“The federal shutdown’s effects on science and medicine are many. There’s halted food safety inspections, kids with cancer who won’t be able to join clinical drug trials, and suspension of disease outbreak monitoring. Conservation studies have been thrown into disarray and at least one NASA Mars mission is at risk of being delayed for years. But one area where the devastating effects aren’t getting much public attention is basic biomedical research. What’s happening to the thousands of researchers and billions of dollars dedicated to understanding human disease and development? I talked to a government biomedical scientist about the shutdown’s effect. Because the scientist was instructed not to speak with the media, this person will remain anonymous. Below is an edited version of what the scientist told me. I’m sitting here, the only person in the whole wing of this building, alone. The lights are off in my office. It’s very depressing. It’s very sad. I don’t think the public realizes the devastating impact that this has on scientific research. Scientific research is not like turning on and off an assembly line. Experiments are frequently long-term and complicated. They involve specific treatments and specific times. You can’t just stop and restart it. You’ve probably just destroyed the experiment. You also can’t necessarily recover. You can’t begin an experiment all over again. If you do, you’ll be set back months — if there’s even time and personnel to do it. But often, science moves rapidly, times change, and you can’t re-initiate the experiments. It’s an enormous loss to scientific research, an enormous loss of time and personnel. Scientists are hardworking people. They work long hours, on weekends, and they do that because it’s necessary. The schedules they follow aren’t like an industrial plant’s. If you interrupt them, they can’t pick up and start again. It’s an enormous waste of money and resources to interrupt this and have it abandoned.””
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 09:16:56 +0000
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