Three days after the USDA ordered Indiana University to shut down the lab of biology professor Roger Innes, much of the department’s work has stopped.

The Innes lab shares contiguous space with other research facilities, which remained on lockdown Monday.

For the almost 50 researchers who rely on those labs, offices, grow rooms, equipment and freezers, the consequences are dire, wrote biology chair Armin Moczek in an email to the chancellor and interim provost. He said those researchers "currently have their professional lives and careers on complete or significant hold due to this development."

“Most of them have no affiliation to the Innes lab, but all of them have experiments, organisms, and external funding obligations to attend to,” Moczek said.

Grant funded research hasn’t just halted. Moczek said experiments are being aborted every day during the shutdown, including projects months in the testing. The affected projects include work for the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.

IU changed the locks at the USDA’s request, and only the university police department possesses a key. A few faculty and staff are permitted entry twice a day for basic maintenance: watering plants, checking for malfunctions and retrieving supplies.

Several more rooms were locked down Friday evening.

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IU Vice President for Research Russ Mumper told the biology department Friday that the school remains committed to supporting their research and minimizing disruption. Moczek said he proposed a barricade separating the Innes lab from the others, but his solution hasn’t been approved.

The USDA has not said why it’s investigating the Innes lab, which it had found in compliance with regulations earlier this year. Innes’s former researcher Youhuang Xiang was arrested last year for not declaring a shipment of DNA plasmids, and the professor has defended Xiang and other Chinese scientists prosecuted by federal law enforcement.

The effect on IU biology researchers may only become apparent down the line in terms of papers and projects that will not be completed and future grants that will not be secured. Science journals and publications have already taken notice.

“If one wanted to sabotage IU’s reputation as a leading R1 institution, one could not do much better,” Moczek said.