Brittney Dockery searched for the right words to say goodbye. Her message might have gotten across, if not for 25 million years of evolution.
“Behave yourself. Keep on working on the eye tracking,” Dockery told Ulti. “You’re doing so good.”
There was no hope Ulti would understand — after all, she’s a rhesus macaque. And yet Dockery couldn’t help herself. As a lab technician at Emory National Primate Research Center, she’d spent the past four years working closely with dozens of young macaques, studying how anesthesia affected their development with the goal of improving human and animal health. She’d taken to calling the monkeys her “kids,” and they were in many ways like toddlers — messy, exhausting, and, at times, sweet.
It was a dream job, despite the low pay. But in August, Dockery reluctantly walked away.
The grant that covered her salary was ending, and as the Trump administration’s seismic disruptions to science mounted, the odds her lab would secure a new award seemed smaller by the day. With a growing pile of bills at home, Dockery decided to leave research.
She now works at an IT help desk. It’s a role she says is more predictable but feels less rewarding. Dockery, 34, doesn’t see herself returning to science any time soon.
“It sort of shakes your belief in humanity and kindness,” she said of the turn federal policy has taken, including the destabilization of the nation’s scientific infrastructure. “It has not been great to grapple with, and because it is still so fresh, I’m not sure that I’ve grappled with it fully.”
The administration’s efforts to reshape science have fueled fears researchers will leave the U.S. Dockery’s story shows how unending uncertainty can drive people out of science altogether, even if they’re not directly hurt by grant terminations. Professors, postdocs, and graduate students get all the attention for splashy discoveries, but lab techs are the backbone of many scientific teams, performing the essential, unglamorous work that powers biomedical breakthroughs. Research has shown that they are key contributors to studies published in the top three life science journals: Nature, Science, and Cell.
Dockery’s departure, less than a year into Trump’s second term, could be an early warning sign of a broader scientific exodus in the coming years. Her experience aligns closely with past research by Wei Yang Tham, a staff scientist at the University of Toronto, who was part of a team that showed that even brief funding delays can push researchers out of academia. The first to be affected are often junior lab members whose positions were precarious to begin with.
“That’s almost a perfect example of what we think is going on in our paper,” said Tham upon hearing Dockery’s story. He warned that the current climate for scientists extends far beyond the scope of the team’s study: “What’s happening now is kind of unprecedented.”
Dockery’s voice shook as she spoke with STAT. It wasn’t until a month after she left science, she said, that she had her first good bathroom cry over the experience. The trigger: hearing another researcher say they might lose their job.
‘Something is missing’
Dockery’s first laboratory was nature, and one of her earliest discoveries was of the hands-on variety: Contrary to popular belief, frog urine does not cause warts.
She was a free-range wild child growing up in Murphy, N.C., an Appalachian town of 1,700 located at the junction of the Hiwassee and Valley rivers. A young Dockery, whom family and friends knew as Brie, roamed the Blue Ridge Mountains collecting bugs and frogs, many of which she’d bring home. During an interview with STAT, she held up 10 wartless fingers to debunk the old myth. “Trust me,” she said, “I’ve been peed on by so many frogs.”
Dockery brought in stray pets, too, and critters she’d pick up from neighbors. There were cats and dogs, rabbits and hamsters, and a snake a friend gave her after his parents wouldn’t let him keep it. There was the time she heard someone call into a local radio station to say they could no longer care for their dozen finches. Naturally, she brought the birds home.
She dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. Her parents dreamed she’d have a different life than they did. Her mom and dad were teenagers when she was born. That wasn’t uncommon in the area, where the teen birth rate is 70% above the state average.
When Dockery turned 16 and got her driver’s license, her parents suddenly turned strict. “You’re going to the movies with friends?” they’d ask. “You’re running late. Why aren’t you home yet?” The woods by their home had bears, she’d think. Why were her parents more concerned about boys?
Luckily for them, Dockery was, as she puts it, a “giant nerd.” She loved going on about the latest Steinbeck or Austen novel she’d picked up from the library, or asking her mom if she knew what the Krebs cycle was.
Her first glimpse of scientific research came thanks to an enterprising high school biology teacher. Dockery still remembers getting pulled out of class alongside a group of other students for a special surprise. A bright blue bus from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sat parked outside. It had been turned into a mobile lab to teach students about how genetics can shape a person’s response to medicine.
“I know this sounds goofy, but they were like, ‘Do you guys want to try a pipette?’ And I was like a kid on Christmas,” she said. “Real pipettes! Were we pipetting anything useful? No, it was water, but it still felt really cool.”
When she got accepted to North Carolina State University, a school 20 times the size of Murphy, the whole family rallied to make sure she could afford college. Grandparents, cousins, great aunts, and uncles chipped in, even if only to give a couple hundred dollars. Once she got there, Dockery realized she didn’t want to be a vet anymore. The veterinarians she shadowed seemed burnt out by constant triage and low wages. Dockery learned that this stress can take a heavy toll; vets are two to four times more likely to die by suicide than the average person.
