Science has always relied on young innovators to drive progress. In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, still PhD students, founded Google. More recently, in 2020 and 2021, Kizzmekia Corbett, then a senior research fellow at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Vaccine Research Center, led a team of scientists in developing the COVID-19 vaccine in under a year.

These breakthroughs remind us that scientific advancement depends on nurturing a full pipeline of scientists — from young people learning about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to early-career researchers preparing the next transformative discovery.

Yet today, that pipeline is at risk with recent funding cuts.

Scaled back spending

President Donald Trump has aggressively scaled back government spending,

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