Andrew Read completed his undergraduate studies in his native New Zealand, earned his Ph.D. at Oxford, and was serving as chair of natural history at the University of Edinburgh when, in 2007, he took the opportunity to come to Penn State. For Read, an evolutionary biologist by training, the motivation was simple: the robust support from U.S. government agencies for the trailblazing research being done by American universities such as Penn State.
“Everybody wanted to get trained in America, because this is where the finest science was being done,” he says now. “And the reason was the federal-university partnership.”
Today, Read is the Evan Pugh University Professor of Biology and Entomology, a leading expert in the ecology and evolutionary genetics of infectious disease, and since last year, Penn State’s Senior Vice President for Research. He appreciates as much as anyone the value of federal support for essential research being done at “R1” universities such as Penn State—those institutions responsible for the highest levels of spending and doctorate production. And he knows what’s at stake if the federal funding that supports that research goes away.
We sat down with Read in August to discuss the threat posed by drastic federal funding cuts—some proposed, some already in effect—to public health, the economy, and quality of life.
PS: What do you think the average non-scientist might not understand about just how essential federal funding is—the research impact of universities, the necessity of federal support?
AR: Those of us in the research and development business recognize that the federal-university partnership is what has driven American exceptionalism since the Second World War, generated huge amounts of prosperity and health gains, and that it’s the envy of the world. Today, there is a belief that the government doesn’t need to be involved in upstream basic research, because industry will do that research. That has not been the case for decades, because companies need to make a profit in the short term. Universities are nonprofit organizations, and we tend to do the work with trainees, graduate students and postdocs, so we can do the basic work substantially cheaper than industry.
More importantly, professors are prepared to take risks. Their job security is not tied to company performance in the short term. You can have 100 professors working on something, and 99 of them fail to produce a technology that works, but the one that does is the one that feeds things into industry, and industry picks that up and runs with it. The universities derisked that whole area of technology. I think the public misunderstands the unique and deep role federal-university partnership play in America prosperity and wellbeing.
I also didn’t realize that folks thought of the cost recovery we get for doing federal research as an income stream for the Penn State. It isn’t. The Feds reimburse us for the cost of doing the research they ask us to do. We do the research, and the federal government covers the costs of doing that research.
PS: That’s keeping the lights on, essentially.
AR: That’s right. Public universities can’t do federal research for the government without the cost of that research being covered. To a reasonable approximation, Penn State doesn’t have an income stream other than student tuition.
PS: Another misconception seems to be just how many things that benefit all of us in our everyday lives are made possible by federally funded university research. It’s a massive list; what are some specific examples that jump out to you?
AR: The classic example is your phone—all the basic technology in there, the computational side and so forth, the materials, the semiconductors, all of that, developed by federal research decades ago. Artificial intelligence came from federally supported computer science work done on campuses in the U.S. The vast majority of breakthroughs in cancer therapies over the last 15 or so years have developed from basic research that’s been federally supported in the universities. It’s not just cancer, of course; it’s almost every other type of ailment, the great breakthroughs in antivirals, HIV therapies. All of that’s been done with federal support, and universities have their hands on all of it. It’s hard for me to think of anything in technology, health gains, wealth gains, of the second half of the 21st century that didn’t have their roots in university R&D.
PS: And to clarify, this isn’t happenstance or coincidence—this research essentially cannot happen without federal support.
AR: That’s right. And it’s the envy of the world because of that. Other countries have tried other arrangements, and you typically can’t get the scale of basic research—the basic discoveries in quantum science, for example, which make quantum computing now a possibility. All of that fundamental quantum science, and all the quantum materials work, has come out of the universities. Now, big companies can pick it up and run with it, but they’re doing that with the workforce trained in universities—the scientific expertise that was generated on campuses—and using the basic research that no company could have afforded to work on for decades without immediate return. The market forces can’t allow those long-term investments in the basic science.
PS: What are some notable examples of Penn State’s research impact?
AR: Certainly the novel treatment around neuroblastoma—a recent breakthrough in therapy on very aggressive brain cancers in children. We have a faculty member, Giselle Saulnier Sholler, who’s come to Penn State who is working on that issue.
PS: Quite literally, research that is saving children’s lives today.
AR: Yes. And that story is really interesting: She joined dots together and made some pretty inspired guesses. And when she did that, had that work not worked, she would have had a grant to keep her lab going; it’s not the end of her world. Whereas in [private industry], that very high-risk work may be a long shot. But you can do it in the university environment, because there really is so much support.
PS: Presumably because that work is expensive.
AR: It’s expensive, and you have trainees that need to be in the lab to make these things happen. And then of course some of our facilities within which the work is done are very expensive. The Materials Research Institute, for example, which has really fantastic clean rooms, and really fantastic [mirrored] materials characterization equipment—that’s very expensive equipment.
One of the stories I most like: A Penn State alum had been at Texas Instruments. He had started up his own company. He had a very successful exit, and then with time on his hands, he came up with an idea that had to do with semiconductors in power transfer in places like digital data centers; he had an idea about a widget that would make that more efficient. He came to Penn State to the materials lab. He paid the government’s rate to do the research there, and in return he got the facilities, troubleshooting, and so forth. That widget turned out to work. He prototyped it, and now he has a small company, iDEAL Semiconductor, that has really good paying jobs in eastern Pennsylvania. So that’s something where he had an idea and our facilities and so forth, our federally supported facilities, enabled him to turn that idea into prosperity.
