While the National Institutes of Health employs 20,000-plus workers and spans 27 institutes and centers, the agency’s main job is to fund researchers working outside its walls. But an unprecedented disruption of grant review panel meetings is provoking panic across the world of academic science that this key piece of the agency’s mission will be upended.
In interviews, more than two dozen researchers at institutions nationwide told STAT that the suddenness of the cancellations — in at least one case this week, a meeting was halted after it was underway — has cast many early-career scientists into limbo, unsure if they’ll have money to pay lab members’ salaries or run experiments. More broadly, uncertainty about when meetings will resume and a lack of communication from NIH leadership is fueling fears about the longer-term impact on medical and biotechnology innovation in the United States.
The worries were triggered by the new Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation this week of NIH study sections, meetings in which expert scientists consider whether the agency should bankroll a research project, as well as advisory council meetings, an additional review that culminates in a final funding recommendation. Together, they are the engine that allows the world’s largest funder of biomedical research to inject more than $31 billion each year into basic science and the search for cures to human disease.
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