Trump's Energy Department just killed jobs in 19 states

ARPA-e's announcement sounded good. But now it turns out

to be just a tease.

It's a lot easier to kill jobs than to create them. It is much easier to kill innovation than to create it. Trump's Department of Energy, led by former Texas governor Rick Perry, seems to be taking the easy route.

As reported in the journal Science this week (and first reported by Politico Pro), DOE has halted its process to award $70 million in new grants that its research agency, ARPA-E, had announced this past December. ARPA-E is the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, created to fund high-risk, high-reward new ideas about energy.

Even more alarming is that DOE has imposed a gag order on the program managers, so that scientists have no idea why their funding is being delayed, or it if will ever arrive. According to the Science story,

"The resulting uncertainty is having a devastating impact on research teams, scientists say, and even threatens the viability of small companies for whom these major awards are so important."

The move, which came with no warning, leaves many scientists, including young Ph.D.s just starting new jobs, suddenly without jobs. Bloomberg BNA was able to extract this tiny bit of explanation from an Energy Department spokesman:

"As with any transition from administration to administration, we have undertaken a full review of all department programs, policies and taxpayer-funded grants."

I'm sure that makes the unemployed scientists and struggling energy technology companies feel much better.

Cutting funding that has already been awarded–and which used money that was already appropriated by Congress–is especially disruptive. How can anyone hire new scientific staff when the federal agency might yank away a grant that it had already announced? The Science story described a young Ph.D. plant biologist from Penn State, Molly Hanlon, who was due to start work next week on one of the new ARPA-e projects, but now she might not have any job at all.

The 26 projects, all of them now on hold, were originally announced by DOE in December. Here are the states that are homes to the threatened projects:

California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia 

15 of the 26 projects are led by companies, most of them small companies trying to creative innovative new technologies. The other 11 are housed at universities, including Energy Sec. Rick Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M (so at least we can't blame Perry for bias). And 9 of these 19 states voted for Trump last November.

This isn't even the whole story. Eight more projects under a different ARPA-E program, ENLITENED, were told in mid-March that they would be funded, Science reports. Just a week later, though, the press conference to announce the awards was cancelled, and the program now appears to be in danger of cancellation.

I'm sure that all of these project teams invested many months in preparing their winning proposals. Leaders of the projects announced back in December were poised to begin their research until the sudden announcement this week, with no explanation, that everything was on hold.

All that Mr. Trump has to do to save these valuable, high-tech jobs is nothing; just let the DOE's ARPA-E program do its work. Unfortunately, this seems to be too much to ask.

Let's speak up for research that saves lives

In this week’s Science magazine, former Republican Congressman John Porter calls on scientists to “speak up for research.” Well, I’m all in.

We’re in the midst of a remarkable stream of scientific and medical advances, spurred by dramatic advances in biotechnology, computing, and miniaturization. Our knowledge of biology has led to amazing leaps in our understanding of aging, immune responses, inherited diseases,  and brain function, to name but a few. And yet we're cutting science funding, year after year. As Porter writes,

“the general public, and in particular elected officials, have failed to embrace the promise of cutting-edge science as a means to improve health and the economy.” 

Somehow we found (or borrowed) $2 trillion dollars to spend on wars in far-off countries whose citizens don’t like us - a cost that will at least double before we’re done paying the bills. And some politicians this past week were demanding that we invest billions more in Iraq, money that we don’t have. It's touching how concerned they are for the citizens of Iraq.

Meanwhile, eight of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. are diseases that we might cure through better research, including heart disease (#1), cancer (#2), Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and kidney disease. We already have far better treatments for these diseases than we had a few decades ago, thanks to our past investments in biomedical research.

In this column over the past few years, I’ve highlighted just a tiny sample of the remarkable advances coming out of the scientific world, such as

• a breakthrough cure for some forms of leukemia; 
• a new, less invasive prenatal test for Down Syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities; 
• stem cell treatments that can repair damaged hearts; 
• a promising breakthrough in Alzheimer’s treatment; and
• stem cells to treat blindness. 

