Mary Woolley, president and CEO of Research!America, delivered the inaugural Bob and Helen Bartee and Family Advocacy of Science Lectureship at the University of Nebraska Medical Center on Tuesday.

Research!America, based in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit alliance of organizations focused on making health-focused research a higher priority in the United States. It includes organizations representing patients, medical and health research institutions, business and industry and scientific and clinical societies.

“I fundamentally believe everyone who cares about the future of health should be an advocate for (the) goal of a better, healthier future,” she said in an interview.

Bartee is the former vice chancellor for external relations at UNMC. The annual lecture is intended to bring experts to UNMC to engage with students and faculty on topics such as making science relevant, creating ways for scientists to engage with the community and building science literacy and trust in scientific rigor and results.

Woolley said Research!America makes the case that health-focused research should be as important as other top priorities in the United States, such as defense. Defense, of course, also depends on research. But a nation relies on healthy people to stay safe and secure, and science of all types is needed when it comes to being globally competitive.

“We want to be ready and able to compete globally,” she said.

Elected officials in Washington have the power to engage in setting priorities, Woolley said. But their constituents, who are taxpayers, also have influence.

While Congress recently passed an appropriations bill to fund the federal government for fiscal year 2024, that budget wasn’t kind to science agencies, she said. Funding for the National Institutes of Health, which funds the bulk of biomedical research in the U.S., was scaled back 0.8%. Budgets for the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were cut or held flat.

“This is not good for patients, aspiring scientists or the economy here in Nebraska or nationwide,” said Woolley, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It puts on hold being able to explore new ideas and finding new solutions to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes, for which there aren’t definitive answers yet.

The NIH’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, is $47.1 billion. Defense funding, by comparison, was set at $825 billion.

A more seasonal comparison, with the nation now in the throes of March Madness, is the nearly $1 billion spent on advertising during last year’s tournaments, Woolley said. That’s enough to fund 1,800 NIH grants.

That doesn’t mean the nation should stop basketball tournaments. “But we can do more,” she said.

Nebraska has a lot to be proud of, she said. It ranks 38th among states for population but 33rd in attracting NIH funding.

Her talk, “Your Role in Winning Hearts and Minds for Research,” in particular encouraged researchers to advocate for science.

UNMC’s chief of infectious diseases wins award

During the event, Dr. Mark Rupp, UNMC’s chief of infectious diseases, received the Bartee Advocacy of Science Award, which is given to a UNMC scientist who exemplifies and lives out a commitment to community engagement.

Rupp served as a resource locally during the COVID-19 pandemic, answering questions from news organizations and the public about what was known and what was not yet understood about everything from about how masks work to the workings of the new mRNA vaccines.

That ability to communicate clearly is rare, Woolley said, largely because it hasn’t been a priority in the medical and science education community.

Trainees “simply don’t learn the skills of talking to nonscientists about the process of science,” she said. The public needs to understand that science is a process, one that progresses by three steps forward and two steps back.

Scientists in particular need to explain that what they’re saying represents what is known now, she said, and that they’ll be back to discuss further when that knowledge changes.

One of her criticisms of the scientific community, she said, is that researchers have been too quick to judge members of the public for being skeptical of science, when researchers themselves are trained to be skeptical and to question evidence.

“I think that’s a point of engagement with the public, rather than something to scorn or demean,” she said.