Popular Science Government and groups that award grants to scientists favor research that’s high tech and treatment oriented rather than studies that seek to understand why contagions leap from animals to people.
The outbreaks keep coming.
Mpox, the virus formerly known as monkeypox, last year crossed borders with unprecedented speed to infect nearly 90,000 people. In the past year, Ebola killed at least 55 in Uganda, and a related, equally deadly virus called Marburg emerged in two countries that have never seen it before. Now, scientists are worried that a dangerous bird flu that’s been jumping to mammals could mutate and spread among humans.
These viruses all came from wildlife. Understanding what conditions prime pathogens to leap from animals to people could help us prevent outbreaks. After COVID-19 showed the world the devastation a pandemic can bring, you’d think this type of research would be among the hottest areas of science, with funders lined up far and wide.
That’s not the case. As ProPublica has shown in a series of stories this year, global health authorities focus far more attention and money on containing outbreaks once they begin rather than preventing them from starting in the first place. This mindset has hindered scientists who study the complex dynamics that drive what’s known as spillover, the moment a pathogen leaps from one species to another.
Australian researcher Peggy Eby and her colleagues have shown that it is possible to predict when spillovers are going to happen by closely tracking bats that spread contagion and patiently observing changes that shape their world. This groundbreaking research on the often-fatal Hendra virus relied on decades of Eby’s field work, some of which she did without pay. Early on, one government funder told her that the project she proposed wasn’t a “sufficiently important contribution.” She and her colleagues had to cobble together a mishmash of different grants and keep impatient funders happy. Their work, published late last year in the journal Nature, highlights ways to intervene and potentially prevent outbreaks.
Scientists want to unlock similar mysteries involving other infectious diseases, but research like this is difficult to do and even more difficult to fund. Here are some of the obstacles that stand in the way:
High-tech research overshadows old-school field work.
Government and scientific funding organizations typically reward cutting-edge technologies, such as using machine learning to build models. But those are only as good as the information fed into them — data that someone like Eby has to collect through painstaking groundwork. Many of Eby’s most important insights have come from visiting and revisiting bat roosts over many years, and there was nothing high-tech or novel about her method: a keen eye, a pair of binoculars, a pen and a notebook.
Funders prize novelty over exploring existing theories.
Some funders prioritize totally new ideas. Eby and her colleagues have found that bats shed more Hendra virus after being stressed by food shortages, which have increased as people cut down native trees that once provided the nectar the bats like to eat. Sarah Olson, director of health research at the Wildlife Conservation Society, has long wanted to conduct similar research on bats suspected of carrying the Ebola virus in the Republic of Congo. Developers have cleared swaths of forest in recent years to build roads and housing, and Olson wants to understand how that’s affected these bats.
Olson has applied for grant after grant since 2015 but has struggled to get sufficient funding. Even before she applied, an employee at the National Science Foundation told her the study wouldn’t be novel enough because she wasn’t exploring an entirely new theory. Rather than strengthening her case, Eby and her colleagues’ prior work weakened Olsen’s chances. A spokesperson for the National Science Foundation said the agency could not comment on specific grants. Speaking generally, the spokesperson wrote, “The most competitive proposals are those that advance broad, conceptual knowledge that reaches beyond the specific system under study.”
Olson has lined up Congolese researchers who are willing to collaborate. “We can do it,” she said. “It’s just a matter of getting funding and the interest.”