Anastasia Khvorova's lab at the University of Massachusetts' Chan Medical School faces funding cuts threatening scientific progress. Photo / Kate Wool, The Washington Post
Anastasia Khvorova is perched at the edge of a massive scientific opportunity.
Her laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School deploys cutting-edge RNA biology with one aim: to solve diseases – the ones that rob people of their memories or endanger pregnant women.
Lately, she sees peril all around her.
In the hallway, she bumps into one world-class chemist, then another, whose salaries are supported by federal funding the Trump Administration has proposed to drastically slash.
Many are immigrants like herself, who can no longer be sure America is the best country in the world to do science – or that they are welcome.
Khvorova built her career by thinking boldly, but if slowdowns and cuts to federal science funding continue, she’ll be forced to winnow her ambitions.
“What is happening right now is absolutely suicidal,” said Khvorova, speaking softly in Russian-accented English.
“I will stop making drugs. I will reduce my lab from 30 people to five. I will stop training scientists.”
With stunning speed, the Trump Administration has over the past six months cut research dollars, terminated grants and hit the brakes on federal funding, destabilising an 80-year-old partnership between the government and universities that has made the United States a scientific superpower.
The policy twists may sound arcane, but to researchers, everything is at stake.
Day-to-day, Khvorova’s lab is bright and buzzing. Scientists are trying to develop cures for Huntington’s disease or halt the muscle loss that comes with ageing. Longer term? “I have no clue,” Khvorova said.
The Trump Administration portrays its changes as a targeted correction.
Officials say grants are being terminated because they touch on topics with which the Administration disagrees, such as increasing diversity in science.
Funding to specific universities has been frozen because they haven’t protected Jewish students, according to the Administration. Fundamental research, Trump officials vow, will thrive.
“The money that goes to basic and blue-sky science must be used for that purpose, not to feed the red tape that so often goes along with funded research,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy, said in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences in May.
In contrast, a recent report from the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that President Donald Trump’s budget request for 2026 – including a 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health – would slice the nation’s basic research portfolio by about a third.
A new report from the Congressional Budget Office found that a 10% cut to the NIH budget would result in two fewer drugs invented per year, a gradual decline that would go into full effect in 30 years.
The Trump Administration’s science agenda is getting pushback in courts, in Congress and at the state level, but the impacts are being felt in research institutions across the country.
As of August 1, the Chan Medical School had a US$37 million ($62m)shortfall in funding because of long delays at the National Institutes of Health.
Khvorova is no stranger to doing science under challenging conditions. She trained at Moscow State University in the waning days of the Soviet Union, when there was sometimes no hot water, no reagents for experiments, no salaries. Even that has not prepared her for the abrupt policy swings that threaten the unique American research system.
“We are working on developing cures, which are not politically oriented,” Khvorova said. “Democrats age, and Republicans age.”
Disruptions will ripple over decades, since no one can predict what science breakthroughs in the lab will turn into world-changing innovations.
Khvorova’s work built off years of federally funded research into soil-dwelling microscopic roundworms that revealed short strands of RNA perform like symphony conductors, controlling the activity of genes and turning their volume down.
Worcester, a gritty former mill city in Central Massachusetts, is home to two Nobel laureates and an RNA Therapeutics Institute that has spawned 12 start-ups.
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a company based on the phenomenon originally discovered in roundworms in labs at Chan Medical School and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has discovered six drugs now approved for diseases that include rare genetic conditions and high cholesterol.
The company’s market capitalisation has soared to more than US$50 billion, and it has 2200 employees.
Basic research “is almost like the starter when you bake sourdough bread. You can’t make the bread without it,” said John Maraganore, who led Alnylam for nearly two decades before he stepped down in 2021.
In the labyrinthine, slightly cluttered labs at Chan Medical School, scientists tend to high-end instruments with geeky names like “Dr Oligo”, using them to synthesise strands of RNA aimed at treating fatal forms of dementia or diseases that cause muscles to waste away.
