THE NEW YORK TIMES – In his first months in office, President Trump has slashed funding for medical research, threatening a longstanding alliance between the federal government and universities that helped make the United States the world leader in medical science.
Some changes have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye, a New York Times analysis found.
To understand the cuts, The Times trawled through detailed grant data from the National Institutes of Health, interviewed dozens of affected researchers and spoke to agency insiders who said that their government jobs have become unrecognizable.
In all, the N.I.H., the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, The Times found.
From the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated through April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth.
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The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities like Columbia or Harvard. The disruptions are affecting research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use, to name just a few, and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Mr. Trump.
“I think people should know that research that they probably would support is being canceled,” said Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi, who had been working to develop a novel approach for treating glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
Their grant had been awarded through a program designed to diversify the biomedical workforce; in April, they were notified that it was being terminated.
“I would like to cure brain cancer,” Dr. Tanner said. “I think that’s not particularly controversial.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign against medical research has been carried out without congressional approval …
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