A Maryland researcher who is studying possible treatments for a disease that’s killing citrus trees across the country said her U.S. Department of Agriculture grant funding has been on hold for months.
Anne Simon, a University of Maryland professor, who also has a company called Silvec Biologics, said she was expecting grant funding to study citrus greening, a disease that’s killing citrus trees in Florida, Texas and California, among other places.
The grant, Simon said, was intended to pay for a field trial of a possible treatment for citrus greening. But it’s been put on hold, she said, as President Donald Trump’s administration makes changes to the federal workforce and cuts at federal agencies.
“This has literally never happened,” Simon said. “Experiments are on hold. People’s lives are on hold. Science is on hold.”
It’s unclear when the grant funding is going to be released, Simon said, calling it essential to help find a potential cure. About 95% of Florida’s citrus trees are dead, she said, and the disease is impacting trees in California and Texas too.
“It’s a terrible disease,” Simon said. “We have a possible treatment, and our grants are being held up for no reason. This is just … it’s devastating.”
Simon said she can’t proceed with the trial and can’t hire the staff she needs to help with it.
She’s “trying to keep my people here, so that when the grant does start, hopefully it will start, that I’ll have the right people here to work on it. But I’m worried about losing people in my lab,” Simon said.
Simon and her father were among the thousands who attended Friday’s “Stand up for Science” rally near the Lincoln Memorial, speaking out about changes at federal agencies and calling for politics to stay out of scientific research.
Her dad, Mayo Simon, said despite decades of work in the sciences, “it’s all being kind of taken away from her.”
Similarly, Anne Simon said, researchers are hoping to have their universities offer them bridge funding, but soon “there’s not going to be any funding left for bridge funding,” she said.
She’s asked for it, and been told she can have it if she needs it, but “I’m just eking by just trying to find pots of money that will fund the one person in my lab,” she said.
Meanwhile, she said, the changes are impacting graduate education. Research grants fund graduate students, “and so when you stop research funding, especially in the medical fields, we are not going to be training the students of the future,” she said.
Some of the college seniors she teaches have had their acceptances to graduate school rescinded, Simon said, and she’s expecting some of them to look at overseas programs instead.
“This is just, it’s devastating for science,” Simon said.
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