To Protest Budget Cuts, Young Scientists Try Letters to the Editor
As a scientist, Erin Morrow's focus is cerebral — literally. She studies the brain, investigating the interplay of memory and stress.
But when Ms. Morrow, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, sat down to compose a letter in defense of science, she decided to write from the heart.
Hers is attached to a pacemaker, implanted a few years ago to manage an atrioventricular block that made her pulse stutter.
'Science saved my life,' Ms. Morrow wrote in a letter to the editor that was published this month in The Marietta Daily Journal, a Georgia newspaper. 'My happy ending wouldn't have been possible without decades of U.S. research,' she added.
Ms. Morrow, 24, from Powder Springs, Ga., is one of hundreds of people who wrote to their hometown newspapers as part of a national campaign spearheaded this spring by graduate students and scientists who are just starting their careers.
They wanted to draw attention to the Trump administration's research funding cuts that are scuttling grants, shrinking science labs and stopping postdoctoral studies. Administration officials have pointed to the importance of cost-saving and attributed many of the budget cuts to changing scientific priorities. The White House has moved to cancel research in specific areas, like transgender health and climate science, and described some research efforts as wasteful spending.
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