Washington (AP) – In his confirmation lists to lead the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattcharya promised his openness to view views that could conflict with his own. “Dissens,” he said, “is the essence of science.”
This obligation is put to the test.
On Monday, numerous scientists from the agency sent a letter with Trump’s leader with the title The Bethesda Declaration, a frontal challenge for “guidelines that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources and impair the health of Americans and people around the world”.
It says: “We dissuit.”
In a capital in which insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly, more than 90 NIH researchers, program directors, branches and scientific review officials put their signatures on the letter – and their career on the line.
Confrontation with a “culture of fear”
In view of a “culture of fear and oppression”, they went public. “We are forced to express ourselves when our leadership prioritizes the political dynamics of human security and the loyal responsibility of public resources,” the explanation said.
Named after the location of the agency in Maryland in the Bethesda declaration, the world’s leading research institution for public health research is described over the months.
It deals with the abrupt termination of 2,100 research grants worth more than $ 12 billion and some of the human costs incurred, such as:
In one case, a study supported by NIH had to be stopped in multi-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti, causing antibiotic treatment in the middle of patients.
In a number of cases, studies that were largely completed without the money to end and analyze the work have been made useless, the letter said. “The termination of a 5 million dollar research study, if it is 80% complete, does not save 1 million US dollar,” it says, “wastes 4 million US dollars.”
The mask goes out
The four -sided letter directed to Bhattarya, but also to Health Minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the congress members who were monitored by the NIH were sent by 250 anonymous employees of the agency apart from the 92 that signed.
Jenna Norton, who monitored the research of the health differences at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digentive and kidney diseases of the agency, recently entered into a forum by Sen. Angela, sobrooks, D-MD.
At the event, she masked to hide her identity. Now the mask is over. She was a senior organizer of the explanation.
“I want people to know how bad things are at Nih,” Norton told The Associated Press.
The signatories said they had modeled their charges according to Bhattacharya’s own explanation of Barrington from October 2020, when he was a professor at Stanford University Medical School.
His explanation met like-minded epidemiologists and scientists of infectious diseases and scientists in public health, which they saw as an excessive Covid 19 blocking policy, and felt outlawed by the larger community of public health, which has promoted these guidelines, including NIH.
“He is proud of his statement and we are proud of our,” said Sarah Kobrin, branch at the NIH National Cancer Institute, who signed the Bethesda declaration.
Cancer research is out of the edge
Kobrin, as head of the research department for health systems and interventions, offers researchers across the country scientific supervision that has been financed or want to be financed by the Cancer Institute. But sudden cuts in personnel and money have changed their work from improving cancer research on what they consider to minimize its destruction. “So much of it is gone – my work,” she said.
The 21-year-old Nih veteran said she signed because “I don’t want to be an employee” in the political manipulation of biomedical science.
Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, also signed the explanation. “We have a proverb in basic science,” he said. “You go and become a doctor if you want to treat thousands of patients. You go and become researchers if you want to save billions of patients.
“We carry out research that will create the healing of the future,” he added. But that will not happen, he said, when Trump’s Republican administration prevails with her scale cuts for grants.
The Nih employees interviewed by the AP emphasized that they spoke for themselves and not for their institutes or the NIH.
Dissidents range over the width of Nih
Employees of all 27 NIH institutes and centers support the explanation. Most who have signed are closely associated with the evaluation and monitoring of extramural research grants.
In the letter it is claimed that “Nih attempts are set regardless of the security of the participants” and that the agency jokes obligations towards experimental participants to “gave the personal risk of giving the incredible gift of biological rehearsals, and to understand that their generosity would improve the scientific discovery and health”.
At several fronts, the Trump administration has exposed itself directly to several fronts than part of their broad efforts, diversity, justice and inclusion values ​​throughout the bureaucracy, and as part of its endeavor to starve some federal universities, directly as part of their broad efforts.
A blunt ax swings
This has forced “indiscriminately subsidies, survey, freezing for ongoing research and ceiling in terms of awards regardless of quality, progress or effects of science,” the explanation says.
Some NIH employees have previously reported to air complaints on television, and many went with the employees from Bhattacharya. The explanation is the first coherent effort to register the dismay of the NIH statement.
A signal group was the place where the participants sort the chatter to Reddit, recognize rumors from reality and offer mutual support. The explanation took shape in this group and as a word, the neighbors spread to neighbors in Nih offices.
In her letter of his often defined ethics, the Dissens are reminiscent of his frequently defined ethics that academic freedom must be a lynchpine in science.
In a statement in April, he said: “Nih scientists can be sure that the ability is enabled to operate an open, academic discourse within the framework of their official duties and in their personal skills without the risk of official interference, professional disadvantage or retaliation at the workplace.”
Now it can be seen whether this is sufficient to protect these NIH employees who question the Trump government and it.
“There is a book that I read my children and it talks about how they cannot be brave if they are not afraid,” said Norton, who has three little children. “I’m so afraid of it, but I try to make myself brave about my children because it is only more tough to comment.
“Maybe I will be at risk,” she added. “And I still do it because otherwise I couldn’t live with myself.”
___
The medical author of Associated Press, Lauran Neergaard, contributed to this report.
