Keanan Joyner: Addiction funding is on the chopping block. We must save it.

There is a lot of confusion about proposed government cuts for federal scientific research grants to universities, often focused on grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from drastically cutting medical research funding from the NIH.

The public perception on these proposals is heavily politicized — but make no mistake, this is not the political battle that some politicians and media reactionaries are attempting to make it. Georgia’s scientific infrastructure all over the state will be absolutely devastated if the proposed cuts take place. Georgia’s future is at stake — it may not always be in the media, but extremely successful medical, technological and health care advances in our state are driven almost exclusively by this public funding, and these advances will be decimated by the proposed policies.

I care about this deeply because I grew up in Georgia, and I first found my love of psychology research while taking my AP Psych class at Eagle’s Landing High School in McDonough. I went on to attend the University of Memphis on a track scholarship, but I quickly figured out that I wouldn’t be going pro in running. Rather, I wanted to pursue my love of psychology and become a clinical psychologist. However, I learned that I needed to do research in undergrad to be able to get into graduate school for that career. Little did I know at the time, but that undergrad research opportunity — only possible through NIH funding — would change the entire direction of my life; I discovered I had a real talent for clinical neuroscience research that I never anticipated. Fast forward to today, I ended up taking so strongly to scientific research that I no longer wanted to be a therapist, but instead ended up as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where I get to do science as my full-time job.

I run a research lab that primarily studies alcohol and drug addiction. A lot of my inspiration for getting into this field came from core childhood memories and experiences growing up in Georgia, watching drug and alcohol addiction quietly tear apart families across all political, socioeconomic and sociodemographic lines. We all have someone we know and love who has struggled with addiction; addiction does not care how you voted, where you go to church or where your family is from. That’s why I think it is important enough to dedicate my life to studying how we can identify risk for development of addiction and intervene before lives are ruined. Heartbreakingly, there were more than 1,800 fatal drug overdoses and more than 2,000 alcohol-related deaths in Georgia in 2020, and this number has only gone up since. This is why NIH and NSF invest so heavily in topics like these — it’s paramount to prevent as much of this suffering as we can for every American.

Georgia, specifically, relies on public science funding to drive so many health advancements in addition to job creation, with NIH support alone contributing more than $2 billion to Georgia’s economy, and supporting more than 11,000 jobs. The NSF invested more than $200 million in Georgia last year. Without this scientific support, we’re not just losing the chance to make new discoveries — we’re losing jobs, life expectancy, education programs, health care advances and a pipeline of future scientists who can transform our communities. This is not only about supporting research happening at universities — for every dollar invested in the NIH, $2.46 in economic return is produced for our country. NIH grants don’t only go to universities; private companies also are routinely supported. Georgia companies KDH Research and Communication, Glycosensors and Diagnostics, Lena Biosciences, and ProDa Biotech are the fifth and seventh through ninth most highly NIH-funded institutions in the state. Moreover, private companies heavily rely on Ph.D.-holding scientists who themselves were trained at universities carrying out projects supported by NIH and NSF funding. This perhaps explains why every single new drug (210/210) approved by the FDA from 2010-2016 was built on NIH-funded research. Private companies may commercialize the final product, but it’s built off decades of publicly funded science identifying drug targets and disease mechanisms, and then doing the foundational work to turn them into effective treatments.

Discovering how diseases evade our immune systems, how drug and alcohol addiction alters our brains or how to treat post-traumatic stress disorder is what NIH research is all about — and NIH manages to do all of this with less than 1% of the federal budget. And that’s exactly why public science funding has historically been one of our proudest nonpartisan successes — we all benefit from this enterprise.

With science funding on the federal chopping block, I implore you to resist the partisan narratives and uphold one of our most valuable approaches to combating addiction and other diseases that don’t care about our politics. Please, call and write to your representatives and help them understand how important NIH and NSF funding are for Georgia. We need to not only not cut, but increase scientific funding — for you, your children and all of our futures.