SABRINA LEWANDOWSKI was diagnosed with a stage four glioblastoma – an insidious brain tumor that most people don’t survive. Many hospitals would have advised her to go home and get her affairs in order. But Duke proposed a more complicated, aggressive therapy that would attempt to outwit the tumor through unconventional means.
Today, 23 years later, Lewandowski is living proof that research matters and works. She went on to give birth to Layla, a healthy baby girl, in 2012 and to sing the praises of the doctors who saved her life and gave her a beautiful future.
“I wouldn’t be here without research,” she says today.
Advances in cancer treatment like hers are just one of the ways that research at Duke is improving – and saving – lives. It’s given rise to the motto “From our labs to the ones you love.”
For those who face a health care crisis themselves or who fear losing a loved one with a critical disease, the value of this research is crystal clear. That makes the potential loss of federal funding for such research cause for grave concern.
Jenny Lodge, vice president for research and innovation at Duke, does not sugarcoat the situation. “This is heartbreaking,” she says, “because this research is so important to the future of our society, and to the world and the survival of humans.”
She spoke not just about medical research but about all research projects caught up in the decisions by the federal government to cut funding that universities have counted on to support life-changing scientific investigation.
Mike Bergin, the Sternberg Family Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, recently has seen two grants related to his air quality research put on hold and then, possibly, restarted. He has been told by the State Department not to make any long-term plans.
“In the big picture, it might get canceled again,” he says. “That’s where I am now.”
By eroding this partnership and not replacing it with something equally effective, the United States is going to lose its competitiveness in so many areas.”
– JENNY LODGE
To make matters worse, the National Institutes of Health has sharply reduced what it will reimburse universities and research institutions for Facilities and Administrative costs. These F&A reimbursements pay a portion of what Duke spends for research, including the costs of lab equipment, building maintenance, and the safe and ethical treatment of research subjects, among other infrastructure and administrative essentials. Lawsuits have stopped the government from immediately reducing the F&A funds, but where matters will end up after inevitable appeals is far from clear.
The financial complexities these funding changes mean for Duke’s – and the nation’s – scientific enterprise are enormous, but they’re not the only problem Lodge and Bergin worry about. The partnership between the government and universities to fuel scientific advances that lead to new drugs, treatments, discoveries and products emerged after American science helped win World War II, Lodge notes. “By eroding this partnership and not replacing it with something equally effective,” she says, “the United States is going to lose its competitiveness in so many areas.”
Bergin shares those concerns but finds space for hope.
“I’m an engineer, so I feel like I’m a problem solver, not a problem creator,” he says. “So I’m thinking there has got to be a way to keep these things going. There has to be a way to find some funding, you know. I don’t know what it is, but it’s got to be there.” Stay tuned. n