In the jumble of graphs, Corynn Kasap saw something remarkable.

She had painstakingly prepared a collection of tiny cell vials and run them, one by one, through the hulking machine that shot them with lasers, measured the scatter and projected the data as lines on a screen. That data would tell her if a set of in-development drugs worked on several treatment-resistant forms of chronic leukemia.

Now, she had an answer: a mutation resistant to many existing drugs for the blood cancer was unresponsive to some of the drugs she was testing — but highly responsive to one.

Kasap was thrilled. She cleaned up and dashed to catch the streetcar where, as she remembers it, she called Neil Shah to share.

Shah is now a distinguished researcher, hematologist-oncologist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

But in 2007, Shah was an early-career investigator who had just started a lab to develop targeted drug therapies for leukemia. He’d bet big on Kasap: she was his first hire, a lab tech, having made her way to UCSF after her undergraduate science pursuits were sidetracked by a years-long struggle with autoimmune disease.

And President Donald Trump was a real estate mogul and television personality, not a president intent on slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding. The resulting chaos at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has thrown the careers of a generation of budding scientists, doing potentially life-saving work, into limbo — scientists like Kasap, who, at a critical juncture, face unexpectedly unfunded grants, hiring freezes and the possibility of being pushed out of academic biomedical research.

Those scientists, including many at the Bay Area’s renowned medical centers like UCSF and Stanford, have been left to pick up the pieces.

Kasap was in the clinic with Shah the next day, as she remembers it, when she saw a patient with an exact mutation she’d investigated the night before. Though her results were preliminary, Kasap couldn’t help but think to herself: some of those drugs I tested probably wouldn’t work for this patient.

Moments of immediate gratification are rare in science. This one blew Kasap away. It was also the moment she knew: she had to go to medical school.

***

Kasap has spent a lifetime chasing that kind of high. She first felt it in the water.

Born a stone’s throw from Lake Erie, Kasap’s science love story began with long days spent plunging deep and resurfacing victorious, unsuspecting turtle in hand. She would later learn, in medical school, the risk of death associated with freediving. But for a young Kasap, it was all pure joy.

In 1997, she left for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). By 1998, debilitating health issues had sent her home. She worked in restaurants and went to art school and finally, after four years, began to feel better. As she recovered, she wanted to return to science.

So she transferred to a biology program at the University of Michigan: graduating in 2006, then leaving the Midwest for San Francisco. She figured she had already lived through a life-changing illness: whatever else happened, happened.

Then came four years in Shah’s lab, followed by seven at Weill Cornell, Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Tri-Institutional M.D.-Ph.D., also known as “Tri-I,” an acclaimed medical scientist training program and the recipient of substantial NIH funding. She returned to San Francisco for residency, fellowship and postdoctoral work at UCSF.

All the while, Kasap and loved ones sacrificed time with each other, a sacrifice that became plain in a month of loss. It began with a call from her stepdad as COVID-19 raged, not long after her grandfather died of it in his sleep, telling her her grandmother had grown delirious. Soon her grandmother was gone too, her stepdad in an intensive care unit in Tennessee.

By then, Kasap had flown in, was bending the rules to stay by his side longer. She dreaded seeing him so ill, then felt guilty for her dread. Took care of papers, signatures, notarizations, same as she had cared for people in the clinic many times before. Different now, because the person was hers.

Then Kasap’s stepdad seemed to improve, and she returned to San Francisco, wrongly believing he was in the clear.

She remembers the last moments: a call with the physician, a request for more time. She wanted to get her mom in the room to say goodbye.

***

In late 2023, Kasap’s days started at 8 a.m. and ended at 3 or 4 the next morning. She was leading the development of an innovative therapy for multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer for which no cure is currently known. Her approach was a type of immunotherapy, engineering a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack the cancer cells.

On top of running experiments and preparing a talk for a major conference in December, she faced another big stressor: applying for a career development grant.

The competitive NIH grants, called K08s, are invaluable during a physician-scientist trainee’s transition to independent investigator: a particularly vulnerable part of their career that demands substantial funding. K08s cover much of the salary a trainee would otherwise need to earn from clinical work, enabling them to focus on their research.

