Andrea Graham
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University whose research examines host-parasite interactions, immune-system variation, disease ecology, and how natural selection shapes host defense and parasite transmission.
Federal Science Cuts Could Set Research Back for Decades
In a Princeton discussion after a screening of *The Endless Frontier*, director Marilyn Ness, producer Elizabeth Westrate and immunologist Andrea Graham argued that cuts to federal research funding threaten more than individual projects: they can break the chain of accumulated work and leave younger scientists without the chance to build on it. Graham said the resulting setback could last for decades, even if policy changed immediately. The filmmakers said they expanded the documentary to show how funding reaches research teams and what its withdrawal means for their work.
Political Control, Not Flat Budgets, Threatens U.S. Science Funding
At a New York post-screening panel for The Endless Frontier, filmmaker Marilyn Ness, immunologist Shruti Naik, journalist Ira Flatow and executive producer Aaron Mertz argued that the most vulnerable part of science is not discovery itself but the public system that sustains it. Their case was that curiosity-driven research, expert peer review and stable federal funding are being misunderstood and politically threatened just as the public needs a clearer view of how science actually produces medicines, technologies and trained researchers. The panel framed science funding as both an institutional question and a democratic one: who decides what research is worth doing, and whether voters understand enough to defend that process.