Curing these diseases will not only save lives - it will also save money. A nonpartisan study revealed that publicly-funded research generates returns of 25 to 40 percent a year. And former Congressman Porter explains,

“If a treatment became available in 2015 that delayed the onset of Alzheimer's disease by 5 years annual Medicare and Medicaid spending would be $42 billion less by 2020.”

Without investment in research, though, these treatments will never arrive. Meanwhile, we’re spending $400 billion (13 times the entire annual NIH budget) on a new fighter plane that won’t even be ready to fly for another 5 years, after which the Pentagon says it will cost $850 billion to keep it going. We’re spending billions more on military equipment that even the Pentagon doesn’t want, such as the Global Hawk drone program, which Congress is forcing the Air Force to keep.

Obviously, the military-industrial complex has better lobbyists than we in the biomedical research world have.

We don’t invest in research just to make money, though. Make no mistake: biomedical research saves lives. We’ve effectively cured many types of childhood cancer such as retinoblastoma and Hodgkins lymphoma, but there are over 200 types of cancer, most of them still needing far more research.

We need elected leaders with the vision to re-examine our priorities and invest in the future. The U.S. scientific research enterprise remains the envy of the world, but it won’t stay that way long if we keep cutting it as we have been.

How much should we invest in biomedical research? Let me put some numbers on the table - not that we can get there overnight, but we could set these as goals and and then figure out how to get there.  How about allocating 2% of our total budget - $75 billion - for all of our biomedical (NIH) and basic science (NSF) research?  NIH’s budget is currently about 4 times the size of NSF; if we keep that ratio then NSF would get $15B and NIH $60B. That’s about twice what we spend now. We've done this before: Congressman Porter and his colleagues advocated a doubling of the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003, and we could do it again.

Congressman Porter wants us to speak up for research. Let’s start now.

Stem cell therapy offers hope for “irreversible” heart damage

In December 2011, I reported on one of the first attempts to inject stem cells into damaged hearts. In that study, published in The Lancet, scientists grew stem cells from patients’ own hearts after the patients had suffered serious heart attacks. These were patients who had serious, irreversible heart damage. As the study leader, Dr. Roberto Bolli, said at the time, 

“Once you reach this stage of heart disease, you don’t get better. You can go down slowly, or go down quickly, but you’re going to go down.”

Amazingly, in that study, the patients got better. 14 of the 16 patients had improved heart function after 4 months, and the results were even better after one year. The stems cells grew into new, functioning heart cells.

That was just one study. Now there have been more, and the results continue to be very encouraging. Just last week, the Cochrane Collaboration published a review of 23 trials, all of them attempting stem cell therapy for heart disease. These trials looked at the use of bone marrow stem cells in patients whose hearts were failing. Unlike the 2011 study, which looked at heart attack patients, these studies looked at patients with advanced heart disease who had not suffered a heart attack. The results: overall, stem cell treatments reduced the risk of death and improved heart function, though the benefits were not as dramatic as in the patients with heart attacks. 

What is most exciting in the newest studies is the long-term reduction in the risk of death. Six of the studies reported long-term results (more than one year) on mortality. In these studies, 8 patients died out of 241 who received stem cell therapy (3.3%). In contrast, 30 patients died out of 162 (18.5%) who did not receive stem cells. The numbers are small, but this is a huge benefit: patients were about 5 times less likely to die. The Cochrane review concluded that

“The risk of mortality over long-term follow-up was significantly lower for those who received BMSC [bone marrow stem cell] therapy.”

An important caveat is that this is still “low quality” evidence, meaning that we need to see more data, on many more patients, before we can have confidence in the results. But it is still very encouraging, especially when no other treatment offers anything remotely this promising for advanced heart disease.

The evidence continues to build that stem cells can repair heart tissue damaged by heart attacks. Just a couple of months ago, Britain launched the largest study yet of stem cell treatments for heart attacks, involving 3,000 patients in Europe. This new review shows that they can help repair some of the damage from other types of heart disease as well.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and we should be pursuing every plausible treatment, though very few exist. Stem cells offer the hope that, for the first time ever, we might be able to reverse heart damage that was previously thought to be irreversible. Stem cell treatments are a true breakthrough, and rather than cutting medical research, as we have been doing for the past five years, we should be pouring resources into this remarkable new medical technology and the therapies that it makes possible.