NIH Has Become Vichy France

According to Science magazine, “After freezing all grants to Columbia University last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now stopping grant and contract payments to Harvard University and four other universities that President Donald Trump’s administration believes have not done enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses. The move will both block new funding and halt payments to investigators currently working on NIH projects.” I feel sorry for the NIH extramural administrators who are caught in this awful situation, but we have reached the point that NIH is weaponizing its research funding; anyone participating in this effort has become complicit in the Republican War on Science. They are like leaders in Vichy, France who collaborated with the Nazis. I worked at the National Institutes of Health for seven years. I consider those years as the most productive years of my life, and believe that NIH used to be the greatest scientific research institution anywhere, ever. It is now a force for evil. This is the saddest event in my 40-year scientific career.