Harvard Needs to Look into Industry for Scientific Funding

Yesterday, Harvard secured a huge win in the battle for funding research. But the war on science is far from over.

United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to freeze over $2.6 billion in research funding was unconstitutional. This decision restores grants, at least temporarily, but it’s still unclear as to when labs will receive their money back. There are also questions as to whether this decision will even stand. Liz Huston, a spokesperson for the Trump administration, vowed to appeal the ruling. Should the case reach the Supreme Court, it’s unclear with whom the justices will side.

Yes, Harvard has achieved a short-term victory. But the funding could vanish again as easily as it reappeared. This whole battle should serve as a wake-up call that reveals the model of government funding is changing and that scientists at Harvard and peer institutions should look elsewhere, including into the private sector.

Trump’s vendetta against Harvard seems to indicate that he will not rest until he wins. This court battle could very well follow the same path as SFFA v. Harvard: the District and Circuit courts side with the University, but the Supreme Court doesn’t. If Trump wins this case in the Supreme Court, nearly 70 percent of Harvard’s annual research funding will be wiped out. If he loses, Harvard’s victory will be Pyrrhic — with the scientific careers of so many having been sacrificed.

This isn’t an issue that just affects those in Cambridge or Longwood, either. More broadly, the Trump administration’s decision to cut “indirect costs” exposes how the landscape of federally supported science is eroding. And so, although these cuts were blocked in the courts, the very fact that they were proposed in the first place casts doubts on the reliability of continued government research funding.

In the past two decades, multiple breakthroughs have affirmed the viability of partnership with industry funding. One need not look much farther than Somerville, where bluebird bio has its offices. The company was founded by two MIT faculty — one of whom is now at Harvard Medical School — who used private sector assets as a source of funding. Their advancements eventually culminated in the creation of a gene therapy for beta-thalassemia, which received FDA approval in 2022. The accomplishments of such biotech companies should signal to investors that Harvard researchers are wildly successful at what they do, and that this sort of partnership could greatly benefit them.

Now, this is indeed just one success story — out of probably hundreds of failures. Additionally, it’s quite challenging to even get industry backing in the first place. Many biotech companies have a narrow focus on profitability, whether that be crafting vaccines for Covid-19 or even bringing back the woolly mammoth. For those labs not studying anything with a clear angle for monetization, it would be a Herculean task to try and secure funding from investors. Yet that’s precisely what scientists need to do now to circumvent potential losses of federal funding.

Historically, this is an unpopular stance — it’s long been known that academic science is famously industry-averse. Yet this stigma is largely a modern phenomenon. Wealthy industrialists endowed some of the first research universities, and their companies often maintained close relationships with these institutions. From the very beginning, industry and academia were conjoined. It was only much later that they became strange bedfellows.

Of course, the quest to find private funding doesn’t preclude the ongoing fight for government funding. In fact, we should do everything in our power to keep up the fight. Private-sector funding isn’t a perfect solution, for many reasons. Studies have shown that research funded by companies can often be biased and inequitable. To combat this, the University would have to set up protections for their faculty — such as mandating that companies fund labs for a minimum period of time. And still, even if a scientist does manage to obtain private funding, it’d be tremendously difficult to raise enough money to be able to support new graduate students.

Worse yet, much of the innovation made with private funding won’t necessarily be able to help many people. Bluebird bio’s treatment for beta-thalassemia is technically on the market but touts the astronomically high price tag of $1.8 million. It could very well be argued that this fee completely negates the lofty ideals of science — why innovate if those innovations aren’t available to everyone?

But we are in dire times, which call for dire measures. Should disaster strike us again, it seems as if the best way for scientists at Harvard to keep the lights on is to collaborate with private companies — or else risk losing it all.

Alex Xu ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.