UC Berkeley Scientists Protest Trump Administration’s Cuts to Research Funding

Chanting “defend science, defend democracy,” hundreds of UC Berkeley scientists and their students emerged from their labs on Friday afternoon to protest the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to scientific research institutions.

The rally on Sproul Plaza was part of a string of one-day demonstrations dubbed Stand Up For Science and held on university campuses across the country. The protest called for the restoration of federal research funding from the National Institutes of Health and condemned what many scientists are calling an all-out assault on scientific progress.

“I would not be here without support from the National Institutes of Health,” Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley professor of biochemistry, told demonstrators on Friday.

NIH, the largest biomedical funder in the world, spent $35 billion on grants for research last year. Doudna, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her pioneering work on CRISPR gene editing, said an NIH training grant allowed her to attend graduate school and ongoing support from the NIH is a key source of funding for her lab.

“We can’t take that support for granted. We have to be standing up for it,” she said. “We have to be informing our congressional representatives how important it is and encouraging them to reach out and stand up for what’s right in science — that science can only be done with the appropriate federal funding.”

Friday’s rally comes just days after a federal judge extended an order mandating the NIH to continue holding off on massive funding cuts for an array of scientific and medical research. The order, originally issued last month, stems from a lawsuit filed by attorneys general from California and more than 20 other states to block the Trump administration from slashing the funds.

Despite the judge’s order, the Trump administration has used an arcane law to freeze huge amounts of funding for biomedical research, which researchers say has already put hundreds of critical studies at a standstill, including work on pancreatic cancer, brain injuries and child health.

In the last academic year alone, the University of California system said it received roughly $2.6 billion in NIH research funding, a significant portion of which would be slashed moving forward as part of the administration’s agenda.

“A cut this size is nothing short of catastrophic for countless Americans who depend on UC’s scientific advances to save lives and improve healthcare,” UC President Michael Drake said in a statement last month.

Juliet Christian Smith of El Cerrito said she showed up for the rally because federal funding for cutting-edge immunotherapy treatment saved her husband’s life after he was diagnosed with skin cancer eight years ago.

“It’s the dream of parents to leave the world a better place for your children,” said Christian Smith, as demonstrators behind her chanted, “Science saves lives.”

“And I know the scientists here around me, that’s what they work to do every single day — to cure diseases and to make people’s lives better,” she said. “It’s still so wild to know it’s a bipartisan issue, having a good life and having a long life.”

In addition to the funding freezes, the Trump administration has dealt relentless blows to the nation’s scientific and medical establishments, often using executive orders to kill funding for global health programs, gut climate research, remove thousands of scientific datasets from government websites and fire more than a thousand workers across federal science agencies, including the National Weather Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Russell Wilcox, an engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended the protest in a white lab coat and goggles. Scientific progress, he said, shouldn’t be stifled.

“Everybody is contributing in various ways,” Wilcox said. “It’s a very interconnected process, and if you wreck one part of it, then the other parts suffer, and you don’t know what the impacts will be.”