The Trump administration’s sudden cancellation of the National Institutes of Health Meetings and Grants Review has raised concerns that medical advances will be stalled and DEI initiatives will be shut down.
from Amy FeldmanForbes Staff
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n Wednesday around 1:30 pm Pacific Time, Esther Choo, a professor of Emergency Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, received an email that the National Health Survey Section she was scheduled to sit for the next day was canceled. Within hours, as word of the NIH meeting’s cancellations circulated on the social media platform Bluesky, she realized it wasn’t just about the opioid research she would be reviewing, but a broader shutdown of NIH research.
“For the first hour, it felt like a rumor,” Choo said Forbes, Noting that there was no announcement on the NIH website. As it became clear that the cancellation included all stages of the scientific proposals in the grant review process, the reality sunk in and she began to evaluate the best-case and worst-case possibilities. “There can be some drastic effects where people who [research] The cycle continues to not listen and it affects their ability to stay at their research institution or take on mentors,” she said, adding, “We’re preparing for the worst. It’s very stressful, especially when your entire career or training path depends on it. “
The NIH is the Crown Jewel of American scientific research, investing most of its $47 billion budget in medical research. Without NIH meetings known as study sections, the agency cannot review grants and thus cannot make research awards. These funds are critical to helping researchers study cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and opioid addiction, among other health issues—and have helped finance major advances, including Moderna’s development of its mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. Vaccinations against COVID-19 saved at least 14 million people from dying in the first year.
Almost every major university or medical institution relies on federal grants to fund their research, with major recipients of NIH funding including Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts General Hospital. A small portion of the funds, including those from the federal health care research institution Arpa-H, go to health care and biomedical startups with promising early-stage research. (Arpa-H had a meeting in San Francisco that was supposed to draw more than 100 people on Thursday suddenly canceled).
“Many people are in oblivion. This is where you see the panic because we just don’t know. ”
In the short term, the cancellation of these meetings means that some researchers expecting to receive funding in January will see those funds delayed, while others who had been waiting for their grant proposals to be reviewed will be were subject to the challenges of revival once the hiatus is lifted—each review requires about two dozen researchers to meet at the same time to assess the scientific merit of the proposals in their field after the hiatus is lifted. It is not clear whether NIH grant review meetings will resume after Feb. 1, when the federal health communications pause ends.
Longer term, researchers fear that the Trump administration will use federal research funding as a cudgel to force universities and other institutions that receive it into cleaning up its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Wall Street Journal It was the first to report that the NIH grants would be a “major lever” in forcing schools such as Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco, which receive tens of millions in NIH research funds each year, to rework or removed their DEI initiatives.
Programs that highlight race, gender and sexual orientation “will at least be ignored by the administration, and that’s just a straightforward reading of these orders,” Mark Barnes, a partner focused on health care at global law firm Ropes & Gray, told of the Trump administration’s DEI order. The order, issued Tuesday and called “ending unlawful discrimination and restoring opportunity based on merit,” designates federal anti-discrimination laws as “material” to those who receive government funds, allowing them to be sued based on of the False Claims Act. This essentially makes NIH’s billions in funding a stick for implementing the Trump administration’s DEI agenda.
The NIH did not respond to detailed questions seeking comment by press time.
“The effect is that the ocean will be uneven. Some ships will sail higher than other ships.”
As word traveled among scientists about the cancellations of both NIH study sections and the advisory, which is the next step in a grant approval process, fear and uncertainty spread. There are at least 200 study sections each cycle, with three cycles a year, and each can have dozens or, in some cases, 100 different projects to consider, said Rebecca Burdine, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, of who has a Grant pending to look at congenital heart defects in zebrafish (a precursor to being able to do such studies in humans). “A lot of people are in limbo,” she said. “This is where you’re seeing panic because we just don’t know,” she said, adding that there has been a lot of fear in the scientific community about the administration’s lack of respect for scientific truth.
Even short delays can be a problem in scientific research, Burdine said. With zebrafish, for example, if there is no money to keep the fish facility running, it would take a lot of time, effort and money to restart it. “People are thinking, ‘If I don’t get this grant, I might have to shut down this research, and it might never be possible to start it again,'” she said. The shutdown comes at a time when the NIH saw the budget Its slightly unbundled for fiscal 2024, making it more competitive to get funding on value projects, has only increased researchers’ anxiety.
The potential to shut down diversity societies is an additional concern, she said. NIH currently offers numerous awards to diverse researchers at all stages of their careers, including predoctoral fellowships known as F31 and postdoctoral fellowships known as F32. “Students who have fellowships through some of these DEI initiatives fear that they will be dealt with retroactively and their careers will be stopped because this is their tuition and stipend and money that they live on while doing their Ph.D. work,” he said. she.
Michael DL Johnson, an associate professor of immunology at the University of Arizona Tucson College of Medicine, said it was not yet clear to researchers whether the NIH meeting cancellations and the DEI initiatives were directly related, but that there was concern. “It’s hard to see why this is being used as leverage,” he said. “Maybe because it can be, and it’s as simple as that. What I can say is that the effect is that the ocean will be uneven. Some ships will sail higher than other ships.”
Johnson, who is also director of the National Undergraduate Research Summer Program, a virtual summer research program for underrepresented students funded through NSF that has paired more than 400 students with more than 160 labs, said he was concerned about what might happen to such programs under the new administration. As a tenured black professor who was helped by such programs early in his career, Johnson worried about the impact this would have on the next generation of scientists. “That to me is terrible because I know how important it was to me,” he said.
For early career scientists, NIH funding is essential to get a leg up on a difficult career path. Sema Quadir, a postdoctoral research fellow studying alcohol use disorder at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told stale By email that her proposal for a K99 award (for promising postdocs to complete the development of mentored research) was scheduled for March 5 – but was currently pending with no additional details. The NIH website that once had the study section review list for each date has been purged of details.
Quadir said she hoped to receive the grant, which would begin in July, in order to apply for faculty jobs in the fall 2025 cycle. Otherwise, she said, she may have to postpone the length of her postdoc, i which may be viewed unfavorably in a faculty job search, or forego the potential K99 grant, which may mean applying for fewer jobs prestigious.
“This pause in grant reviews jeopardizes not only my career, but the progress of our field,” she wrote. “What happens to researchers whose work is endlessly delayed? And what about the 46 million people in the US living with a substance use disorder, waiting for breakthroughs that depend on federally funded research? “
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