How the Shutdown Is Devastating Biomedical Scientists and Killing Their Research

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.

Unlike most other government medical researchers, this scientist has been allowed to visit the laboratory to feed rodents used in research by the scientist's group. Many if not most of the rodents will soon be euthanized.

It's not a matter of feeding the animals and cleaning their cages. These animals used for research are used in intricate experiments, involving treatments and collection of data performed by hundreds of individual scientists with each project. An animal caretaker can't continue that.

Given that, you can imagine what has to happen. You cannot maintain colonies for no reason. It's very expensive — and if they're useless for research, what are you going to do? And mice and rats breed like crazy. An exponential expansion of the population that will rapidly fill all the cages.

Every lab I know already works to maximum capacity. You can't leave animals for somebody to feed and water. So every time a shutdown happens, measures have to be taken. The politicians might talk gloatingly about how they averted a shutdown five minutes to midnight, like the last one — but that's too late. The damage has already been done. All our preparations have to be done well in advance. As soon as you find out there's only going to be caretakers for the animals, the experiments have to end.

We do our experiments 24/7 in my lab. You have to harvest at particular times. Experiments need to be processed and manipulated. A week's interruption would mean wasting and interrupting a lot of material — but what we're given is a shutdown of an indefinite period. We don't know what's going on. We try to maintain as much life and resources as possible, but there's a lot that can't be maintained given an indefinite shutdown.

While talking about the imminent death of the animals, remorse enters the scientist's voice. I'm surprised: After all, the rodents are going to be killed during the experiments anyways, right?

We only take the life of an animal if it's justified to provide new insight that will lead to basic understandings in science, or new treatments in human disease. We understand and appreciate that. We don't do it lightly. We do it deliberately.

There's a difference between using an animal to obtain knowledge of human disease, and just having to engage in a mercy killing for no outcome, and with an enormous loss to science and to resources. It's a waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of people, a waste of animals.

I ask if the scientist is being paid.

I'm not being paid. They've promised to compensate me when this ends.

Here I am in a dark building. I walk by the snack shop that this family runs, that everybody here in the building uses. They're an immigrant family, hardworking, they take the bus to work. They're here before anybody else and leave at the end of the day. Now that door is closed. That family is getting no money. They're not going to recover it. They're not going to be paid for the lost income. These are hardworking people that need the money. And it's all lost because of politicians engaging in this political terrorism.

Democracy means that you're not always going to get your way. That's what democracy is. To apply a really loaded term — but I think it's appropriate — those engaged in this, I view theirs as anti-American behavior. It's ironic that factions with names like Tea Party and Patriot engage in anti-American behavior: shutting down the government because they don't agree with a vote passed by the majority. And I don't care what the issue is. We always have our right- and left-wing factions. Nobody ever gets their way. You can't sabotage the entire government in a democratic society and still have an America. What you end up with is a failed democracy.