Seeing clearly is literally the life work of Anna Vlasits.
She is a neurobiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago, studying how neurons work together in the retina of your eye to make vision possible.
“I’m a basic researcher,” Vlasits said. “I’m brand new to UIC. I started my lab about a year ago.”
Jane Miglo is a biology graduate student trying to cure ovarian cancer, which kills 140,000 women worldwide every year.
“My whole lab focuses on women’s health,” Miglo said. “It’s already an area that’s underfunded in comparison with the lethality of the disease.”
Michael Schultz is a senior director at Portal Innovations, a biotech venture capital firm in the West Loop that operates shared lab space for startups. He knows firsthand how the most obscure research can blossom into practical applications.
“You don’t know what’s going to come from it,” he said. “One example are these GLP1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy treating obesity. The first one was discovered in the saliva of a lizard, and now it’s the biggest drug ever and hugely helping the obesity crisis.”
These three scientists aren’t professional agitators. None has ever organized a public protest before. But the trio is part of the effort behind Chicago’ s “Stand Up for Science” rally Friday at 12 p.m. at Federal Plaza, one of 32 rallies taking place nationwide to draw attention to the enormous damage caused by the Trump administration’s wholesale slashing of National Institutes of Health research.
“I’m at the stage I’m just building,” Vlasits said. “I got a startup fund from the University of Illinois to get going, but after that I need NIH funding. That is the way biomedical research happens in the United States, through this funding, and to have it get slashed and denigrated — it’s a really scary place to be as a new researcher.”
Michael Schultz is a senior director, at Portal Innovations, a venture capital firm in the West Loop. He said companies working to translate new academic discoveries into practical drugs and treatments “are at a loss what to do” in the face of sweeping National Institutes of Health cuts.
Provided photo.
“A lot of grad students are feeling very discouraged,” Miglo said. “Programs around the country either are not admitting students or have significantly reduced the number of grad students they’re taking next year in anticipation of funding cuts.”
The cuts were so abrupt, the prestigious University of Pennsylvania found itself clawing back offers to graduate students who had already been notified they were accepted.
As tough as these cuts are for universities, at least those have been paying students to soften the blow. They will be ruinous to stand-alone institutions like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Founded in 1890, it’s home to eight Nobel Prize winners and employs 1,000 people.
“The impact to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and other academic scientific research institutions is unsustainable,” the New York lab said in a statement. “The U.S. has long been the leader in scientific research. If this NIH guidance stands, the country will see a loss of discovery, innovation, and competitiveness, and ultimately a loss of well-being in the nation’s health and economy.”
Research initiatives are simply vaporizing in the chaos. Miglo spent half a year preparing a proposal for her project exploring how ovulation can spark ovarian cancer, which seemed on its way to approval until the NIH was decimated. Giving her time to worry that language in it could cause her proposal to now be rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific merit.
“The word ‘woman’ is being potentially censored in the verbiage of what’s being said in grants,” she said. “The first sentence of the fellowship I submitted to the NIH has the word ‘woman’ in it because that’s where ovarian cancer is.”
They’re expecting hundreds of people Friday for the rally and realize their voices may fall on deaf ears.
“I’m someone who always been, ‘What is a protest rally going to do?'” Vlasits said. “I think I’m being radicalized by this situation. It’s time for us to start standing up. If we don’t do it, who is going to?”
“It’s the patients who are going to suffer in the long term,” Miglo said. “It’s the discoveries. If we don’t speak up, what’s the alternative?”
“We work with a lot of startup companies, which the NIH and the federal government also support,” Schultz said. “These are companies trying to translate the discoveries made by universities into actual drugs and devices that can help patients. They’re all at a loss of what to do. We’re going to have employees laid off, really promising treatments and clinical trials to test out these treatments that are not started.
“Science is advancing so quickly. We are at the cusp of understanding and treating a lot of diseases in ways that seemed science fiction a couple decades ago. We are just going to abandon all those discoveries.”