“This freeze — these levees at this magnitude — is and will be absolutely devastating to our research community and to biomedical research,” Dr. David Shackelford, a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told CNN Aug. 9 about the federal government’s suspension of approximately $584 million in research grants to the university.
The suspensions have halted some 800 research projects across a range of disciplines, from medicine to engineering — projects aimed at advancing human knowledge, improving lives and changing society for the better.
“Our research has effectively been frozen,” Shackelford said, “and this is biomedical research, cancer research that is impacting patients today, tomorrow and in the near future.”
Shackelford, who researches lung and other types of cancer, compared UCLA’s biomedical research community and enterprise to an ecosystem in danger.
“It takes decades and decades to build, and once you destroy that, it does not come back,” he said. “The U.S. is a world leader — if not the world leader — in biomedical research, and we need to preserve that and treat it as a national treasure.”