PS: And job creation.
AR: And job creation, right.
PS: That’s probably an underdiscussed aspect of all this.
AR: Yes—and the other way around, too. A small company with an idea that doesn’t have the facilities to test their idea, prototype things. So, they come here.
PS: This goes back to that idea of “keeping the lights on,” which might not be clear to readers, but that’s also about jobs.
AR: A large chunk of what the Office of Physical Plant does here is keep research facilities running at the top of the line. That is many jobs on this campus. We spent $1.44 billion last year at Penn State on research, and a large chunk of that $1.44 billion is in Centre County and in Pennsylvania. That’s the research itself, the vendor relationships; buying all the things that need to go into the lab. It’s an economic powerhouse. But I would still say that the reason it really matters is what that powerhouse is directed towards.
PS: Can you say a bit about what Penn State has been doing to adapt to federal cuts thus far?
AR: To put this in perspective, we’ve had around 70 grants terminated, at a loss of roughly $12 to $15 million. And we’ve got about a $20-million grant hanging in the balance. So that number might change. For now, less than 1 percent of the research operation has been terminated. Now, in the scheme of things, one percent is not that significant, although for those individuals and students, and for the patients and people that would have benefited from that, it’s pretty devastating. But even bigger threats are still out there, from possible reductions in the amount of money we get to support this research, and possible reductions in the amount of money the country is spending as a whole on research—reductions in NSF budgets, reductions in NIH budgets, and so forth. And also, somewhat hidden is the slow speed with which the federal dollars are currently going out to universities. The NIH has a lot of money to spend that is not being spent at the previous years’ speed. So there are very significant drops in activity.
At the moment, the university is trying to deal with new contract negotiation terms with terminating grants, shifting priorities, all of that. More broadly, it’s finding the resources to support, for example, the students who were funded on terminated grants. Then it’s the possibility that we’re left with the cost of terminating that project. If the federal government, which has always been a strong, reliable partner, can stop a project, it causes significant trouble. For example, if you have to lay people off, at Penn State, we need to give four weeks’ notice. That cost is not recoverable from the federal government. We’ve got equipment in one of the projects that’s been cancelled, and the cost of decommissioning the equipment is not being met by the agency that supported the research in the first place. So even when things are terminated, you incur costs.
Going forward, the real difficulty is the uncertainty. Should people take new graduate students? Will there be funding in certain areas? All of that uncertainty is causing us terrific problems. And then what is called indirect cost recovery, things like keeping the lights on, the costs of remaining compliant with federal regulations. All of those costs are substantial. If we went to the proposed caps on that, Penn State would lose almost $100 million a year straight out of its research ecosystem. In order to keep the research going, we would need to find nearly $100 million from somewhere else, and there isn’t a somewhere else. Even if we doubled our industry investment, that’s still not anywhere near $100 million. At a big public institution like ours, the internal money effectively comes from student tuition. And to what extent should the families of Pennsylvania have to subsidize federal research? If these cuts went ahead, Penn State would have to do a lot less research.
PS: Speaking of students, another aspect here is the opportunities for student research that are essential to students going into these fields.
AR: Absolutely. There’s no question that students get a great education by coming to an R1 institution like ours. They’re taught by the people who are running the labs within which they can work, they get undergraduate research experience. They’re exposed to some of the best cutting-edge facilities in the world. They’re mentored by graduate students who are working in research labs. If Penn State reduces the size of its research operation, that’ll mean fewer research students, fewer graduate students, a smaller workforce—a trained, scientifically expert workforce—for America. But as well, fewer undergraduate research opportunities in the labs, fewer faculty that are doing research that’s the cutting edge that we’ll be teaching the students.
PS: What, if anything, can alumni do to help here?
AR: There’s a lot that alumni can do. Most obviously, they can help raise awareness of Penn State’s research impact, and the importance of research for Pennsylvania, for America. Share on their social media, or when they’re talking to their elected representatives, letters to the newspaper, and so forth. There’s a lot that can be done.
I also think about advocacy on the part of companies big and small, on the importance of our research. We’ve got C-suite alumni all over the country in companies that are benefiting from the R&D pipeline that starts in the universities. People in those positions making the case would be great, or providing internship opportunities for our students to do research in their companies. And I would say, become engaged in the Penn State philanthropic environment. We’ve got to try to get ourselves to the point where we don’t lose our current expertise.
PS: You mention reaching out to elected officials, and it seems worth noting that federal support for research has traditionally been an issue with strong bipartisan support.
AR: Different administrations have different priorities, and that’s part of the territory, and to be expected. But the enterprise itself—the facilitation of high-risk research that happens at universities—is a very bipartisan issue. It drives wealth and prosperity and health in America, and it has done so for 80 years. Politicians across the entire spectrum have been hugely supportive of the way in which America has done its research. It is the envy of the world.
To learn more about the potential impact of funding cuts to Penn State research, visit
psu.edu/research/real-world-solutions.
