Who picks the winners?

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: changes to federal funding for scientific research.

The Trump administration wants taxpayers to get better results for their money. That means new opportunities for scientists—and new questions about who decides which research gets funded. WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: Rama Gullapalli is a doctor and scientist at the University of New Mexico and his team has made it through the first round of a National Institutes of Health grant competition.

RAMA GULLAPALLI: They are trying to encourage scientists like myself to come up with novel alternatives that can help speed up the drug development process, and also provide more human-relevant information.

Universities and companies can compete. Gullapalli teamed up with some other industry experts to create a new testing regimen that could reveal whether a new drug will harm the human liver.

GULLAPALLI: If we are able to come up with novel methods and techniques to test these in the preclinical phase… that is a big kind of benefit for the entire pharma industry for sure, but also humans, because we are developing better drugs that are more effective in humans with minimum toxicity. That's the whole goal of this competition.

The competition has three phases: First, show the idea could work, then build it, and finally submit it for independent testing. Gullapalli is in stage two. Across all three phases, his team could win about 1.4 million dollars.

GULLAPALLI: It's a novel paradigm in terms of encouraging new and innovative creative ideas that is not necessarily limited to only academic institutions.

Last year, President Trump issued an executive order to change how federal grant money is distributed..

In the old system, independent experts reviewed research proposals. Now, Trump wants political appointees to review them too, and to make sure a research project’s goal aligns with his administration’s priorities.

Trump said he wanted to keep federal dollars away from projects promoting critical race theory, transgenderism, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and other so-called “far-left initiatives.”

AMBER LOCKRIDGE: Federally funded science gives us a way to invest in people whose needs might not ever be large enough to create a market on their own.

Amber Lockridge is the director of science policy for the National Association for Biomedical Research. The group advocates for the responsible use of animals in medical research.

LOCKRIDGE: What I'm thinking about then with the kinds of changes around federal grant making is: are those changes getting us closer to fulfilling that mission of serving society through science, or making it harder to do that.

She thinks the competitive approach could get scientists engaged with new ideas and technology.

LOCKRIDGE: We also have to be a little conscientious about how we're using funding decisions in order to steer scientific priorities, and that's because the available money is finite.

But she’s cautious about giving politicians more control over grant money.

She and Gullapalli say many flashy scientific breakthroughs are built on years of research that didn’t seem particularly useful at the time.

LOCKRIDGE: Those choices can have long-term consequences that the public or political appointee might not understand in a way that a trained scientist would.

Last month, Congress temporarily blocked new rules that would give political appointees more control over grants. That block lasts until December.

This year, the administration also announced plans to shift money away from universities and toward individual scientists, and considered changing the grant scoring system. It’s also trying to shift research away from animal testing.

Lockridge says it’ll take time to know which changes stick and how they affect research. Still, anything in the extreme might hurt. For example, she says some systems can replace animal testing, but:

LOCKRIDGE: When you get to the complexity of a whole living body, I think that there really is no substitute on a chip or in a computer model that can give you the same understanding.

She expects the Trump administration to keep rolling out changes, and for now, researchers like Gullapalli will have to roll with them.

He says his research grants ran out about a year ago. He’s had to buy equipment with his own money.

GULLAPALLI: It's all part and parcel of how science works. No one is funded 100 of the time. There are times when you know you lose funding, you get back funding. You keep trying for funding. That's how science is nowadays.

If his team wins the NIH competition, he plans to put his share toward his lab research.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy. 

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