‘Scientists have been cut off at the knees’: Scientific community rallies for research funding
Camille Sipple Published March 7, 2025
WASHINGTON—Thousands of scientists, patients and concerned citizens from across the country showed up in the name of science on Friday at the Stand Up for Science rally in Washington.
Since February, the Trump administration has been attempting to rewrite a National Institutes of Health policy which would carve out millions of dollars of funding from research including Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease as well as clinical trials.
For Elizabeth Stone, this policy-change could be life or death.
Stone, 36, was diagnosed with refractory Hodgkins’ Lymphoma at age 24 and has been on more than 12 medications since. Due to the nature of her cancer, each medication she is given eventually stops working, typically after less than two years Stone said.
“I’m now on the last FDA-approved medication that is on the market for my cancer,” Stone said. “That will fail eventually. At that point I will rely on clinical trials.”
Stone has already been taking her current medication for nearly a year.
Cancer-survivors such as Judy Lorenz and Martha Brettshneider stood alongside physicians and scientists at the Friday rally — many out of concern for future generations.
“I just really feel for young women — my daughters and granddaughters,” Lorenz, 67, said. “We need the research to keep going. We’ve made so many strides for it all to just halt.”
Protesters line the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial | Washington D.C. | MARCH 7, 2025
"It's going to take the decision-makers' family members dying," Brettshneider said. | Washington D.C. | MARCH 7, 2025
Brettshneider said she worries lawmakers’ eyes won’t be opened until their own loved ones are affected.
“Unfortunately, the hit on science, it’s going to take the decision-makers' family members dying,” the 61-year-old said.
“Without objective, evidence-based science people are going to lose their lives,” Christine Markwalter, a global health researcher at Duke University in North Carolina said.
Markwalter, 34, said she, along with countless other members of the scientific community, feel their profession and public health is being threatened by the Trump administration and by the Department of Government Efficiency’s actions under Elon Musk.
Researchers, scientists, cancer survivors and more gathered together during the Stand Up For Science protest at the Lincoln Memorial | Washington D.C. | MARCH 7, 2025
Young researchers, scientists and PhD students were also among the protestors gathered at the Lincoln Memorial Friday afternoon.
As an early-career researcher, Ciara Weets said she has been bracing herself to lose funding, or even her job over the past several weeks.
“Personally I’ve been horrified at the ways in which misinformation has been spread and scientists have been cut off at the knees,” the 24-year-old Georgetown University global health science research associate said.
At his wit’s end, Dan Barton, 44, said he could not think of anything else to do but start showing up at events like Stand Up for Science. A professor and vice chair of the wildlife department at California Polytechnic University Humboldt, Barton said he hopes to make his voice, and his students’ voices heard.
“I’ve worked my whole life to serve the public good that is science, in the belief that it makes people’s lives better,” Barton said. “I train students everyday in science — they are completely demoralized right now.”
Barton said he plans to take stories of the protest back to his California students and give them hope for the future.
“We need them. It’s their future, as much as it is mine,” Barton said.
Dylan Hale, a neuroscience researcher at Johns Hopkins University, explained that he and his colleagues are united by a hope for a better future.
“That’s what drives us to keep working in science,” Hale, 34, said.
The future of science is in question when academic funding is attacked, Johns Hopkins PhD Candidate, Lucas Dillard added. By leaving research up to the pharmaceutical industry, less-profitable studies into diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer are neglected, the 29-year-old said.
“We need institutions like the NIH to support that and without that research our future is pretty bleak,” Dillard said.
“Freedom from illness, from disease. That’s what we’re all out here fighting for,” Hale said. “That’s what I’m fighting for.”