Keeping My Heart in Uncertain Times for Science

Written by SNAP member Megan Garcia

Thoughts and views written in this blog post reflect those of the author only, and not necessarily those of every SNAP member or the SNAP coalition as a whole.

Footnotes are denoted with superscript numbers. References are denoted with brackets.

No one goes into public health or science policy without caring about people. Caring is why we are here. But lately I have been grappling harder than ever with how much care I still have to give without falling apart.

I became a scientist because I wanted to help people. My work is rooted in emerging viruses, global health, and health inequities. I chose this field hoping to be a force for good in people’s lives and communities. That hope has always come from caring: about people I will never meet, about a world I will not live to see, and about problems that do not directly affect me. I know this thread connects scientists across every field.

In early 2025, many critical aspects of how research is done and funded were uprooted or dismantled.

Public health funding was hit directly. By mid-April, the NIH had terminated about 780 grants or parts of grants, according to KFF Health News [1], and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said the agency should step back from infectious disease research for years. At my own school, the federal government froze $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard [2], including several of my lab’s grants, and a stop-work order halted a ten-year, 21-lab tuberculosis consortium [3], which its leader calls the NIH’s largest single investment in tuberculosis, a disease that kills a million people a year.

USAID was dismantled. For decades USAID funded health programs around the world, including HIV and AIDS treatment, and people who depended on that support saw it disrupted almost overnight. The $4 billion the US had pledged to the global HIV response for 2025 [4] vanished with the freeze on foreign aid, and UNAIDS reported closed health facilities and thousands of clinics left without staff. In March 2025, the administration notified Congress [5] that it intended to dissolve the agency permanently. USAID was far from perfect and carried its own legacy of American influence abroad. But the US had made a promise to those people, and it was abruptly broken.

DEI programs were cut or put under scrutiny, the kind of programs that gave me hope that science could do better by bringing in the voices and thoughts of people so long ignored. The NIH purged training grants designed to bring historically underrepresented students into biomedical research. A federal court found that unlawful [6] in June 2025, but in August the Supreme Court allowed $783 million in related terminations to go ahead [7] for now.

As a public health researcher and a student who benefitted from DEI research programs, I felt each of these losses as a blow. I had trouble focusing on my PhD lab work, and I could not stop thinking about the people who would be harmed. Compassion had always felt like my greatest strength in this field, but I was slowly beginning to resent it. I began to wish I could turn off how much I cared, because the pain was overwhelming. That feeling inspired the following poem, which I wrote in the middle of these events, when none of us knew how final these changes would be. It is a repeated loop of trying to push my heart away and realizing I can’t.

Content Note: The poem includes graphic bodily imagery meant to describe emotional pain. If you don’t want to read, you can skip to the next page break.

Sometimes I hurt so much I start to hide.
I curl into a ball and close my eyes until I wake up and hope things are different, but they never really are.

There is this overwhelming wave of knowledge that this world is not what I want it to be.
There is too much evil.
Too much greed.
Too much callousness.

I feel small and afraid and mostly just exhausted.
I feel like nothing is ever going to change and it is naive to even try.
And when I’ve been squashed underneath the totality of greed in the world, I imagine what it would be like to stop caring so much.
I try to conjure up a version of myself where I do not worry about anything else but myself and those closest around me.
But I know the only way to accomplish this is to tear my heart out of my chest and throw the oozing red worthless thing as far from me as I can.

I lay my palm above my ever beating heart.
God how I hate this beautiful piece of me.
Does it know I feel burdened by its existence?
Does my heart realize it is the cause of itself breaking?

My nails begin to dig.
I peel my skin and bone back to wrap my hand around the slick trembling tissue.

Could I fully grasp my hand around it without her fighting back?
Oh what a vulnerable thing she would be with her protective cage torn away.
Can one love one’s own heart and also despise it?
My hand could as easily squeeze as it could caress.

I don’t know who I would be without her.
We have been intertwined since the day I learned what caring meant.
We’ve grown together as I have slowly witnessed the world I thought so hopeful, crumple into shapes of atrocities, exploitation, and greed.
Now, more than ever, I no longer want her.
It is so hard to carry on with this bleeding heart of mine.

I continue to pull her out of my chest.
Not caring about the blood that sprays or the pain I feel.
Just so I can look at her in my palms.
I want to hug her and sob into the cushion of her tissue.
I want her to know I am hurting too.
Not just her alone.

But as I hold her close, all I can think is she is mine.
She is mine and mine alone.
I refuse to discard her because, god, all I have in this meaningless world is her.
I don’t want her to be taken from me.
I don’t want to let the world win.

She is mine and she is terrible.
She is pain and she is hatred
but she’s also love and kindness.
As I caress her with hands dripping in our own blood,
I know the world would be less kind without her.
And that means something.
It has to mean something when there is such a lack of it.

“I am sorry, heart.” I whisper into her flesh.
I am so sorry to not want you, but need you.
I am sorry you hurt as I hurt.
I am so sorry that this is never going to go away.

We will be together though.
Even when I despise you.
Even when I think I don’t need you.
We are one.

I look around at the carnage of ourselves.
The splintered bones, warm blood, and raw flesh.
And you, my heart still beating in my hands.
“I am sorry,” I say once more as I press my lips to the warmth of her.

What a display of violence we make.

“I am with you,” whispers my heart. “I forgive you.”
I nod back and whisper “I forgive you too,” as I place her gently back into the cavity of my chest.
“You are me and I am you,” we say together.

Update, October 2026: Some of this has since eased, at least for now: Harvard’s funding has resumed [8], and some terminated grants have been reinstated [9]. But times are still uncertain, and there is now a new rule to worry about. A proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget [10] would change how federal grants are decided and kept, across nearly every agency that funds research. Senior political appointees would review awards before they are issued, with peer review playing a smaller role, and agencies could terminate active grants that no longer fit their priorities or the national interest at the time of termination. Congress has temporarily delayed the rule [11]: a funding law signed in September bars OMB from finalizing it through December 11, 2026.

Science in the United States continues to sit on uncertain ground. There is still a deep anxiety that we are heading toward a worse state, for science, for people, and for the world. I don’t know a fix for this, but I do know I’m keeping my heart and my compassion because it’s needed now more than ever. I hope you keep yours too.

Recognition

Megan Garcia is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the Biological Sciences in Public Health Program. Their work focuses on immunology and virology of emerging viruses.

Special thanks to the following SNAP members who provided feedback on this blog:

Amanda Finn has a PhD in Nutrition Sciences from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She studied physiological and social determinants of insulin resistance in people with overweight/obesity.

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