For a large part of Living memory, the United States has been a world leader in scientific research and innovation. From the polio vaccine to the decoding of the first human chromosome, to the first cardiac pontage surgery, American research has created an apparently endless list of health care that is held for acquired.
But when the Trump administration published a memorandum on Monday that interrupted all federal pause subsidies and loans—Auting the aim of ensuring that the beneficiaries of funding comply with the president of the president of recent decrees – university land. Since then, the frost has been partially canceled for certain sectors, but remains largely in place for universities and research institutions across the country, without any certainty of what comes next.
“It has an immediate impact on people’s lives,” said J9 AustinProfessor of psychiatry and medical genetics at the University of British Columbia. “And it’s terrifying.”
The freezing of funding obliges agencies to subject examinations of their programs financed at the management and budget office by February 10. The frost follows separate commands issued last week to American health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, which leads the country in medical research in the country – Break all communications Until February 1 and Stop almost all trips indefinitely.
Confusion is consumed. If the freezing of funding continues until February, and even beyond, how will graduate students be paid? Should subsidy requests – should they be submitted by the deadline for submission of triannu subsidies on February 5? What does this mean for clinical trials if participants and laboratory technicians cannot be paid? Should all this research be abandoned thanks to incomplete data?
Even if Trump fully reverses the freeze on research funding, damage, according to several sources, have been made. Although for the moment the freeze of funding is temporary, the administration has shown how it could exercise government levers. The involvement is that the withdrawal of funding could be done more permanently and could be done to individual institutions, individual, private and public organizations. This is not content to create a precedent for the major universities of the East Coast or the West Coast, but those located in the red and blue states.
Although always an imperfect arrangement, science in the United States is largely funded by a complex system of subsidy requests, peers’ reviews in the field (which had to be interrupted as part of the communications break), and The competitive distribution of the NIH Fund, known as Gerald Keusch, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Boston and former associate director of international research for NIH. According to its website, the NIH spends nearly $ 48 billion in subsidies per year.
Regarding medical research, America is really the first, and if it abduces this position, the void left behind has global ramifications. “In Canada, we have always considered NIH as an example of what we should try to do,” said Austin, talking to me independently of any role and affiliation. “Now it’s collapsed.”
Science is, in its very nature, collaborative. Many consortia and alliances in scientific fields cross boundaries and linguistic barriers. Some laboratories may be able to find additional funding from alternative sources such as the European Union. But it is unlikely that a continuous withdrawal of the financing of NIH can be connected by support abroad. And Big Pharma, with its apparently endless funds, is unlikely to intensify no longer, according to the sources with which Wired has spoken.
