Everybody loses in the war on science
Nicole Garneau refuses to get political. She’s a scientist and she knows that while politicians come and go, the quest for knowledge continues whether scientists take to the streets or hunker down in their labs.
Being a scientist has always been a roller coaster ride.
Sputnik launched the country on a brief binge of spending for science in the schools in 1957. Richard Nixon’s War on Cancer in 1971 produced a burst of public funding for research. Jimmy Carter advocated for alternative energy development in the 1980s only to have subsequent presidents slash budgets and derail progress.
Now Garneau, curator of human health at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the principal investigator at the Genetics of Taste Lab, faces the era of Trump, who has proposed an 18 percent cut for the budget of the National Institutes of Health. Support for her lab, which includes a $1 million NIH grant, hangs in the balance.
Across Colorado, hundreds of scientists face the prospect of scrambling for money to continue their work. In a letter to faculty and staff members at the University of Colorado School of Medicine this month, Dean John Reilly Jr. characterized Donald Trump’s proposed budget as shortsighted and destructive.
“These proposals reflect a lack of understanding of the value of biomedical research and fail to acknowledge the significant co-investment that our university and others across the country make to support this critical aspect of our mission,” he said.
While some biomedical research is done by the private sector, vitally important work simply isn’t. It’s not profitable. It’s why we have endless research for new drugs to treat erectile dysfunction but had to have an epidemic sweep western Africa before any serious effort was made to find treatments for Ebola.
The Ebola virus had been killing people since 1976, but urgent work supported by governments around the world to address its spread didn’t happen until 2015. A lot of science isn’t exactly sexy. Garneau didn’t find a cure for Ebola, but she did focus her graduate work on understanding how viruses work. It’s this painstaking basic research that makes more dramatic scientific discoveries possible.
“We have to invest in basic research because we don’t know what’s important yet,” she said. “We don’t know what challenges are going to come up in the future. The big discoveries come on the shoulders of decades, centuries really, of basic research.”
Visitors to the museum are well aware of her work. Many of them participate as research subjects.
While the Genetics of Taste Lab performs the important function of bringing the scientific method to the public and demonstrating up close how a double-blind study works, it also is producing important data.
Volunteers have their cheeks swabbed to gather DNA and taste foods — sour flavors, for example — and then rate them in terms of palatability. The scientists will analyze the data to determine what genetic factors play a role in personal taste.
Taste may seem like a trivial matter, but with obesity and diabetes posing increasingly serious threats to public health, the critical aspect of how we taste food could be a key to unlocking the mysteries of treating these intractable conditions.
Garneau said scientists have not done a great job of communicating with the public. “They stand at a podium and use jargon to talk to their peers,” she said. No wonder we don’t understand.
And too many of us have been willing accomplices to the efforts to malign their work.
Inconvenient facts, such as the overwhelming evidence that smoking is harmful to health, were buried for decades under dishonest tobacco industry campaigns to discredit them. The fossilfuel industry has followed the same script to undermine the reputations of climate scientists worldwide.
So if you’ve ever taken an antibiotic, signed on to the internet, listened to a weather report or wondered what the big deal was about small pox way back when, thank a scientist.
Even the mother of all bombs can’t help you like she can. Diane Carman is a communications consultant and a regular columnist for The Denver Post.