Documenting grant cancellations that represent ‘a life’s worth of work’
Over the past several months, the federal government has terminated roughly 2,100 National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants worth around $9.5 billion. One of the most detailed accounts of those grant terminations has been produced by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Scott Delaney.
Delaney, a research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health, has been working since March with computational researcher Noam Ross to create the Grant Watch database, combining government information with crowdsourced submissions to track both NIH and National Science Foundation grant terminations. In a May 27 STAT Q&A, Delaney discussed his efforts to document the grant terminations. He also talked about what it was like to learn in mid-May that hundreds of federal grants at Harvard had been axed—including those supporting his own research on how climate change can exacerbate Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s.
Delaney explained that, as NIH grant terminations began in March, he couldn’t find much information about the moves. “My first thought was, ‘This is surely illegal,’ but it’s going to be really hard to file a lawsuit if we don’t have a record of what’s happened,” said Delaney, who is also a lawyer. That concern prompted him to start the Grant Watch database. The group’s goal is to continue to curate a common factual record, “because the government has taken steps that obscure that record,” he said.
A separate project—called the Science & Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMaP)—is now making use of Grant Watch’s list of terminated grants. SCIMaP is an effort from an interdisciplinary, multi-university team of researchers aimed at showing how cuts in federal research funding are impacting science, the economy, and healthcare.
Delaney told STAT that even though the government had frozen payments on Harvard’s NIH grants in April, the terminations on May 15 still came as a shock. “A freeze always felt temporary, whereas the terminations felt in some sense final,” he said. “I just had to take some time away, get outside. On my colleagues, it had a really, really, really profound impact, and was extremely demoralizing.”
However, he added, he thinks that people are now ready to fight back. “These grants are the manifestations of a life’s worth of work,” he said.
Read the STAT article: A Harvard scientist built a database of 2,100 NIH grant terminations. Then his own funding was cut
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Funding cuts create ‘existential crisis’ at Harvard Chan School (Harvard Chan School news)
