granted. The fruits of the Human Genome Project for personalised medicine are ripening slower than some expected but still offer great opportunity for future health. My field of epigenetics, for example, deals with how the environment alters DNA. It promises to tell us how genetic variation and activities such as smoking combine to cause disease.

The US still leads in biomedical research spending, and output measured by research publications, but it has been declining for over a decade. Funding for the NIH is now down to 2000 levels, taking inflation into account. NIH funding was doubled under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton; it should be doubled again.

Worse, its budget has been slashed by another 10 per cent for the second half of this year under “sequestration”, the US’s austerity programme. And things are going to get worse. Sequestration will lead to an additional 9 per cent cut next year in overall government spending, and the non-profit Coalition for Health Funding reports that the House of Representatives is considering NIH cuts of a further 19 per cent, stopping work in progress and shutting down new ideas.

Additional cuts will also strike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the finger in the dyke against new pandemics – there is a bad one fulminating right now in the Middle East. The CDC is in the process of cutting virtually all of its funding to schools of public health for research on epidemic preparation.

What of the horseman of war? Historians credit economic development and the growth of the middle class as the greatest engines of peace, and scientific advance is the greatest driver of this development. The return on investment for publicly funded biomedical research is greater than 30 per cent per year in jobs and technology.

Examples are recognised by a bipartisan Congress group in the Golden Goose awards. This year’s went to a technology for counting paint particles that became the backbone of blood tests used everywhere. A previous one went to research on masers, which led to the lasers that drive technology from digital media to surgery.

Famine? Malthus predicted endless catastrophe caused by the population outgrowing its food supply. When I was a kid, mass starvation in China and India was taken for granted, until scientist Norman Borlaug saved a billion people with the green revolution.

We face new threats, however, from alarmingly reduced biodiversity. The wild relatives of crop species are an important resource of genetic diversity for improving agriculture, but a new report warns that the wild relatives of around half of the world’s most important food crops are threatened with extinction. At the same time the US Geological Survey has shut down its National Biological Information Infrastructure programme, the best source of information on the country’s biological resources. We would do well to remember that the Irish potato famine in the 1800s was largely caused by over-reliance on a single strain of potato.

What is more, a recent study from the UK’s Met Office directly linked famine in Africa to global warming, yet climate research and even the reality of warming are under assault in the US.

Then there’s death – at least premature death and dementia, a kind of living death. One great example shows how science can save us. Al Sommer, an ophthalmologist studying night vision, accidentally discovered that vitamin A could reduce infant mortality in developing countries. His efforts have saved perhaps 100 million children. That is science at its best.

No politician has an answer to cognitive loss, other than to fund brain research. President Obama recently launched a $100 million brain initiative, complementary to a similar European programme – but he had to find funds from the existing, shrinking NIH budget. It’s a no-brainer that Congress should find new funds for research like this.

I know science is not usually front page news, but it drives the front page. In the long run it is the only thing that can keep the horsemen at bay and ensure generations to come are healthy, peaceful, well-fed and long-lived. And that’s no exaggeration.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Apocalypse soon”