That day in 2019 now seems like a relic of a bygone era.

Jessica Whited shows a photo of one of her proudest moments. She stands with her parents — an autoworker and a schoolteacher — after winning a Presidential Early Career Award signed by President Donald Trump, honoring her as one of the nation’s most promising young scientists.

Six years later, the second Trump administration delivered a blow to her science, cutting nearly all the funding for her work on illuminating the molecular secrets of how salamanders regrow limbs — and how these mechanisms might be used to help human patients.

“Emotionally, it stings,” said Whited, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, fighting back tears. “It feels very personal. It took me 19 years to build this axolotl colony and research program with a goal to ultimately help human lives. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

The recent funding cuts have damaged research across the University. Whited was hit particularly hard. She lost five separate federal grants worth $4.2 million, or about 90 percent of her research budget.

“The strokes coming down are just so broad and heavy-handed,” she said. “They were not really scrutinizing the individuals that were affected. But I find it very ironic the way we can be characterized as a bunch of ivory tower elitists who don’t have any sense of what’s going on outside in the rest of the world — even while our research is dedicated to solving hard problems that impact human health.”

The loss was personal in other ways.

An unpaved road

Whited was born in Monroe, Michigan, a small, largely blue-collar city famous as the childhood home of the cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer and headquarters of La-Z-Boy Chairs.

Her father’s family came from Appalachia and generations of men who worked in coal mines. In the mid-20th century, they moved north for jobs in the factories around Detroit.

Her mother’s family also worked blue-collar jobs in Michigan. Many lacked good healthcare and died young. They bore children early, and Whited knew five of her great-grandparents.

Her mother got pregnant at 17 shortly before high school graduation. She married Whited’s father, a 21-year-old laborer in a mattress factory, and the couple rented a small apartment.

“They didn’t have a landline,” said Whited. “When I was born, my dad had to go call the doctor from a pay phone.”

Later, her father got a job on the assembly line of a General Motors plant, and the Whiteds bought a small house on an unpaved road. When her father was laid off, the family went into the fields across the road to collect night crawlers and sold them to a bait shop to earn money.

When Jessica was 8, the family moved to Missouri so her father could take a job at another GM factory.

Her mother — who at that point had only a high school education — proved to be a natural teacher. She read aloud to Jessica and her younger sister and bought books at yard sales. Whited learned to read before kindergarten. When they went outside, her mother would point out the names of things in the natural world.

“She took us to the library all the time, and I would go straight to the science section,” said Whited. “I was also really into the paranormal section.”

When her father bought some used living room furniture, the seller threw in a set of World Book Encyclopedias. As a girl, Whited spent hours poring over the 22-volume collection and vividly remembers the anatomical illustrations with transparent pages showing the layering of muscles, nerves, bones, and digestive tracts.

“Those were my first real educational experiences,” she recalled. “That set of World Book Encyclopedias probably changed my whole life.”

Budding scientist

Whited excelled in school, was routed into gifted programs, and became co-valedictorian of her high school class. She went to the University of Missouri on academic scholarships and a Pell Grant.

For work-study, she chose a position in a soil science lab — her first exposure to scientific research. Later, she got jobs in biology labs and worked with chicken embryos in studies of limb development. She double-majored in biology and philosophy and eventually earned admission to numerous top graduate programs in biology. She chose MIT.

In Cambridge she experienced culture shock. Whited had never lived in a big city and could not walk past a homeless person without stopping to talk. She was stunned to realize that many of her peers had parents with Ph.D.s or medical degrees. When she told people her father worked for GM, most assumed he was an engineer.

She wrote her dissertation on the development of the central nervous system in fruit flies. After earning her doctorate, Whited got a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in the lab of Clifford Tabin, George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor of Genetics. There she discovered a different animal to study — axolotls, a species of salamander native to Mexico.

“There were two axolotls, and they were chewing each other to pieces,” said Whited. “They had already been relegated to be lab pets and were sitting in an aquarium in the lab. Several people came before me, tried to work on axolotls, and they all quit because it was too hard.”

“Several people came before me, tried to work on axolotls, and they all quit because it was too hard.”

Whited decided that was the animal she would study. Salamanders were of great interest because they have the unusual ability to regrow entire limbs.

A personal connection

As a teenager, Whited watched her grandfather endure a series of amputations. John Ledyard Zinner worked at Michigan Gas Utilities and was an unpredictable character (once he returned home with a flock of chickens). A widower, he encouraged his granddaughter’s interest in nature and bought her a subscription to National Geographic.

A heavy drinker and smoker, Zinner developed peripheral artery disease and gangrene. First, he lost his toes, then his foot, then the entire leg below the knee. He died at age 61 when Whited was in college.

In salamanders, Whited saw more than another topic of biological fascination: Here was an opportunity to help people like her grandfather and many others. If science could somehow decipher the genetic code of limb regeneration, perhaps stem cells could one day be used to regrow them in human patients who had lost limbs in battle, accidents, or chronic diseases.

A long-term commitment

Axolotls are difficult to study. It takes a year to breed them (in contrast, the generation time for fruit flies is about 10 days and for lab mice about 12 weeks). When Whited began studying them, nobody had sequenced their genomes or produced RNA transcripts, so researchers had to build everything from scratch.

Whited’s lab is one of the leading axolotl research centers in the world. She grew her colony to about 3,000 animals, and her team has made significant discoveries.

In 2017, the group published the most widely used transcriptome and tissue map for axolotls. In another publication the same year, they showed that repeated limb amputation severely compromised the salamanders’ ability regrow new limbs — revealing there were natural limits to regeneration.

Now her lab is completing what she expects to be the most important paper thus far — the discovery that limb regeneration involves the peripheral nervous system in a body-wide activation of stem cells, not just at the injury site.

Now her lab is completing what she expects to be the most important paper thus far — the discovery that limb regeneration involves the peripheral nervous system in a body-wide activation of stem cells, not just at the injury site.

These breakthroughs were funded by series of awards from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health — all earned through an open competitive process.

The presidential recognition came out of the blue. She was thrilled and invited her parents to the ceremony, which was presided over by one of the president’s aides. The day was one of the few times in her life that she had seen her father dressed in a suit, and relatives joked that he looked like a senator.

“It made me so happy,” said Whited. “After pouring myself into this research all these years, it felt great to be with my parents when that work was acknowledged.”

Fears for the future

Then came the cuts. Earlier this year, Trump froze more than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard. Whited lost five grants — including an NSF career award and a $2.5 million award from the NIH.

Whited was mystified. She had been continuing the exact same research that was honored by the previous Trump administration.

The cuts already have taken a toll. One postdoc left her lab and moved to the U.K. A Ph.D. student lost an NSF fellowship. The lab reduced the number of support staff, slashed projects to preserve top priorities, and began to downsize its axolotl colony.

Whited fears the long-term consequences will be even more devastating.

“I think that’s bad for public health,” laments Whited. “It’s also just existentially sad that becoming a scientist — and having the support of your government if you’re willing to put in the hard work — would no longer be a viable path for a kid to take.”