For the past five years, Vern Schramm's lab has been working on a promising anticancer agent. The research has been successful — one of his grant-renewal proposals this year to the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, had a score in the top 10%. But a 1% drop in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s payline (the percentage of applications funded), caused by US budget cuts known as sequestration, meant that Schramm didn't get his grant. It was his second NCI grant renewal to go unfunded this year. The consequences have not been pleasant: Schramm has just had to let five postdocs go.
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