STAT+: Harvard scientist ordered to halt multicenter TB trial in funding freeze
Sarah Fortune, Harvard tuberculosis expert, says a Trump administration order could lead to scientist layoffs and the deaths of research monkeys.
A top scientist at Harvard who has spent years unraveling the mysteries of tuberculosis woke up Tuesday morning and discovered an order from the federal government telling her to halt her research.
The stop-work order from the National Institutes of Health arrived hours after the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force said Monday night it would freeze more than $2 billion of funding to the university. That funding freeze was a response to Harvard’s refusal to comply with a list of extraordinary demands the Trump administration had sent the school’s leaders several days earlier.
In an interview Tuesday morning, Sarah Fortune, the lead Harvard scientist on the halted tuberculosis study, said she planned to spend the day in emergency meetings figuring out how to proceed. Her $60 million contract with the NIH had supported an international network of researchers and clinicians who had produced pathbreaking work on a disease that infects a quarter of the world’s population and kills more than 1 million people per year.
