【中美创新时报2025 年 1 月 29 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）周一晚上，白宫下令暂停联邦政府发放的所有赠款和贷款。周二，在一片混乱和困惑中，政府试图澄清其行动，但在冻结将于下午 5 点开始前，一名联邦法官暂时将其暂停至周一。这些突然的变化让世界上主要的科学中心之一感到恐惧和困惑，研究人员争先恐后地了解资金状况，并从谣言中分辨出事实。
《波士顿环球报》记者Anna Kuchment、Kay Lazar 和 Neena Hagen 对此作了下述报道。
Sameer Sonkusale 已经购买了前往华盛顿特区的不可退款机票，以展示他的研究以获得联邦资助，这时电子邮件上周出现在他的收件箱中。
原定于周二举行的会议因“新指导方针”而取消。电子邮件说，他将收到有关后续步骤的通知，但到目前为止他还没有听到任何消息。Sonkusale 是塔夫茨大学的生物、化学和电气工程教授，他是六支科学家团队之一，他们计划竞争美国国立卫生研究院的设计创新资助，以将他们的研究转化为医疗保健产品。该小组将提出一种检测新生儿败血症的新方法。
上周上任后数小时内，特朗普政府就发布了一系列指令，颠覆了该国主要卫生和科学机构的工作。上周，官员们暂停了卫生与公众服务部（包括国立卫生研究院、疾病控制与预防中心和食品药品管理局）与公众之间的许多沟通，直到由政治任命者进行审查，部分冻结了部门员工的旅行，突然取消了数十场科学会议和拨款审查，由于特朗普总统的命令称世界卫生组织对 COVID-19 处理不当而退出该组织，并冻结了对美国主导的全球卫生计划的资助至少 90 天。
周一晚上，白宫下令暂停联邦政府发放的所有赠款和贷款。周二，在一片混乱和困惑中，政府试图澄清其行动，但在冻结将于下午 5 点开始前，一名联邦法官暂时将其暂停至周一。
这些突然的变化让世界上主要的科学中心之一感到恐惧和困惑，研究人员争先恐后地了解资金状况，并从谣言中分辨出事实。
美国大约 40% 的基础研究由政府资助，马萨诸塞州获得的人均 NIH 资金份额是各州中最大的——上个财政年度，35 亿美元支持了 5,783 多个项目，包括寻找治疗阿尔茨海默病的药物、减缓抗生素耐药性以及对抗儿童最常见和最致命的脑癌。
“随着这些资金冻结，创新停止了，”哈佛医学院教授 Aaron Kesselheim 博士说，他领导着布莱根妇女医院的一个学术研究中心，该中心研究处方药的使用、结果和监管。
“如果政府不提供资金，那么我们所有药物的基础和转化科学就无法开展，”他说。
波士顿大学公共卫生学院全球卫生与医学教授戴维·哈默博士表示，这场动荡发生在 NIH 拨款主要截止日期 2 月 5 日之前。
“我正在重新提交两份申请，”负责监测新兴传染病的哈默说。“我们不应该这样做，否则会发生什么？”
一位波士顿地区的研究人员表示，她的团队已经开始探索私人资金来源作为 NIH 的替代方案，她因担心遭到特朗普政府的报复而不愿透露姓名。
“我个人感到非常沮丧，”她说，并补充说她怀疑资金机会是否会完全恢复。
她说，她对自己的工作以及她所在领域的未来感到恐慌，同样担心特朗普的指令，即终止政府和联邦合同中所有多样性、公平和包容性计划。
“我们处理的拨款通常侧重于公平，所以感觉有点像双重打击，”她说。“即使某种程度的资金回来了，我们可能也不会得到资助，或者我们必须修改我们的提案，不包含这些词。”
Sonkusale 还担心对 DEI 的打击。几十年来，美国国立卫生研究院一直要求其研究拨款具有多样性，最近又要求科学家在拨款申请中明确解释他们打算如何增加他们招募的研究参与者的多样性。这项指令在拜登政府的领导下取得了进展，Sonkusale 说，他接受美国国立卫生研究院资助的研究遵守了这些要求。
“我担心科学的可靠性，无法研究疾病对不同群体的影响，”他说。“我希望他们不会说停止这样做。”
对于波士顿急诊医学医生兼公共卫生研究员杰里米·福斯特博士来说，封口令暂停了 CDC 网站的一些数据更新，这尤其令人担忧。上周，该机构未能在其 COVID 和流感疫苗接种仪表板以及跟踪新 COVID 变种崛起的网站上发布新数据。上周四，该机构几十年来首次没有发布其《发病率和死亡率周报》，据报道，该报告包含了迫在眉睫的公共卫生威胁禽流感的新发现。
“对我来说，那是真正令人不寒而栗的时刻：如果他们拿走我们的数据，那么我们就是在盲目飞行，”福斯特说，他撰写了广受欢迎的 Substack 时事通讯《医学内幕》，并与同事一起运营自己的传染病仪表板。
然而，到周五，当他看到卫生机构已经更新了他仪表板所需的大部分数据时，他最担心的事情减轻了。
“报道比平时少，但变化不大，”他在电子邮件中写道。“医院容量非常重要，值得庆幸的是，大多数（但不是全部）数据都已更新。”
上周三，Faust 在社交媒体上发帖，要求研究人员如果他们的工作受到拨款审查暂停的影响，请与我们联系。他收到了一些回复，其中很多都伴随着他所说的“明显的恐惧，即使告诉我这件事也会毁了他们的职业生涯或毁了他们的实验室，”他说。
“我的意思是，这是一种多么可怕的对待科学家的方式，”他说。“这些人正在努力让世界对我们所有人都更安全。”
特朗普最近的行动并不是他第一任期的重复。在 2017 年初，他专注于撤销气候变化法规和废除奥巴马医改。这一次，特朗普的行动似乎是由于对 COVID 时代政策的失望以及它们引发的对科学日益增长的不信任而引发的。卫生与公众服务部没有回应多次置评请求。美国行政管理和预算办公室周二发布的一份备忘录称，暂停是必要的，以便新政府能够“忠实地管理纳税人的钱”，并确保联邦项目“按照法律和新总统的政策执行”。
另外，美国国家科学基金会是一个独立的联邦机构，支持包括桑库萨勒在内的科学和工程研究，该基金会周二发布了新的指导意见，称将暂停所有审查小组、新奖项以及所有公开奖项下的资金支付，以确定它们是否遵守了政府的一系列行政命令。
