With major leadership changes, grant disruptions and terminations, and a stoked distrust in science, Steven Artandi, the director of Stanford Cancer Center, worries that young investigators will feel disenchanted by the U.S. research atmosphere and take their work and study elsewhere. 

“The uncertainty in the current system is giving some people pause, especially younger people, whether they’re Americans or whether they trained abroad, as to whether the United States is the right place to spend their careers,” said Artandi, who is also the Laurie Kraus Lacob Director of the Stanford Cancer Institute and the Jerome and Daisy Low Gilbert Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry at Stanford University. “So, I am up at night worrying about the future of American leadership in cancer science and in science more broadly.”

“And these changes reverberate,” said Eric Winer, director of Yale Cancer Center. “The fact that there’s this threat to scientists from around the world to be able to come to the U.S. is a real turnoff for a lot of people.” 

There is an existential threat that the U.S. might not be the best place to do cancer research right now, said Winer, who is also president and physician-in-chief of Smilow Cancer Hospital, Yale New Haven Health System.

“This is the time where I think all of us in the field want to step hard on the research accelerator, we don’t want to back off,” Winer said. 

However, Winer pointed out that he will not be the one making scientific discoveries in 10-20 years. It’s the future generations, the very ones who are feeling uncertain about entering into an unstable NIH, that worry him.

“And if we lose a generation, or even half a generation of people, it’s a huge problem for cancer medicine and cancer science,” Winer said.

Winer and Artandi appeared together on The Directors, a monthly series which focuses on the problems that keep directors of cancer centers up at night. Otis Brawley, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Oncology and Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, appeared as a discussant on this episode.

A transcript of this episode is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20251010_1/