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{shortcode-a46f82c6bba4b7e8e7b988d3efca115acdf3ed73}ver the course of three decades, Harvard School of Public Health professors Shahin Lockman and Roger L. Shapiro led the Botswana Harvard Health Partnership — a research hub with more than 300 staff and 11 active clinical trials — to become a leading center for HIV research, treatment development, and public health training in southern Africa.

In just three weeks, they watched the Trump administration abruptly pull almost all federal funding from the program they had spent their careers building as officials terminated most of Harvard’s federally funded research grants. Federal funding accounts for more than half of the research partnership’s operating budget.

Lockman wrote that the grant terminations could force the program to interrupt 11 clinical trials, shed more than 150 jobs in Botswana, and halt training for more than 20 young scientists in degree programs or mentored research. More than 240 jobs have already been cut, according to Shapiro.

“This will set science and capacity and trust back in a major way,” Lockman wrote.

Their story is not unique.

Across Harvard’s schools, researchers described a wave of destruction following sweeping terminations of federally funded grants. More than $2.7 billion in cuts have come as part of the Trump administration’s targeted pressure campaign against Harvard. And research began suffering even earlier, as agencies made nationwide cuts to grants that tied up billions of dollars of funding in legal limbo.

At Harvard, the loss spans disciplines, from neuroscience and oncology to global health and occupational medicine. But researchers say the impact is larger than any single lab or the University itself — it is a dismantling of the national research enterprise and the loss of a generation of scientists.

‘Playing with Patients’ Lives’

The lifelong work of HSPH professor Alberto Ascherio is now frozen — literally. His lab has spent years and “millions of dollars in tax-payer money” to prepare “irreplaceable” blood samples for therapeutic interventions for multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Ascherio wrote in an email.

As a result of the Trump administration’s funding cuts, Ascherio and his fellow researchers’ only hope is freezing those samples until funding starts flowing again.

“We had to stop all work, and we just hope to have sufficient funding to keep our freezers running to preserve the samples for better times,” he wrote.

“It is difficult to overestimate the level of waste and disruption this is causing,” Ascherio added.

Federal funding has been a political battlefront since Trump’s inauguration, leaving researchers in a prolonged state of uncertainty. Just a week into his presidency, the administration announced a nationwide freeze on federal funding — a move later blocked by a judge and rescinded.

Still, the threat lingered, with changes to the indirect cost reimbursement rate and stop-work orders issued for diversity-related projects, with Harvard-affiliated researchers experiencing $110 million in terminations from the end of February to April 11.

In mid-April, the Trump administration announced a $9 billion review of funding to Harvard and affiliated health care centers should the University not comply with a series of demands — from ending DEI programming to banning masks on campus.

Harvard stood its ground. Then the cuts started rolling in — with a price tag that keeps climbing toward $3 billion. The federal government terminated around 350 research grants to Harvard Medical School in mid-May and nearly all direct federal grants to HSPH, totaling more than 190 and affecting more than 130 scientists.

Harvard has committed to funding terminated research in the short term, but affected faculty said it remains unclear how long that support will last or how much of the government-backed research can be salvaged.

“The university is trying to provide some bridge funding, but it is insufficient to cover needs,” Ascherio wrote. “Being able to pay salaries day to day is not enough — we need to show that we have committed sufficient funding for at least one year if we want the best scientists to stay.”

HMS professor Bertha K. Madras, a member of Trump’s 2017 Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, lost funding for a parent-focused course aimed at preventing teenage opioid abuse.

“We reached the final stages of production last week, when the institutional funding crisis compelled the University to make the painful decision to cancel support of the course,” Madras wrote. “The abrupt termination has left me in a grief borne not only of personal investment, but of a lost opportunity to inform, equip, and inspire those most pivotal in a child’s life: their parents.”

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And dozens of postdoctoral fellows researching a range of critical conditions — including Alzheimer’s disease and more than a dozen forms of cancer — were left without a future salary after fellowship support from the NIH and National Science Foundation was terminated.

Many think it will be impossible to make up for their lost federal grants because alternative sources of funding are insufficient or nonexistent.

HSPH Professor Christoph Lange has spent the last 25 years developing a software package that diagnoses a variety of chronic illnesses. Private foundations typically focus on one aspect of research, like Alzheimer’s, Lange said, meaning projects like his would not be eligible.

Rita Hamad ’03, a professor at HSPH, said that the private sector has no interest in answering the kinds of questions public health research seeks to address.

“Amazon’s not interested in that question. Pharma is not interested in that question. The government theoretically should be interested in that question,” she said.

Researchers also say private funding cannot match the scale or consistency of federal support.

University-wide, the $684 million Harvard received in federal funding made up 10 percent of its total operating budget for fiscal year 2024 — more than twice what it received from non-federal sources of sponsored support, like foundations and local governments.

The NIH, with a $48 billion budget, is the world’s largest biomedical research funder and the largest federal contributor to Harvard, while major private funders like Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gates Foundation operate with less than $10 billion annually.

And private funding can be unpredictable. HHMI recently canceled some postdoctoral fellowships to support researchers affected by federal cuts.

“It’s basically kind of like a snowball effect,” said Silvi Rouskin, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School.

Faculty say some of the most urgent consequences may be felt by patients enrolled in clinical trials that have been paused indefinitely.

“In the more immediate term, these cuts are actively harming patients,” HMS professor Kanaka Rajan wrote in a statement. “There are real patients with treatment-resistant conditions and no paths forward with traditional interventions who were enrolled in clinical trials affected by funding cuts.”

“These terminations put medical breakthroughs on pause, effectively playing with patients’ lives and delaying the development of treatments that could help future generations,” she added.

