Understanding the Long Game of Resources, Funding in Research

As recent keynote speaker at the ASM Microbe 2025 conference, veterinary microbiologist Margie Lee, DVM, MS, PhD, associate dean, Research and Graduate Studies, interim director, Animal Cancer Care and Research Center professor, Virginia Tech, wanted to remind everyone in the microbiology field, that despite this feeling like unprecedented times, she says funding and resources have been limited in the past and she wanted to impart encouragement.

“Being an infectious disease specialist, the funding environment and the resources for infectious disease research for diagnostics has been extraordinarily rich for about, I'd say, 23 years since the anthrax threat, after 9/11,” Lee said. “Up to that point, we shared a lot more resources with a lot of the other disciplines and research; we got a pretty good chunk of the pie after the anthrax mailings, and right now, it appears that the government is going to redirect resources. It will be lean times. Our time will come around again, because the microbes don't care what the politics are, and they don't care what we think they're going to do…And so, I wanted people not to lose heart with the rhetoric that goes on with politics, but to understand that the job remains the same.”

Comparing COVID-19 And Avian Influenza

Lee used to run a poultry diagnostic lab and is very familiar with these facilities. In looking at avian influenza compared to COVID-19, she says that influenza mutates at a much greater rate.

“The problem with influenza, which makes it really different from COVID, is influenza is the master of change; it's the master of mutation…COVID is still figuring it out. The avian coronaviruses, the animal coronaviruses, are much better at mutating than the one that we just had with the pandemic,” Lee said.

She points to avian influenza being able to infect cattle as an example with this most recent round of outbreaks that happened earlier this year.

“I’ve been a veterinarian for 40 years. If someone had told me that bird flu could infect cattle, I would have laughed at them and said ‘not possible,’” Lee said.