She graduated with a bachelor’s in zoology and a minor in microbiology. But without a clear sense of what she wanted to do next, Dockery drifted after college. After working as a barista, she took a job as a prop artisan at a local theater. It was the kind of job where you might be asked to fashion a 4-foot meat grinder for “Sweeney Todd,” or a hot pink Victorian-era couch for “My Fair Lady.”
She picked up welding, sewing, and a life partner; her now-husband, TJ, was the theater’s master carpenter. They dated in secret before moving in together. But through it all, she couldn’t shake the feeling, she said, that “there is something in my value system that I am not working toward.”
A dream job — and a tough choice
That missing something, it turned out, was a large and boisterous troop of monkeys.
She applied for the primate center job after a close friend encouraged her to just go for it. The work sounded interesting enough. Researchers had found that children exposed to anesthesia multiple times had an increased risk of developing learning problems. It wasn’t clear, however, whether anesthesia caused these issues, or whether they were the result of whatever medical conditions required surgery in the first place. But a group of Emory scientists had a telling clue: Healthy rhesus macaques repeatedly exposed to anesthesia during infancy were more likely than unexposed monkeys to show signs of anxiety later in life.
The lab was looking to continue that work, with the goal of potentially identifying new forms of anesthesia or safer ways to deliver existing sedatives. And they needed a lab tech to handle much of the day-to-day work.
That’s where Dockery came in. She’d spend the day taking blood samples, jotting down notes on the primates’ behavior, and using eye trackers to assess their visual acuity and interest in looking at novel objects.
In the process, she got to know each of their colorful personalities. Vintage was a bit of an oddball. She’d get distracted while grooming a fellow macaque and would end up absentmindedly stroking thin air. Ulti was food-motivated and had a sassy streak, while Meep never quite seemed interested in anything Dockery had to say.
It was draining work. She would often get in by sunrise and be greeted by the familiar funk that would waft through the facility — especially if the troop had been fed raw onions the day before. But Dockery relished the work.
“It felt like coming home,” she said. “I was getting to do research. I was getting to disseminate knowledge. I was getting to help people and animals.”
Dockery was also getting to make under $19 an hour, her annual salary below $40,000. She found ways to scrimp and save. She learned to hunt for discounts at the grocery store, seeking out vegetables near the end of their sell-by date. Dockery and TJ got married at a courthouse to avoid the price tag of a big wedding. There were years when the couple didn’t exchange Christmas or birthday gifts.
Somehow, they were making it work. But Dockery started to harbor doubts soon after the Trump administration came in. One of the first warning signs was when the National Institutes of Health announced plans in February to slash payments for indirect costs, which include expenses that can’t easily be linked to specific projects, such as lab utilities. The announcement concerned Dockery, as her work with the macaques had high overhead expenses.
While a federal court has for now prevented changes to indirect cost policy, Dockery’s worries only deepened as the administration began terminating and freezing thousands of grants, targeting research at odds with Trump’s priorities and implementing blanket freezes that spanned whole universities. After talking with a few researchers who’d had their funding cut, Dockery began wondering who’d be next.
The grant that covered her salary hadn’t been affected, but it was nearing its end. Her adviser was frank about the situation: She was applying for future funding, but there was no guarantee she’d be able to keep Dockery past next year. It might be wise, her supervisor suggested, for the lab tech to start thinking about a backup plan.
Within days, Dockery was hit with another reminder that money was tight — her 2008 Mazda broke down. It wasn’t long before she began having long, hard conversations with TJ. Could they survive on his salary if she got laid off, or would they lose their home? How much did they have in savings?
“Your car breaks down, you find out that your boss can’t guarantee that you’ll have work, and your mortgage is due in a week,” she said. The choice became clear.
A difficult exit, and a new normal
When Dockery started applying for jobs, she told herself she’d come back to research again someday. Now, she’s not so sure.
On her last day in the lab, after finishing up paperwork and handing off all her notes and files, she spent the afternoon saying goodbye to her “kids.” Dockery coupled the message with a language the primates were more likely to understand: treats. She doled out little bags of yogurt with a bit of apple or Jell-O, depending on each macaque’s preference. And then it was time to go.
She’s now trying to adjust to a new routine. Her IT job pays around $20,000 a year better, and it doesn’t demand as much of her time and energy.
But while she’s grateful for the work, she feels much like she did before getting into research — like something is missing.
“I still help people on a one-to-one basis. They call me [to say], ‘I’ve blocked myself out of my computer. My printer is not working.’ … But in all honesty, those people would get help elsewhere. They would Google it,” she said. “My day-to-day is a lot quieter, and it feels like it has less of a really lasting impact.”
During those quiet moments, Dockery might ping a former co-worker to ask how one of the macaques is doing. She sometimes wonders whether she has irreparably harmed the study she was part of by leaving early, as the work is being carried on by researchers who are less familiar with the macaques.
She can’t imagine returning to science any time soon. Yet Dockery can’t shake the feeling that, when she left the lab, she left a piece of herself behind, too.
