Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump's Cruelty

Last year, University of Washington School of Medicine professor of biochemistry David Baker won the Nobel Prize for his work on designing proteins that can be used in drugs, vaccines, materials, and sensors. But now that the Trump administration has begun to greatly diminish the role of research and gut scientific funding, around 15 of Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US, NBC News reports. Meanwhile, a major funding squeeze is forcing Baker and his colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design to reevaluate and cut back. "There’s so many amazing people who want to come […]

Apr 14, 2025 - 23:03

Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump's Cruelty

Around 15 of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist David Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US.

Last year, University of Washington School of Medicine professor of biochemistry David Baker won the Nobel Prize for his work on designing proteins that can be used in drugs, vaccines, materials, and sensors.

But now that the Trump administration has begun to diminish the role of research and gut scientific funding, around 15 of Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US, NBC News reports.

A major funding squeeze is forcing Baker and his colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design to reevaluate and cut back.

"There’s so many amazing people who want to come in, and we can’t take them," he told NBC. "The Nobel Prize was just a little blip. But things have gotten quite bleak."

Trump's war on science in the US has sparked concerns over a major brain drain, with a Nature poll of more than 1,200 scientists finding that a startling 75 percent are now considering leaving the country.

The Trump administration has gutted federal agencies, with the National Institutes of Health ringing the alarm bells following massive layoffs and budget cuts. Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been ordered to be canceled by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

"Right now, due to the funding cuts, we are unable to enroll any more participants into federally funded studies, or start new studies, or do really any new work," UW Medicine infectious disease researcher Rachel Bender Ignacio, who cut her own salary to distribute money to the rest of other staffers, told NBC.

Even politically uncontroversial lines of research, including Alzheimer's and cancer, have been swept up in a major shrinking of funding, which could lead to significant slowdowns in progress toward treatments, cures, and other interventions.

"We’ve gone through a bunch of contingency planning," University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center director Thomas Grabowski told NBC, referring to grant decisions slowing to a crawl. "When it starts to look like multiple, multiple, multiple months, then there’s not a good answer to your question."

The university received about 1,2200 grants from the NIH, worth around $648 million, last year. This year that approval process ground to a halt, and more than 600 grants are still in limbo.

Scientists are now in the dark, awaiting some much-needed clarity from the agency, which has spent much of its resources pointlessly chasing after president Donald Trump's number-one bogeyman: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

"The fact that they’re cutting these things or putting them in limbo is really upsetting, and you know, I feel like they’re doing surgery with a chainsaw at the federal level," retired attorney Andrea Gilbert, who had undergone treatment for Alzheimer's disease under Grabowski's care, told NBC News.

More on the NIH: Trump Administration Throws Cancer Research Into Turmoil

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