“With every halted experiment, we forfeit cures that might have been, lives that could have been saved, suffering that could have been spared,” HMS dean George Q. Daley ’82 wrote.

A ‘Survival State’

While the immediate fallout from federal funding cuts has halted research at Harvard, the secondary effects are radiating outward — unraveling partnerships at institutions around the world.

When the University acts as the primary awardee on a grant, subawards to other institutions are also canceled. The same is not true in the reverse, unless the primary awardee has also had funding revoked.

“The federal effort to isolate us from our collaborative networks by creating uncertainty as to whether we will sink a grant if we are included even as a subcontractor is clearly having an effect,” wrote HSPH professor Sarah Fortune, who received a stop-work order on her $60 million tuberculosis research contract in April.

Hamad, the HSPH professor, said she had to abruptly inform collaborators at institutions including the University of California, San Francisco, Boston University, and the Louisiana Public Health Institute that their joint research was being terminated.

“For some of them, we’re actually in the last year or two, and we are getting close to the point of finalizing our results and publishing the papers, and it’s just very devastating for everybody,” she said.

The damage is global. HSPH professor Shoba Ramanadhan wrote in an email that she was forced to shut down a multi-year NIH-funded project involving collaborators in Madagascar and South Africa on health effects of heat stress.

“To abruptly shut down planned work in Year 1 of a 5-year grant (as we have just had to do) damages not only our relationships with partners, but the stability of healthcare and public health organizations that were relying on these funds to continue their vital work,” she wrote.

Ulrich H. von Andrian, a professor of immunopathology at HMS, said cuts to his lab had a far-reaching consequence: stopping production of a vital monoclonal antibody his lab has distributed to scientists around the world and been used for several publications.

“It’s not commercially available, and there’s really no alternative to it, and we have been providing this to academic researchers really throughout the world, basically free,” von Andrian said. “Going forward, I won’t be able to do this anymore, because I won’t have funding to just simply produce this protein.”

Rouskin, the microbiologist, was the lead principal investigator on a pulled major NIH grant uniting her lab with MIT and two biotech firms to develop RNA-based therapeutics — leaving all institutions without the funding needed.

Fortune, the tuberculosis researcher, wrote that due to a lack of relief policies, some of her collaborators “are sadly even ahead of us in terms of having to lay people off.”

“Many junior faculty at other universities who are already proven, powerful collaborators, but are struggling to maintain their labs and continue their research,” Rajan wrote. “When collaborators like these are in a ‘survival state,’ they simply do not have the bandwidth to think about novel scientific ideas or participate in new collaborations as effectively as they could.”

Choking the Pipeline

While researchers are operating in a “survival state,” they can’t help but be worried about the long-term ramifications of the funding gap: not just on their individual labs but on America’s scientific progress, economic health, and national security.

Lange said that cuts to public funding could deter top researchers from pursuing careers in the U.S., weakening the nation’s leadership in scientific discovery. “If I were them, I’m not sure I would bet my money at the moment on Boston or the U.S. — because what happened to us?” he said.

That talent drain, faculty say, is already beginning. For early-career scientists — particularly Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows — the traditional academic path is becoming increasingly untenable.

HSPH professor Laura D. Kubzansky described a bleak outlook for her team.

“The government wins regardless because by the time the lawsuit unrolls (first court date is now end of July), all of our teams will have to be folded, labs shut down,” she wrote in an email. “Our trainees are looking for jobs overseas and will go the first opportunity they have. Many will leave academia.”

A major casualty of the cuts and recent federal actions is physician education and training. The M.D.-Ph.D. Physician Scientist Training Program — run jointly by Harvard and MIT — lost its NIH funding last week. The NIH funding provides full tuition and stipends for its trainees, who commit to nearly a decade of dual training to become leaders at the intersection of medicine and research.

“For 50 years, the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program has produced renowned physician-scientists who have advanced science, medicine, and public health in service to the country and the world,” the program’s director, HMS professor Loren D. Walensky, wrote in a statement. “We remain fully committed to our remarkably talented student body of 208 MD-PhD trainees.”

Daley — a graduate of the MD-Ph.D. program himself — wrote in a statement to The Crimson that it was “astounding that supporting these dedicated physician-scientists-in-training isn’t a solemn priority for the government.”

“I remain steadfast in my support for their training. We’ll find a way,” Daley wrote.

At HSPH, the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency, which trains future physicians to prevent workplace injuries and chronic occupational disease, lost its funding when the Trump administration gutted the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

“Without new funding, we will be unable to continue training doctors in this essential field,” wrote the residency’s director, HSPH professor Justin Yang. HSPH will only be able to support doctors already enrolled in the program, Yang wrote.

Some early-career scientists are already exploring careers outside of science altogether. Hamad said students in her lab are being forced to pivot.

“They’re saying, ‘I’m having to apply to Amazon and Facebook to do statistics and AI’ and things that are not as focused on public health and public good,’” she said. “There are just so many fewer jobs in academia and in science right now, and I think that’s a waste of their talent and their idealism.”

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HMS professor Stephen D. Liberles ’94, who lost two research grants and the fellowships supporting his students in mid-Ma, wrote that he fears “cuts to scientific research will choke the pipeline that produces the next generation of scientists.”

“It isn’t Harvard Medical School only that suffers — these cuts interrupt the pipeline from lab discoveries to lifesaving treatments, hurt the next generation of researchers, and they erode America’s role as a global leader in biomedicine,” Daley wrote.

For junior researchers, the outlook is particularly grim.

“The advice I’ve been giving today, and in the last couple of days, is just for them to survive the next one or two years,” Lange said. “There’s no strategic advice at the moment beyond that.”

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.