哈佛大学研究员凯塞尔海姆正在见证这些命令的直接影响，这些命令冻结了联邦卫生机构的大部分通信。他是同行评议健康杂志《法律、医学与伦理学杂志》的编辑，周五他收到了美国卫生与公众服务部的一封电子邮件，告诉他必须撤下他即将出版的一篇文章，因为它是由一名卫生与公众服务部员工撰写的，而且没有经过特朗普政府的审查。他们表示，审查将需要长达 90 天的时间，这实际上扼杀了该版的这篇文章。
凯瑟尔赫姆表示，这篇关于公共卫生研究诚信的文章已获得拜登政府的批准，作者去年秋天在一次公开集会上介绍了研究结果。
“期刊文章是科学家相互交流和向世界传播研究成果的主要方式之一，”他说。“如果政府不允许科学家发表文章，那么就会损害整个领域。”
《环球邮报》工作人员利兹·科瓦尔奇克 (Liz Kowalczyk) 对本文亦有报道。
题图：在塔夫茨大学，教授 Sameer Sonkusale（左二）去年与他的学生一起工作。Suzanne Kreiter/Globe 员工
附原英文报道：
‘A terrible way to treat scientists’: Trump directives sow uncertainty, fear among area labs and hospitals
By Anna Kuchment, Kay Lazar and Neena Hagen Globe Staff,Updated January 28, 2025
At Tufts University, professor Sameer Sonkusale, second from left, worked with his students last year.Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
Sameer Sonkusale had already bought his nonrefundable plane ticket to Washington, D.C., to present his research for federal funding when the email pinged into his inbox last week.
The session, which was scheduled for Tuesday was canceled “due to new guidance.” The email said he would be notified about next steps, but so far he’s heard nothing. Sonkusale, a Tufts University professor of biological, chemical, and electrical engineering, was among six teams of scientists who were slated to compete for a National Institutes of Health design innovation grant to translate their research into a health care product. The group was to present a new approach for detecting sepsis in newborns.
Within hours of taking office last week, the Trump administration unleashed a torrent of directives that upended work at the country’s major health and science agencies. Officials last week suspended many communications between the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration — and the public until it could be reviewed by a political appointee, partially froze travel for department employees, abruptly canceled scores of scientific meetings and grant reviews, moved to withdraw from the World Health Organization because of what President Trump’s order called its mishandling of COVID-19, and froze funding to US-led global health initiatives for at least 90 days.
On Monday night, the White House ordered a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government. On Tuesday, amid widespread chaos and confusion, the administration sought to clarify its actions, but moments before the freeze was to start at 5 p.m., a federal judge temporarily paused it until Monday.
