John Archibald: This doctor and former Crimson Tide receiver says NIH chaos threatens UAB, America’s health

This is an opinion column.

Pete Pappas is one of those guys. He walked on to Bear Bryant’s Alabama team as a split end in the early ‘70s, not knowing The Bear was about to change the offense, and college football.

Pappas looked good on the freshman team and quickly earned a scholarship. He made the Crimson Tide roster, and they wrote of his “sticky fingers” on the sports page.

But Bryant’s new wishbone offense turned a lot of receivers into spectators. Alabama went 21-3 over the next two seasons, but completed only 119 passes — less than five a game.

Pappas caught a few balls, scored a couple of late TDs and won the Ray Perkins award for most improved receiver. But his biggest headline came not because of his game but because of his brain. His pre-med grade point average of 2.76 out of 3 was tops at Alabama, not just for the football team but among all athletes.

Which was a bit of a clue. When the record books are written about this guy’s life, it will not be because of sport.

Stat sheet — Dr. Pete Pappas led the team in receptors. The Mobile Press, Feb. 15, 1973The Mobile Press

Pappas went out to the West Coast to study medicine and begin his career as an infectious disease specialist. He was happy. But UAB recruited him in 1988, harder than Alabama had in football. You might say he heard mama call, and he came home.

He’s been there ever since, a doctor, a researcher, an expert on invasive fungal infections, a professor – professor emeritus, now – with more published works in medical journals than Bear Bryant had wins.

Which makes him ideally suited to talk about the things a lot of UAB officials are fearful or unwilling to say out loud: that cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other grants don’t just affect research faculty, staff and students at UAB and across the nation. They threaten construction workers, contractors, local businesses, communities, America’s standing in the world and the future of medical research and science itself.

“The NIH is not a villain,” Pappas said.

Neither are the men and women who conduct research at places like UAB. Neither are the indirect costs of research, which have been targeted by DOGE and the president.

Lord knows the institutions aren’t saying it out loud, for realistic fear of reprisals.

“Indirect costs are really important to the survival of any university, but especially this one,” Pappas said. “They allow UAB to be what it is because it provides the income, the wherewithal, to recruit, to build, to build labs, to do all the life-changing research that we do.”

NIH cost-cutting measures, limiting indirect costs to 15% of the grants as if medical research was private business, threaten grants that amounted to $380 million in Alabama alone last year. A report by United for Medical Research said that money had a $915 million impact on the state in 2024. UAB alone got 88% of the money in those grants, which are decided years in advance.

“They are important scientifically,” Pappas said. “But they’re important to us personally because these are your neighbors that are going to be losing jobs when and if that happens. These cuts are going to be painful.”

That’s not all medical and other scientific researchers have to fear. Trump and DOGE cuts and restrictions at the National Science Foundation have limited research and pulled the rug from under students. Chaos at the Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control doesn’t help.

Especially as those who have devoted their lives to a heroic pursuit — finding cures for illnesses and developing ways to make people’s lives less painful and more productive — toil in the background. Often, I am told, to the detriment of their own health.

“To make these people squirm and suffer as if they’d been sitting around on their asses doing nothing and just living off the gravy train is just so egregious,” Pappas said. “It’s such a poor depiction of what really goes on. Something’s got to be said. Beyond the fact that UAB has a billion-plus dollar impact on the state, the things they do really impact lives and individuals.”

Which makes the silence at research universities like UAB and Duke and Vanderbilt seem so damn loud.

We live in a world where powerful universities cower like congressmen, afraid to complain lest they lose the clout they are too afraid to fight for.

So yeah, it’s good to have a 72-year-old guy who knows what it’s like to block downfield speak up for his students and peers, his work and his profession. Somebody’s gotta do it. Pappas is only semi-retired, but he has proven all he needs to prove.

Give him the chance and he’ll go down a list of medical accomplishments he says wouldn’t have happened without research grants and their indirect costs. At UAB and in collaboration with other institutions.

I get lost in all the syllables. But he’s proud UAB researchers – in a building named after GOP Sen. Richard Shelby – helped develop a class of meds to treat arthritis and inflammatory skin and joint conditions and autoimmune diseases, among many others. He’s proud UAB was on the cutting edge of using pig valves in transplants.

He’s proud that work has helped treat fungal diseases and cancers. It says a lot about our times that he must acknowledge, while explaining the development of HPV vaccines that help prevent cancer, that vaccines are a dirty word in our wacky Washington.

And he’s proud that UAB has become one of the top transplant centers in the world, not just the country, he said. He sounds the most proud when he talks about the way it serves Alabamians — people who, because of an assortment of underlying factors, are more likely to need kidney and heart transplants and other care.

He is proud of the team. Proud of the people who came before him, and those who came after, who were and are expected to carry on.

Next researcher up.

Josh Huffines is a young man who had plenty of options. He could have gotten an M.D. but he chose to become a researcher. He once might have identified himself a UAB student, but now describes himself as “a biomedical Ph.D. researcher in Birmingham who happens to be at UAB,” making clear that he speaks only for himself.

Huffines said he, like a host of other researchers, chose the path they loved most. He felt good about his choice, and thought it better for himself and ultimately for humanity. He and many colleagues are crushed, stunned that work they saw as so vital is being dismissed, flagged for keywords that rarely mean what red-meat politicians think they mean. Like ‘diversity."

They fear retribution. They fear unemployment. They fear that research being done in academia will never find a home in the contracting and profit-driven private sector.

I asked him to describe the mood among his peers.

“Complete and total hopelessness,” he said. “For me, I feel stupid.”

Why?

“What was the point of me getting this degree?,” he said. “And others share that sentiment. What am I supposed to do?”

I guess being a medical researcher in this moment is a little like learning, as a receiver, that your coach is installing a wishbone offense. Suddenly it’s a different game.

Only the stakes – forgive me the sacrilege, Alabama – are a whole lot higher.

Pappas has learned a thing or two about disappointments over the years. I’d like to tie it all up neatly, to say he learned from Bryant or the gridiron how to overcome. But the truth is he turns to his faith and his core beliefs more than his football.

“You have to be a blind or heartless person not to look at what’s going on in the world right now and not just want to cry,” he said. “But you just have to pick your feet up and keep on going, to try to make the best of it and speak out when you can.”

Speak out when you can.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner who has covered Alabama forever.