I mean their intentions are great but I get the feeling they're yet to experience the crushing and pessimistic realities of scientific and especially pharmaceutical/neurobiological research. It's a depressign world for us sometimes.
Edit: In review, I would be very interested to read about how they were given permission to experiment on mice. Filling out the paperwork just to get ethical approval alone is a daunting task.
Re: mouse work. I'm assuming they already have the facilities to run these experiments...especially at Princeton. If they don't, I'm sure a neighboring lab has the mice/protocols to run this experiment and they will/can cola berate. They write up an IACUC protocol, go through a few bouts of revisions and they should be able to run the experiment. This would be a simple protocol as they are just injecting mice with the drug, this isn't out of the ordinary by any means.
Other professors (the vast majority) struggle to get appropriate funding. It's a horrible rat race to scrounge up enough money to continue your research. God forbid if you aren't tenured - your job literally depends on how much funding you can bring in (not enough papers = not enough funding = sacked for someone else).
That said, $25k is laughably small amount of money in research. At my old lab, I performed an experiment where I was easily blowing $1000 per week. And I was just a single technician in a lab. Hell, I spent more in supplies than I was paid in salary (probably by some multiple).