In other news, a Trump
administration policy to limit
the overhead expenses of medical
research has powerhouse
research universities like UW
Madison reeling.
Most medical research is funded
by the National Institutes for
Health.
The new policy would limit Niaid's
funding for indirect costs
to 15%,
far below the 55.5%
overhead costs at Madison.
The cut is currently blocked
by a federal court.
UW School of Medicine and Public
Health Dean Robert Golden is here
to describe the implications.
Dr.. Thanks very much for being
here.
It's a pleasure.
So what would the loss of $65
million, which is what I understand
it is a year by way of cuts
to these indirect costs mean
to research.
Madison This would be devastating.
This would be apocalyptic.
This would mean that we would
have to dramatically
scale back and
probably end really
important research going from the
bench to the bedside into the
community in areas like cancer,
diabetes, heart disease and
neurologic illnesses.
So you're you list those costs
again as being 55.5%
of research expenditures.
What what does that go toward?
Well, here's one way to think about
it.
It's Valentine's Day and I'm going
to cook dinner foreshadowed to to
celebrate when I go out
and buy the groceries, the eggs
and the cheese for a quiche.
Those are direct costs.
But I need to have a refrigerator
to keep them safe.
I need to be paying my electric
bills in order to have the
cookware work.
And so the indirect costs
are literally freezers
that literally keep things safe
for both clinical
as well as pre-clinical research.
And they are essential.
Otherwise the food goes bad
and you can't prepare dinner.
So is it possible to reduce
those costs to 15%?
And if forced, what goes?
Well, the infrastructure goes.
Our equipment
becomes old and not replaced.
New buildings are not built.
Renovations for both
equipment and the actual buildings
are not there.
The staff who are required
to fill out all the forms from the
federal government, ensuring that
our people in the labs are safe
cannot be kept on.
So it would be absolutely
devastating.
And yet it's being made out
as bloated administrative
expenditures to pad the
books on the backs of taxpayers.
What's your response to that?
Anybody who has been in
academics, anybody who's been in
research would never use the word
bloated, shoestring,
living on the edge.
Funding already is
so competitive and so low that
every day every investigators
looking for more efficient ways
for her to keep her research going.
What research is happening right now
that would be hurt?
We have important clinical trials in
cancer, for example, for patients
who have failed to respond to
conventional treatments.
These are important not simply for
the science, but for those
individual patients.
We have new promising treatments
that have gone from basic
discoveries into practice
looking at potential new
therapies for blinding illness.
We have a lot of research that
really focuses in on asthma
and childhood asthma, in particular
nationally renowned research.
All of this, including the
laboratory basic science
that leads to new therapeutics,
as well as the clinical trials
looking for safety and effectiveness
would be at serious risk.
What are some of the kind of famous
breakthroughs found through research
at UW Madison?
Well, in fact, one of the very first
medications for cancer
treatment for Flora Uracil
was discovered right here.
We have also had amazing
technological breakthroughs with
Tomo therapy, a sophisticated
way of doing imaging
that not only has helped countless
patients worldwide, but has led to
spinoff companies that built up our
economy.
There are so many exciting
new breakthroughs going on, but
they build on a tradition that
has been present here ever since
the founding of the NIH.
So the cuts are currently blocked,
as we mentioned.
What measure of solace is that?
Well, it's just a temporary
reprieve.
We do hope
you have to be hopeful in order to
be in academics in our days.
That patient
voices, voices of
reason will
lead to a
more than temporary restraint.
It's not to say that
our system is perfect.
It's one of the best in the world.
But there might be.
Ways to continue what's already
happening, to look for
the most efficient ways that
we can continue to invest in
research so that we're investing
in the health of people in
populations.
All right. Dr. Robert Gold, thanks
very much.
Thank you.
I think they
must have realized that what
they were doing was illegal
as well as unwise.
But this is just one of
a series of things.
But this one would be
really, really deadly for
universities like ours.
Yeah.
And then, you know, they're talking
about universities like Harvard
or something.
But are they?
They're huge endowments.
That's what they always point to.
I mean, UW has its
own but not you
can't compare.
Yeah, but those huge endowments
are wisely being invested
in stuff.
Yeah. Okay.
It isn't as though they're just
sitting there.
And if you go to the Harvard campus,
they have the advantage of doing
all the investments beyond what
we are able to afford to do
in cyber security.
Something you're familiar with.
But, you know, right now,
it takes a lot of running just to
stay in the same place in terms of
the safety of patient data.
There is brilliant hackers out there
in terms of the safety for
the, you know,
radioactive compounds that we're
developing for a third Gnostic for
cancer treatment.
And so you can't say, that's
just fluff.
It's the kind of things
ranging from
effective hoods to protect
the gases that you're working with.
You can't say
the research can go on without the
indirect because the indirect make
it safe to do the research.
And Harvard, you know, I wish
I had their IT structure.
We have pretty damn good I.T.
here, but it's nowhere near the
computing capacity that they have.
So they're not just sitting around
counting their dollars or putting
it in there.
And, you know,
it's kind of like saying, well,
you know, so our
teachers
are getting a pay cut, but they
get paid more than the folks that
clean the schoolhouses.
Yeah, but teachers still can't
afford to get a pay cut.
They have to deal with inflation and
the inflation, especially in
pharmaceuticals, that we need for
research and other biomaterials.
It's costly.
Well, we will follow this.
And thank you.
Would like to have you back when
there's some understanding
of what's going on.
Yeah.