Cuts And Conflicting Directives Sow Confusion For NIH Workers

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. Later in the hour, how banning diversity, equity, and inclusion affects medical research. And cancer in the animal kingdom, how looking at all creatures great and small might one day help people.

But first, five weeks into the Trump presidency, federal science funding in the US is in a state of confusion. Executive orders that have halted grant funding at the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, have faced court challenges. Last week, a federal judge lifted a freeze on some NIH funding.

So is the NIH making new grants? What’s the directive? It’s opaque from the outside. Is it any clearer on the inside?

Katherine Wu, Staff Writer for The Atlantic, talked to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials to find out what’s happening on the inside of the NIH campus. She’s here to catch us up on that and other science stories of the week. Katie, welcome back to Science Friday.

KATHERINE WU: Always good to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So there’s a lot going on. And you actually spoke to NIH workers about what it is like to try to do their jobs. What did you find out?

KATHERINE WU: Yeah, I think it is fair to say that this has been one of the worst five week stretches in a lot of NIH officials career. It is just a mess in there. I think they are battling a lot of really conflicting things. They are telling me that they are caught between their duty to their direct leaders, including their acting director, what is legal, according to the literal law in this country, and their duty to the American public to protect and preserve and promote their health.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Who is the acting director? Who’s running the NIH show right now?

KATHERINE WU: Right. So for the past few weeks, it has been a flu researcher named Matt Memoli, who was picked out of a part of the NIH that does not typically yield acting directors. There actually usually is a deputy director who typically steps into that position when directors are in transition. But that didn’t happen.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And why was he picked?

KATHERINE WU: So I can’t say for sure. I’m not in the brains of the people who did the actual selection. But the rumor mill suggests that it was for largely political ideology reasons. Matt Memoli gained some note of fame a few years ago when he emailed Anthony Fauci criticizing COVID vaccine mandates.

And that became public. He publicly critiqued the idea of COVID vaccines, reportedly refused the shot himself at least in 2021. And he’s also gotten chummy with Jay Bhattacharya, who is Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH next. And I was made aware that he submitted a DEI statement for an internal review at the agency, where he called the term DEI offensive and demeaning.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so is the NIH making grants right now? What is the state of grant making?

KATHERINE WU: Oh gosh. I think the answer is, sort of? Question mark. And I think that’s actually a pretty fair assessment. I mean, normally we see tens of thousands of grants come out of the NIH every year, and there is still a trickle. It’s been happening in fits and spurts.

It’s been really, really stop and go at the agency since basically the end of January. But it is nowhere near the typical cadence that is necessary to support biomedical research in this country and, frankly, abroad. So the big issue here is that they have been told by their leaders, including Emily and the folks at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, that they are not to be issuing grants.

And that is to be in compliance with president Trump’s recent spate of executive orders, including ones on DEI, gender, foreign aid, environmental justice. Basically, the agency is not supposed to be funding grants that would violate those orders. But they’ve also been told by federal judges it’s not legal to be withholding those federal funds. We allocated those funds to you as a country, and you were supposed to be giving them out. So it is a total and complete mess.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And are there competing directives within the NIH?

KATHERINE WU: So within the NIH, I would say that if you are looking to leadership, the message has largely been the same. Hold off. We’re figuring things out. We’re trying to do our best to comply with president Trump’s wishes.

But I think the mixed messaging really comes from the fact that their leaders are telling them one thing. But these are also government workers. They, of course, find the letter of the law very important. And all around them is this swirl of federal court orders that are saying, no, you really need to get back to business as usual to comply with the law. That is the most important thing. You must unpause things immediately.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what about the NIH lawyers? What are they saying?

KATHERINE WU: Well, the NIH lawyers are certainly experts in the law, and they have been advising leadership, yeah, please follow those court orders. If they’re telling you to unpause and get back to grantmaking, that is what you need to do. That is what is most legally advisable.

And at worst, if they continue to violate some of these court orders, they could be held in contempt. They could be prosecuted as criminals. But I think people are really unsure what to do.

If their leadership is telling them one thing, their lawyers are telling them another thing. HHS is telling them kind of something else. Court orders are saying yet another thing. It’s a mess. I mean, some people appear to have resigned over this mess.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is this also happening at other agencies? NSF, EPA? I

KATHERINE WU: Believe this has been happening to some degree at every federal agency that you could name. But I think what makes NIH particularly special is the size of its budget, which is about $47 billion a year, and the fact that their pause has probably been one of the most prolonged and severe.

