How important do you feel discovery research and ‘basic’ science is for understanding disease? Well, I have a little bit of a biased view on the topic, since I'm a basic scientist myself. The lab has made more and more discoveries with very strong therapeutic implications, and often people ask me why we are not pursuing these further ourselves. Part of it is that I think about this very much as an ecosystem. People have different skills – I have colleagues who are very good at the application side of things and I have other colleagues, including people in my lab, who are very good at the basic science. There are a lot of very smart people at every stage in the ecosystem and, sometimes, we have to acknowledge that we can't all be experts in every step. A lot of basic science discoveries will end up having profound implications in the clinic – if you don't have the full imagination about how to get it there, that's okay, because you're still a very important piece of the jigsaw puzzle and other people can help. If the basic science discoveries didn't exist, then it's quite possible that the well would run dry. We cannot simply rely on the idea that the therapies currently in clinical trials are going to be enough because we already know that – for diseases, such as cancer, and with rapidly evolving viruses – there needs to be a constant influx of new ideas to stay ahead of the arms race. I'd also make a plug for the fact that, ultimately, we are all interested in human disease, but disease research in humans is not ethical or possible. This is why creating and studying model organisms in a high-throughput, low-investment context is incredibly important. We cannot just say ‘okay, we're going to stop work on anything that is not related to human research’, because – actually – it's all relevant to humans.
Do you think basic science is particularly threatened by cuts to funding? Science itself is quite uncertain. We do experiments wondering if they will even work. It's discovery, and you don't know where it's going to lead. It could lead to a billion-dollar company, something like mRNA vaccines or CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, or it could simply be something that interests you. Sometimes it might appear esoteric from the outside, but there are very smart people dedicated to this work. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that most of this work is paid for by taxpayers, but funding uncertainty creates a very unstable foundation. If the foundations are weak, people are going to get much more conservative about the science that they're doing and worry that ‘blue-skies research’ is not worth pursuing because it won't get funded. And that would be a mistake because all innovation in science really originates from blue-skies, basic research. The second thing that uncertainty does is send a message to our young trainees – who are our future – that this is not a career option that will provide professional and personal stability. I worry that this kind of uncertainty will mean we lose an entire generation of people, and that would be a loss we might not be able to overcome.
I was interviewed by @katiepickup.bsky.social recently for @dmmjournal.bsky.social. This has a little bit of my background, a little bit on science and mentoring, and a little bit (ok, more than a little bit) on funding in science.
Check it out at: journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/...
