Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2021

Public Affairs

Congress Proposes toMore Than Double NSF Funding Through the years there have been ongoing discussions among the scientific community and Congressional staff about a dou- bling of the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget, similar to what was achieved with NIH back in the early 2000s. On Friday, March 26, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology introduced a bipartisan bill outlining plans to more than double the NSF budget over the next five years and to create a new technology directorate. In 2021, the NSF received $8.5 billion to fund its seven directorates. The new legislation would increase the agency’s annual budget to $18.3 billion by 2026, part of which would go toward a new initiative called Science and Engineering Solutions. With a focus on turning basic research into new technologies and commercial products that would address societal issues and drive economic growth, the new directorate would receive $1 billion in 2022, growing to $5 billion per year by 2026. In some ways, the new bill is similar to the Endless Frontier Act introduced in June of last year, which sought to quadruple the NSF’s budget and redirect the agency toward “industries of the future” such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. While the National Science Foundation for the Future Act introduced by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX-30) supports innovation in these industries through the proposed technology directorate, it also proposes to boost funding for all scientific disciplines that the agency supports and outlines measures to prevent funding tradeoffs between the new directorate and other NSF divisions, which is a concern of researchers who rely on NSF funding.

Public Affairs Committee Sessions at the 65th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society Global Pandemic Response: Charting a Path Forward Using Guides from the Past and Present The Public Affairs Committee (PAC) organized a session fo- cusing on global pandemic response entitled “Global Pandem- ic Response: Charting a Path Forward Using Guides from the Past and Present” as part of the BPS 2021 Annual Meeting. This online session brought together an international panel of scientists from academia and industry for a discussion that ranged from the atomic to the societal and covered the structural biology of viruses, the deployment of diverse antiviral therapies, and socio-economic hinderances to the development of consistent global strategies targeting current and future pandemics.

True to the “global” title of the event, the expert panelists joined the session from three continents: Europe, Africa, and North America. Félix Rey of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, spoke about the structures and interactions of coronavirus spike proteins and the possible effects of emerging mutations on vaccine development. Thurka Sangaramoorthy of the Uni- versity of Maryland called in from Addis Ababa to discuss the effects of income disparities, political instabilities, and societal challenges on providing universal access to thera- pies. Patrick McTamney of AstraZeneca and Arturo Casadevall of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University highlighted two distinct, yet related, approaches for targeting COVID-19 through the use of broad neutralizing antibodies and convalescent plasma-based therapies. The formal presentations were followed by robust discussion sparked by audience questions on topics including the role of partnerships between academia and industry in facing the current crisis and in providing lessons to prepare for future challenges, the importance of supporting fundamental re-

May 2021

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