Research scientists alarmed by NIH meeting cancellations

Research scientists around the country who get funding from the National Institutes of Health have had key meetings about their grants canceled in the last few days. This is happening at the same time as a broader ban on all external communication by the NIH and other agencies that fall under Health and Human Services through Feb. 1.

The NIH is the biggest funder of biomedical research in the world, and there’s little clarity on why meetings are being canceled, and whether it’s a temporary pause or something bigger.

This Thursday, Gregory Ducker was supposed to be going to a meeting where he and a bunch of other scientists would review grant applications for NIH funding. But last week, he got an email “kind of a little cryptically saying that it was canceled,” he said.

Ducker is an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Utah, where he does NIH-funded research of his own. Lots of scientists have had upcoming grant reviews canceled, he said, and there’s been no communication from the NIH about why or when they might be rescheduled.

“People are anxious because the research is very dependent upon having funding renewed so that you can continue the studies,” Ducker said.

It’s not just grant-review meetings. Rebecca Pompano, a professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, was supposed to go to a training last week to be a grant-reviewer, but that was also canceled — “20 minutes before it was supposed to start,” she noted.

Without that training, she and others won’t be able to review NIH funding applications.

Regardless of whether all of this is just temporary and everything is rescheduled soon, “even a delay of a month or several months in funding could make the difference between a scientist being able to stay working on a particular research project or having to leave to get a different job somewhere else,” she said. “And so you would lose that ability to pick up the research again.”

That would be the case even if the grant eventually comes through.

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