PHOTO: SANTIAGO MEJIA/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/POLARISon Twitter, asking biology researchers to
send her information about the minimum
guaranteed stipend for graduate students
in their department. She found that the
figure in her department ($18,650) is well
below the national average in her data,
$27,000. It’s also well below the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology’s living wage
for a single-person household in Gaines-
ville, where the university is located.
So far, Gaynor’s department hasn’t
budged on stipend levels. According to a
university spokesperson, “The university is
currently addressing these issues through
the bargaining process.” Gaynor notes that
“many faculty here are very supportive.”
but “it’s just hard internally to find the
money within just our department.” Still,
she hopes the data, which are available
online, will help others advocate for their
own raises.
Petzoldt agrees that comparative data
can be helpful. “Sometimes competition
with peer institutions can ... be a motiva-
tor.” Last year, she and NC State Ph.D. stu-
dent Michelle Kirchner collected stipend
data from other universities to advocate
for a raise within their department. The
data helped win a raise $1000 higher than
what the department had originally of-
fered, she says. “It doesn’t offset inflation
since 2019, but it’s at least something.”
In Canada, hundreds of researchers and
scientific societies sent a letter last month
to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asking for
funding to increase the award amounts for
graduate scholarships offered by the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council
of Canada. “They have not had a raise in
nearly 20 years,” says Marc Johnson, a biol-
ogy professor at the University of Toronto
who organized the campaign to send the let-
ter. “We have the best and brightest minds
in science and engineering that are living
below the poverty line.” Johnson adds that
faculty members in his department are also
discussing raising graduate student stipends
because of rising cost of living in Toronto,
one of the most expensive cities in Canada.
At some universities, individual faculty
members have taken matters into their
own hands, using their grant money to
supplement trainees’ stipends, students re-
port. But other faculty members, they say,
argue that after tuition and health insur-
ance costs, graduate students are already
expensive, and that they, too, lived on low
wages when they were completing their
Ph.D.s. “It’s kind of this mentality of, ‘Well,
I suffered in graduate school—therefore,
you should also suffer,’” Kirchner says.
She rejects that argument: “If you look at
historical inflation ... what’s happening to
grad students right now, we’re worse off.”
Beyond that, she adds, “We don’t think
that’s a healthy mindset, because why are
we not working towards a better future for
grad students?” j1034 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 science.org SCIENCEIn April, graduate students across the University of California system, including here at Berkeley,
protested for better pay.
T
ools such as CRISPR that snip DNA
to alter its sequence are moving tan-
talizingly close to the clinic as treat-
ment for some genetic diseases. But
away from the limelight, research-
ers are increasingly excited about
an alternative that leaves a DNA sequence
unchanged. These molecular tools target
the epigenome, the chemical tags adorn-
ing DNA and its surrounding proteins that
govern a gene’s expression and how it ulti-
mately behaves.
A flurry of studies in the past few years
in mice suggests epigenome editing is a
potentially safer, more flexible way to turn
genes on or off than editing DNA. In one
example described last month at a gene
therapy meeting in Washington, D.C., an
Italian team dialed down expression of a
gene in mice to lower the animals’ choles-
terol levels for months. Other groups are
exploring epigenome editing to treat ev-
erything from cancer to pain to Hunting-
ton disease, a fatal brain disorder.
Unlike DNA editing, where the
changes are permanent and can include
unintended results, epigenomic edits
might be less likely to cause harmful off-
target effects and can be reversed. They
can also be more subtle, slightly ramping
up or down a gene’s activity, rather than
blasting it at full force or erasing it alto-
gether. “What’s exciting is that there are
so many different things you can do with
the technology,” says longtime epigenome
editing researcher Charles Gersbach at
Duke University.
Adding or removing the chemical tags
on DNA and the histone proteins it coils
around (see illustration, p. 1035) can ei-
ther muffle a gene, or expose its sequence
of DNA bases to other proteins that turn
it on. Some cancer drugs strip off or addA gentler way
to tweak genes:
epigenome
editing
Flipping genetic on-off
switches can treat diseases
in mice
BIOMEDICINEBy Jocelyn KaiserNEWS | IN DEPTH