For the past several days, I’ve been in the UK, first hearing music and seeing art in London, then walking and visiting beautiful sites in East Anglia (Suffolk), and most recently attending the opening Symposium for the newly constructed Francis Crick Institute near King’s Cross in London (see photo). (Can anyone guess what the commissioned statue in front of the building might represent?) The symposium featured about a dozen speakers from outside the Crick, including several from the US, a few from continental Europe, and others from other places in the UK, talking about a wide variety of scientific topics relevant to biology and medicine. (In my own talk, I described three projects underway in my laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine that address questions raised by the profiles of mutations found in cancer genomes.) Most talks were terrific and spirits were high, reflecting the aspirations of the Crick scientists and their financial supporters from government, philanthropy, and universities who helped to build this extraordinary new institute. At the breaks, however, most of the questions I had to field were much less cheery, reflecting the confusion, consternation, and frank anger that many here are feeling about our new President’s proposal to reduce the budget for the NIH by about 20 percent (nearly $6 billion). We all know that this is a proposal, not a done deal. (Congress will eventually need to pass an appropriations bill that determines the fiscal year 2018 budget for the NIH and all other Federal agencies, and the NIH has many friends in both parties.) But this week’s announcement from the Office of Management and Budget sets the starting point for the coming debates at a very low level and (perhaps more importantly) indicates the no-holds-barred approach that the President and his advisors appear to be taking to our country’s scientific enterprise—and will likely continue for at least another four years.
The budget proposed for the NIH and for many other agencies that do important things for the nation and the world is already eliciting an enormous response and will certainly be a featured element in the March for Science in late April; I look forward to discussing these matters with you during our forthcoming classes. In the meantime, I hope all of you are getting prepared for our next class on Monday evening (yes, March 20th) by reading the assigned texts as outlined on our web site. In addition, I must again ask those who have not yet done so to identify one or more possible topics for an essay for our course. I have heard interesting proposals from about half of you, and I intend to meet individually with every student in the next couple of weeks to provide advice about how to pursue the topics on which we can agree. I look forward to our reunion on Monday at 6PM.