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STAT+: At ‘Stand Up for Science’ rally, Francis Collins warns major NIH research programs ‘at severe risk’
At "Stand Up for Science" rallies across the U.S., scientists and their supporters protested Trump administration actions affecting research.
WASHINGTON — Days after retiring from the National Institutes of Health, the agency’s former director warned that two signature programs — an initiative to decipher how the brain works, and another to build a massive and diverse genomics database — are threatened by Trump administration actions.
“Both of these groundbreaking projects are now at severe risk because of budget and workforce cuts,” Francis Collins said of the BRAIN and All of Us projects during a speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial — during one of dozens of Stand Up for Science rallies held around the U.S. on Friday.
The BRAIN initiative, launched during the Obama administration, is developing technologies to map how the individual neurons and circuits within the brain interact, while All of Us, which Collins was instrumental in launching, seeks to gather genomic and other health information from more than 1 million Americans, more than half of them from communities underrepresented in biomedical research, to better tailor medical care.