Just for sake of comparison, the National Science Foundation, NSF, they resumed a decent degree of grant making as early as February 2. Things are by no means completely perfect and running smoothly over there. But just for comparison, I think that shows that federal agencies are handling this very, very differently depending on their leadership, depending on who is overseeing that particular agency and likely what staff internal to the agency are attempting to accomplish in this mess.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s talk about the measles outbreak in Texas. What’s the state of that?

KATHERINE WU: It is not great. As of this week, we have hit triple digits in terms of the number of confirmed cases. An unvaccinated kid has died amid the outbreak, which is the first measles death that the country has recorded in over a decade. It’s incredibly tragic.

This is a dire situation. This is one of the bigger outbreaks that we’ve had in recent years. And I’m already hearing experts talking about the fact that this could be an outbreak, if it continues to grow in size and the deaths continue, this could be something that could lose the country its elimination status for measles, which we declared in the year 2000.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I need a break from our planet for a second. It’s a pretty special weekend for stargazers, right?

KATHERINE WU: Yeah, absolutely. I fully agree. Life on earth is super stressful right now. I am constantly trying to look elsewhere.

And tonight, I need to check if my zone of habitation is in the right spot. But for some lucky people, if they have the right stargazing equipment, they can look upward and may be able to see all seven of the other planets in our solar system.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, the planetary parade.

KATHERINE WU: Yes, and I will say, having some degree of what’s called planetary alignment, which is being able to see more than one planet up in the sky at any given time, isn’t super rare. But to have all seven of the other members of the solar system up there at once and potentially visible, that’s pretty cool.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I read that it won’t happen again until 2040.

KATHERINE WU: Yeah. So if this is your jam, I would definitely get in there. You’re going to be waiting a long time.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, let’s move on to one of my favorites from the week, a glass brain. Tell us all about it.

KATHERINE WU: Oh, yes. So if you are an archeology nerd, you may already know about this glass brain that was uncovered from the region that was seriously impacted by the Mount Vesuvius eruption 2000 years ago. And I do want to note that this isn’t quite in Pompeii, but it’s adjacent to Pompeii.

But basically, researchers a few years ago found what looked to be a nerve tissue that had glassified What happened this week is researchers came out with a paper that suggested a new explanation for how the brain tissue could have glassified.

And the big problem before is, to get glass, you need to heat something very, very quickly and then cool it very, very quickly. That’s typically what happens with the molten sediment that we use to make the glass we see in our homes. But that wouldn’t have happened very easily with an eruption like this.

So the researcher said, well, maybe it wasn’t all the thick volcanic debris you’re picturing when you picture an eruption. Maybe in advance of that, this super hot cloud of ash hit this poor guy who was lying down in his bed, glassified his brain, and then dissipated really quickly because it was just ash. It could move really quickly. And that’s how the super fast heating and cooling happened in that short time frame.

FLORA LICHTMAN: All right, I’m lacing up my running shoes, in my case, my slow, slow jogging shoes, for our last story. Researchers have crunched the numbers and think that Kenyan runner Faith Kipyegon could break the four-minute mile. Is this a big deal?

KATHERINE WU: Oh, it would be a huge deal. So no woman has been recorded doing this. A man broke the record. Well, multiple men have broken the record as early as the 1950s.

But to have a woman break this record as well would be not only just another amazing feat of human performance, but I would also hope would be really inspiring to people across the gender spectrum. Just to think like this is not one of those things where, oh, a man can do it, but a woman can’t. I think that’s an incredibly important message to send.

So the idea here is, she is close but also not close. Her record is 4 minutes and 7.64 seconds. And to nonrunners, that may not sound like a lot, but to people who are sprinters, that is a huge chasm to be breaching. And so people have been really skeptical that this could happen.

She currently holds the world record for a woman, so she is an incredible candidate. But it would be really tricky. What these researchers are saying is what might be the trick is to have really strategically placed pace setters during a race to basically be in front of her and in back of her to reduce drag, so the force that would be working against her from like wind resistance and all that stuff. But if you have strategically placed people, you’re basically able to draft off of those people and run to your maximum ability without having to battle as many external forces as you otherwise would.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What did Faith have to say about this?

KATHERINE WU: [LAUGHS] So I believe she was interviewed by The New York Times on this, and I think she called it interesting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS]

KATHERINE WU: I don’t think she really wanted to– I suspect she didn’t really want to guarantee that this was going to happen or not. But she seemed to be very gracious. If someone did this modeling study on me, which they definitely wouldn’t because I’m the world’s slowest runner, I would also say it was intriguing but like TBD on what’s going to happen next.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thanks, Katie. Thanks for joining us today.

KATHERINE WU: Thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Katherine Wu is a staff writer at the Atlantic.

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