Biomedical research takes a hit
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Trump Officials Blame Mistake for Setting Off Confrontation With Harvard
An official on the administration’s antisemitism task force told the university that a letter of demands had been sent without authorization.
NYT reporting:
“Mistake”.
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As a counterpoint, I have seen several studies that have received government funding that cannot possibly produce the stated result, primarily because the data they would need simply does not exist in any reliable and relatively complete form. There are a lot of people making a living off tax dollars generating exactly that sort of effort.
But once again, this chainsaw vs. scalpel approach is doing as much harm as good. Take the case of the Afghan Christians who received parole at the border and who now received letters from HHS telling them to self-deport by Good Friday. I do not see how this can be justified. There's a difference between controlling our borders and cruelty through a combination of zeal and sheer laziness.
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As a counterpoint, I have seen several studies that have received government funding that cannot possibly produce the stated result, primarily because the data they would need simply does not exist in any reliable and relatively complete form. There are a lot of people making a living off tax dollars generating exactly that sort of effort.
But once again, this chainsaw vs. scalpel approach is doing as much harm as good. Take the case of the Afghan Christians who received parole at the border and who now received letters from HHS telling them to self-deport by Good Friday. I do not see how this can be justified. There's a difference between controlling our borders and cruelty through a combination of zeal and sheer laziness.
@Mik said in Biomedical research takes a hit:
But once again, this chainsaw vs. scalpel approach is doing as much harm as good. Take the case of the Afghan Christians who received parole at the border and who now received letters from HHS telling them to self-deport by Good Friday. I do not see how this can be justified. There's a difference between controlling our borders and cruelty through a combination of zeal and sheer laziness.
Well said, and exactly where I'm at, and for me it goes well beyond just the approach to immigration and university funding. There's a lot of shock and awe going on everywhere but I don't know how we can possibly get good results from this approach. It just seems like a big act to impress or to frighten the masses (depending on who you are) rather than something substantive.
I am doubtful that we'll be better off overall at the end and fear that we will just be more broken, angry, and isolated, both individually and as a country.
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I asked my friend for an update on things at her university.
A number of people have gotten a letter saying that their projects no longer align with the interests of the government. The school has told them that this means that from the day the letter arrives, no other charges can be made against that grant. So, instant firings of techs, students left without pay and scrambling, and the school has to support the salaries of faculty until the end of their contracts. No word yet on the axing of the previously agreed upon indirect costs rate. We have an Institute for vaccine development within the med school, so I bet they were really hit. Oh, and the delay that the feds have instituted on grant reviews have also hit hard, but no one talks about them. I feel lucky to have only had a 20% cut, and if I stay on for an extra year it can't be cut much more because I am tenured and there are rules about how much the salaries of tenured faculty can be cut when they become deadwood
. But the chances of my work being funded in the near term, when clinical trials in important areas are being cut, are pretty slim. It would be unfair both to the university and to myself if I spent all of my time for the next 3 months writing a grant proposal that has no chance of being funded 9 months later.Spoke to a colleague from Harvard who had his salary cut by 50%. He's retiring not because of the salary cut, but because of the bureaucratic morass at the university that makes it so much harder to do anything anymore. I bet that is the one area that survives all this cutting! There is WAY too much administration!!!
So she's still moving forward with closing up shop at retiring at the end of the year.
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Talked to my friend last night. She said her medical school has lost a hundred researchers and they are scrambling to find places to find graduate students a place to go.
She is in a field called neuro-ophthalmology and was recently conducting a study with the military on traumatic brain injury and how it affects vision. She said the NIH has stopped all funding of TBI research.
She says she has no regrets about her decision to retire.
Krugman must have been listening to our conversation...this was in my inbox this morning....
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Oh, and she said she is going to a conference in Europe soon. She received a questionnaire asking what she will be doing, who will she be meeting with, and will she be collaborating with anyone. She said she's never gotten anything like this in her 43 years in academia.
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NIH froze funding for clinical trials at a major university. By fall, they’ll run out of funding
The university is Northwestern here in Chicago.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/nih-northwestern-trials-funding
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The first American academics fleeing Donald Trump's America for France have arrived.
Aix-Marseille University last week introduced eight U.S.-based researchers who were in the final stage of joining the institution's “Safe Place for Science" program, which aims to woo researchers who have experienced or fear funding cuts under the Trump administration. AMU offers the promise of a brighter future in the sun-drenched Mediterranean port city.
While both France and the European Union have launched multimillion-euro plans to woo researchers across the pond since Trump assumed the U.S. presidency in January, AMU's initiative was the first of its kind in the country — meaning the eight researchers who were welcomed are the first academic refugees planning to trade the United States for France.
https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-first-academic-refugees-fleeing-us-france-science-program/
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A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration violated Harvard University's First Amendment rights and federal law when it froze nearly $2 billion in federal grants because of the Ivy League school's handling of antisemitism on campus.
In a victory for Harvard, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs blocked Trump administration officials from implementing or instituting orders freezing the grant funding to Harvard and letters terminating research grants awarded by a slew of federal agencies.
Burroughs wrote in her 84-page decision that Harvard has been "plagued" by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to deal with the issue. But she found that there is "little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism."
"In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI," Burroughs wrote. "Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes."
