Family ties: NIH funding cuts threaten science ‘lineage’

Many young researchers start their careers in the labs of senior scientists, and sustaining the mentoring is key.

SCIENTISTS have two families — their spouses and children make up one, and the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in their labs, who are addressing the scientific questions of the future, are the second. A proposed 20 percent cut in the budget of the National Institutes of Health promises to terminate the nascent careers and discoveries of the second family, the young researchers who seek to address some of the most troubling biomedical issues in the world today: cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders and emerging and evolving infections.

Shortchanging research now will only short circuit the progress that could be made if these “families” can stay in the laboratory and continue to work on pressing issues that affect not only the United States, but also the world. Science works when one generation mentors the efforts of the next.

We live this example daily. The pedigrees of many young scholars at Baylor College of Medicine start in the labs of some of our most senior scientists. One line of scientists begins with Dr. C. Thomas Caskey, whose career began in 1965 at the National Institutes of Health where he was a research associate of Nobel Prize winner Marshall Nirenberg. He continued his work in genetics until 1971 when he left NIH for Baylor College of Medicine. Here, he became chief of the section of medical genetics and professor of medicine and biochemistry. With him, he brought

an important member of his team, Dr. Arthur Beaudet, who has played an important role in unraveling the molecular glossary of epigenetics as it applies to the genetic diseases that affect children from birth. Dr. Beaudet became chair of Baylor’s department of molecular and human genetics, and it was he who put Dr. Huda Zoghbi on the trail of the gene that causes spinocerebellar ataxia 1, a neurodegenerative disease that affects roughly half of the members of families in which the mutated gene occurs. She continued to work in the area of genetics, finding many genes, including the gene for Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disease. She is currently director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Insti

Clockwise from top: Noted National Institutes of Health researcher Marshall Nirenberg, whose Nobel Prize-winning work would give rise to Baylor College of Medicine scientists Dr. C. Thomas Caskey, Dr. Arthur Beaudet, Dr. Huda Zoghbi and Dr. Rodney Samaco.