The sudden changes have sent fear and confusion through one of the world’s major science hubs, as researchers scrambled to grasp the status of their funding and sort fact from rumor.
Around 40 percent of all basic research in the United States is government funded, and Massachusetts receives the largest share per capita of NIH funding of any state — $3.5 billion that supported more than 5,783 projects last fiscal year, including finding drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, slow antibiotic resistance, and fight the most common and lethal form of brain cancer in young children.
“Innovation stopped with these funding freezes,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who directs an academic research center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that studies prescription drug use, outcomes, and regulation.
“If the government is not giving out the money, then basic and translational science that underlies all the drugs we have is not being done,” he said.
Dr. David Hamer, a professor of global health and medicine at the Boston University School of Public Health, said the turmoil landed just before a major NIH grant deadline of Feb. 5.
“I have two resubmissions I’m working on,” said Hamer, who conducts surveillance on emerging infectious diseases. “Should we not do these, or what’s going to happen?”
A Boston-area researcher staff member who didn’t want to be named for fear of retribution from the Trump administration said her group had started to explore private sources of funding as alternatives to the NIH.
“I’m pretty devastated on a personal level,” she said, adding that she was doubtful that funding opportunities would ever fully bounce back.
She said she was panicked for her job as well as for the future of her field, and was equally concerned about Trump’s directive to end all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the government and in federal contracts.
“The grants we work on are typically focused on equity, and so it feels sort of like a double whammy,” she said. “Even if some level of funding comes back, we’re probably not going to be funded, or we’ll have to change our proposal to not include those words.”
Sonkusale was also concerned about the crackdown on DEI. The NIH had for decades required diversity in its research grants and more recently required scientists to explicitly explain in grant applications how they intended to increase the diversity of the participants they recruited for their research. That directive gained ground under the Biden administration, and Sonkusale said his NIH-funded research adhered to those requirements.
“I am worried about sound science, being able to look at the impact of diseases in different groups,” he said. “I hope they are not going to say stop doing that.”
For Dr. Jeremy Faust, a Boston emergency medicine doctor and public health researcher, the gag order that halted some data updates to the CDC website was especially alarming. Last week, the agency failed to post new data to its COVID and flu vaccination dashboard and to a site that tracks the rise of new COVID variants. Last Thursday, for the first time in decades, the agency didn’t publish its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which reportedly contained new discoveries on bird flu, a looming public health threat.
“That to me was the real, real chilling moment: If they take away our data, then we’re flying blind,” said Faust, who writes the popular Substack newsletter Inside Medicine and operates his own infectious diseases dashboard with colleagues.
His worst fears eased by Friday, however, when he saw that health agencies had updated most of the data he needed for his dashboard.
“There was less reporting than usual, but it was not a massive change,” he wrote by email. “Hospital capacity is so important, and thankfully most (though not all) of the data were updated.”
Last Wednesday, Faust posted to social media asking researchers to get in touch if their work was impacted by the pause on grant reviews. He received a smattering of answers, many accompanied by what he called “a palpable fear that even telling me this could ruin their career or could ruin their lab,” he said.
“I mean, what a terrible way to treat scientists,” he said. “These are people who are trying to make the world safer for all of us.”
Trump’s recent actions are not a repeat of his first term. During the early days of 2017, he focused on rolling back climate change regulations and repealing Obamacare. This time, Trump’s actions appear fueled by frustration with COVID-era policies and the growing mistrust of science they spawned. The HHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A memo released Tuesday by the Executive Office of Management and Budget said the pause was necessary so the new administration could “act as faithful stewards of taxpayer money” and ensure that federal programs “are being executive in accordance with the law and the new president’s policies.
Separately, the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering research, including Sankusale’s, issued new guidance on Tuesday saying it was pausing all review panels, new awards, and all payment of funds under open awards to determine whether they adhered to the administration’s slew of executive orders.
Kesselheim, the Harvard researcher, is bearing witness to the immediate effects of the orders that freeze most communications from federal health agencies. He’s the editor of a peer-reviewed health journal, the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, and Friday he received an email from the Health and Human Services Department telling him he had to pull an article for his upcoming edition because it was written by an HHS employee and it had not been reviewed by the Trump administration. They said the review would take up to 90 days, which effectively killed the article for that edition.
Kesselhelm said the article, about research integrity in public health, had been approved by the Biden administration, and the author had presented the findings in a public gathering last fall.
“Journal articles are one of the main way scientists communicate findings with each other and the world,” he said. “If the government is not allowing scientists to publish then it’s damaging the entire field.”
Liz Kowalczyk of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