Good research helps them craft a considerably stronger candidacy for research faculty jobs; getting a research faculty job opens a door to finally starting a lab. Without a grant, finding such a job can become an uphill battle. For some, it’s the end of a career.

Kasap would need funding after her NIH postdoc grant ran out. And it would soon be time to transition to independence. So in February 2024, she submitted data, research ideas, reference letters: nearly two decades of work, neatly summarized in 72 pages, meant to convince a panel of senior scientists that her work was important and that she was suited to do it.

One day in June 2024, she checked her grant status. Her application had received an exceptional score. The good news spread fast: colleagues congratulated Kasap, told her she would almost certainly be funded.

But Kasap was cautious: funding cutoffs are ordinarily hard to predict, and election years mean added budget uncertainty. Then Trump won the election, and her wariness deepened. She had read in the news that his second term would bring a more coordinated attack on science than his first.

Still, she didn’t foresee the impending firestorm.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump was inaugurated for the second time. The next day, his administration paused all public communications from the NIH. Then came cancellation after cancellation of NIH grant review meetings. A massive cut to indirect research cost coverage. A restriction on public notices that brought NIH meetings to a halt for the second time.

Kasap had been corresponding with her contact at the NIH on paperwork that would become necessary were she awarded the grant. That ended. But as she worried for her colleagues who were applying to grants — grants that couldn’t be scored with meetings frozen — people assured her that her already-scored grant was safe.

In March, she emailed her NIH contact about her grant’s status and didn’t hear back.

She emailed again in early April. This time, she heard back.

Due to substantial budget reductions, the NIH could no longer fund her grant this cycle.

“Now what do I do?” Kasap thought.

***

It was Kasap’s turn to present in lab meeting on a chilly day in late spring. Dark attire as usual, dark hair twisted into its usual claw clip, caffeinated beverage in hand, she talked through the art of cell engineering in her usual assured tone. Made her usual deadpan quips.

In addition to her usual science, Kasap was busy saving her career.

Her postdoc funding was set to end in July. When it did, she was promoted to clinical instructor. The arrangement gives her time to figure things out. She’ll apply to private foundation grants, which don’t provide nearly the same support a K08 does, but anything helps.

She’s already resubmitted the K08. One of her mentors, a senior scientist at UCSF, is hopeful she’ll get it this time. Kasap is not so sure. Already there’s talk of more NIH cuts: a preliminary 2026 budget proposal by the Trump administration, obtained by The Washington Post, would slash the agency’s funds by 40 percent. The move would be a big blow to researchers around the country, including those at UCSF and Stanford, two of the top institutional recipients of NIH funding in the nation.

She’ll look for research faculty jobs. She’s trying to find one at a time when many universities, anticipating federal funding shortfalls, have stopped hiring. She’s trying to do it with no K08 in hand. In a typical year, universities might take a chance on a candidate without a K08. But this is not a typical year.

If Kasap does not find a research faculty job, she might pursue a clinical job in academia. Or she might leave for industry. Some worry it’s an environment where bottom lines may stifle moonshot ideas, or investigators may not as readily have the encounters with patients that spark those ideas.

Kasap can’t say if the future will be what she envisioned for so long. Can’t say if she’ll be able to continue the blood cancer research she’s built up to over half a lifetime. But even as she knows her own stakes and sacrifices, she feels a sorrow for every trainee, investigator, patient swept up: an entire ecosystem, disrupted.

The prospect of leaving has made her fiercely determined to stay.

***

Amid it all, a bright spot: her multiple myeloma work was recently published in a premier hematology journal.

One figure is striking. Scans of multiple myeloma in mice: the first group treated with a mock treatment, the next three with immunotherapies based on known antibodies and the last with Kasap’s novel approach. In the first four columns: bursts of red, green, blue. In the fifth: darkness.

Going from mouse to human takes years’ more work and federal support — in regulating the drug development process; in directly funding, sometimes, the requisite clinical trials — and isn’t guaranteed to succeed. Still, when Kasap first saw the scans she felt that familiar high.

Kasap’s stepdad never graduated college. But he loved science.

Years ago, when Kasap was working on a different class of therapies, he would ask her: What about the immune system? Kasap wasn’t yet convinced of the promises of immunotherapy, and the two would argue about it, always friendly.

When Kasap finally turned to the immune system, her stepdad was thrilled. She wishes he could see her work today.