Quick Take
Roughly 150 UC Santa Cruz protesters rallied against President Donald Trump's cuts to research grants Tuesday, including biologist Alison Mills, who learned her research on cell division would lose NIH funding.
On Tuesday, about 150 UC Santa Cruz students, workers and faculty, rallied as part of a national day of action against the Trump administration’s wide ranging attacks against higher education, including its cancellation or freezing of billions of dollars in federal funding for research.
Standing outside the Baskin School of Engineering, post-doctoral scholar in biology Alison Mills told the group how a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program that funded most of her work was terminated as part of the cuts. She found out last Wednesday.
“The work we do here makes the world a better place and saves lives,” she said Tuesday afternoon.
The action, called “Kill the cuts, save lives,” was organized by national unions and organizations including the American Association of University Professors, the National Education Association and the United Auto Worker (UAW) union. Organizers are demanding the Trump administration not make cuts to research funding, which has contributed to lifesaving research and medical treatments. For example, funding has gone toward childhood cancer research which has helped contribute to decreasing the childhood cancer death rate by 70% over the past 50 years, according to the American Association for Cancer Research.
The federal government has terminated billions of dollars in federal grants from the NIH to universities and medical centers and cancelled millions in additional federal contracts and grants to specific universities, including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. The Trump administration says that it is freezing the funds or terminating them to prevent what they claim is waste or the “illegal” use of funds for diversity, equity and inclusion programming.
In addition to cutting federal funds for university research, his administration has terminated the F-1 records and visas for dozens of international students, including about 50 at the University of California. Over the weekend, UCSC officials confirmed that three of its students had been impacted.
Rebecca Gross, graduate student union chair, told Lookout on Tuesday she was “seething with anger” when she learned of the terminated records of international students. She said she’s not certain what those students are choosing to do about continuing their studies.
“I just want to help,” she said. “I know there are limits to what we can do right now but my hope is that we’ll be able to help these folks.”
On Monday, UCSC spokesperson Abby Butler declined to tell Lookout how specifically the university is responding to the termination of their records and if the students will continue their studies. She said “we’re seeking more clarity on the impacts of this action and are focused on supporting our students.” She declined to say if the students were undergraduates or graduates.
Similarly, UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason declined last week to say how many of the school’s programs or grants had been cancelled or terminated by the Trump administration.
“Federal investment has played a critical role in enabling UC Santa Cruz to conduct cutting-edge research that has helped to improve lives and livelihoods,” he wrote, via email. “UC Santa Cruz researchers are helping to ensure the United States remains the worldwide leader for innovation.”
Mills studies how dividing cells cope with damage to their DNA and what cells can do to correct that damage. She said that research has important implications for cancer biology and research because of how generally cancers are cells “dividing out control, which leads to inappropriate growth of tumors, and general bad progression of cancer.”
By understanding how the cells adapt and continue to divide, Mills said, scientists can better understand ways to create treatments to prevent them from dividing.
She said most of her salary, which is about $60,000, was funded through the NIH’s Institutional Research Career and Academic Development Award. Mills said it’s unclear at this point if that funding will last through July or December since the program was terminated.
“We don’t know for sure,” she said. “It’s all kind of vague and everyone is scrambling to figure it out.”
Mills said that ideally researchers are with the program for four years, and she’s in her third year. She works at the UCSC Institute for Biology of Stem Cells in Bill Sullivan’s Lab located at the Sinsheimer Labs Building.
Without that NIH program and the funding it provided, Mills said she doesn’t know if she and the other nine or so other post-doctoral scholars funded by that program will continue to do their research. If she can’t continue at UCSC, she hopes that she’ll get a job as a biology lab instructor at a California State University or community college.
“It’s pretty devastating,” she told Lookout. “I was very sad to see that the program had gone. It was such a great program, not only is it funding research training, but also, it’s training the next generation of teachers and researchers.”
Gross said as the federal government makes these cuts, workers are starting to push for the California state legislature and the University of California to fill the gaps. She asked, for example, why the UC doesn’t use its reserves, or why the state legislature can’t place a tax measure on a ballot, to help fully fund education institutions during this financial crisis.
“I don’t understand why the [UC Board of Regents] and the UC Office of the President are just rolling over and letting this happen,” she said. “Why aren’t they demanding something more?”