David Walt received a presidential medal in January for inventions that have enabled genetic screening for in vitro fertilization, better disease diagnosis and improved crop resistance. His latest work involved early detection of Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, with the goal of developing new drugs to manage the debilitating loss of muscle control from that condition.
But on Tuesday morning, Walt got an unwelcome update: The Department of Health and Human Services was ordering work to stop on his $650,000 government contract, part of an effort to force Harvard University to comply with the Trump administration’s demands.
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Unless he can find alternative funds, his ALS research will end, Walt said.
“Patients will suffer unnecessarily and some will die unnecessarily,” Walt, a professor of biologically inspired engineering at Harvard Medical school, wrote in an email.
Walt’s project is one of many that’s getting caught in the middle of what’s poised to become a protracted political and legal fight over the government’s ability to dictate conditions to the nation’s private universities, which receive billions in federal funding through grants and contracts. The White House continued to escalate its battle with Harvard on Friday as the Education Department claimed Harvard had made inaccurate and incomplete disclosures regarding funding from foreign sources.
The Trump administration says that it’s seeking to protect Jewish students on college campuses. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said the university is willing to work with the government but its demands won’t address “antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner.” Instead, Harvard said the White House was seeking control over who the university hires, which students it admits and how it manages ideological diversity. The school has vowed that it won’t “surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.”
The government has halted more than $2.2 billion in contracts and grants to Harvard in response. The Education Department has said funding for hospitals affiliated with the university isn’t affected. But that still leaves plenty of scientific work at risk.
The federal government had pledged $2.5 billion for more than a thousand research projects at Harvard before the funding freeze. Nearly half of those were already in process, with the vast majority of the money coming through the National Institutes of Health. Those resources support studies on infectious diseases, pediatric health and the impact of aging.
Harvard researchers are finding out one-by-one whether their projects are affected.
Walt’s colleague, Donald Ingber, the founding director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute, also received stop-work orders for two contracts. They total about $20 million and are related to research for human organ chips — devices designed to mimic real organs that could help replace animal testing in drug development and support studies on reducing the side effects of radiation.
“We will never get to Mars without developing ways to overcome the lethal effects of high energy radiation that an astronaut would experience during that long flight,” said Ingber. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have called for ambitious plans to send humans to Mars. Ingber is seeking other funds to continue the work and keep on the roughly 20 researchers who assist him.
The Wyss Institute is funded by Harvard Business School alumnus Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire.
Still, it’s unlikely that there’s enough money from other sources to supplant the government’s role in supporting scientific research.
Harvard’s School of Public Health also received stop-work orders for at least three contracts and grants: one for $60 million for tuberculosis research and smaller ones for research on breast cancer tumor sequencing and a study about the relationship between coffee intake and cancer.
The school faces a significant budget crisis because of the combined effects of the federal funding freeze and threats to international student enrollment, said Stephanie Simon, a spokesperson. Federal funding makes up 46% of the public health school’s budget.
“We anticipate many more stop work orders coming,” Simon said.
Walt, the ALS researcher, has temporarily moved some staff to other projects that haven’t been affected by the Trump administration’s funding freeze. It’s just a stop-gap measure, though, he said, and not sustainable unless the money starts flowing again.
The funding pause will “jeopardize the scientific workforce and will cause huge damage to the economy,” Walt said.
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