Under sterile hoods, they grow millions of mouse liver cells for experiments. In a small room called the “wormhole”, decorated with colourful worms hanging from the door jamb like icicles, Victor Ambros, a Nobel Prize-winning worm biologist, zooms in on mutant roundworms wriggling across a yellowish agar gel.
Unlike Harvard University, which has had billions of dollars in funding choked off by the Trump Administration, Chan hasn’t been targeted. But it is not untouched.
Like hundreds of other institutions across America, it has been thrown off stride day-to-day and week-to-week by the Trump Administration’s unprecedented efforts to downsize and reshape the agencies that support science.
Uncertainty looms over nearly every experiment and conversation. Slogans, not scientific sketches, are scrawled on the frosted glass wall of one office:
“We want scientific data, not alternative facts!”
“Girls just wanna have (NIH) funding”
“Science Not Silence!”
More than a dozen NIH grants, out of several hundred, have been terminated, though they are tangled up in lawsuits challenging the Trump Administration’s actions.
About 200 employees have been laid off or furloughed, about 3% of the medical school’s 6500 employees. A hiring freeze has been in place since March. Graduate school offers to nearly 90 young biomedical scientists were rescinded, though 13 spots were salvaged for next year’s class.
“We have this feeling of extreme uncertainty, in a context where, previously, we could depend upon a robust system, a merit-based system that was predictable for the right reasons – the best science will get funded,” said Ambros, who shared the Nobel in medicine last year.
Jesse Lehman, a graduate student who focuses on understanding the speed and dynamics of immune defences against pathogens, became hooked on science when he first felt the rush of discovering things no one else knew.
There are no guarantees in this career – the contest for federal funding is exceptionally competitive. But what has fuelled the system is its reliability.
The federal Government funds the best research, year after year, and scientists chase grants without worrying that the funder may lose interest in neuroscience or immunology and decide instead to buy a sports team.
But now, federal funding may be there one moment and gone the next.
“I have this fear that the career that I’ve worked 10 years on developing just may not be viable,” Lehman said.
In textbooks, science is a steady march of progress. In the lab, it’s an iterative process – filled with detours and dead ends that sometimes turn out to be surprises that push the field forward.
In 2006, Chan biologist Craig Mello shared the Nobel Prize with Stanford University biologist Andrew Fire for the discovery of a phenomenon called RNA interference: short double strands of RNA could silence genes.
It is a profound biological mechanism shared not just by tiny worms, but by humans. Other scientists built on the work, capturing the interest of venture capitalists and pharma companies.
Many human diseases are caused by errant genes. What if, instead of treating patients’ symptoms, doctors could give their patients drugs that just shut off the problematic ones?
More than a billion dollars flowed into start-ups, but biology turned out to be a bit more complicated. Investor ebullience evaporated.
Alnylam, an RNAi company, began trading below the amount of cash it had on hand, meaning investors thought its stock was less valuable than the money it had in the bank.
Years of science – including a lot of chemistry – eventually turned a profound biological mechanism into a new class of safe effective drugs.
“Sickness doesn’t have political boundaries,” said Phillip Zamore, a co-founder of Alnylam and a professor of biomedical sciences.
“Everyone deserves a better treatment for their disease, and I just want to make that possible. And I can’t do that if my lab, my university, my colleagues’ ability to do science is destroyed.”
In the past few years, several biotech companies have spun out of Chan, including Comanche Biopharma, which is focused on a treatment for pre-eclampsia – a complication of pregnancy – and Atalanta Therapeutics, which is searching for cures for neurodegenerative diseases.
Khvorova, a co-founder of both companies, came to the US with very little money in the mid-1990s, intending to check a box on her CV and stay a year or two. Instead, she became a “typical example of the American Dream”, as she puts it.
She’s an inventor named on nearly 250 patents. She just scooped up one of the most prestigious prizes in biomedical research, with a US$2.7m award. She should be on top of the world.
But as she walked to her lab on a recent Tuesday, she gestured sadly at a collection of empty champagne bottles sitting high up above the cabinets in the lounge outside.
Each bottle, she noted, is a trained graduate student – a reminder that most of next year’s class was turned away.