A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Science has taken a beating under President Trump. Last year, the administration tried to freeze or withhold billions of dollars to major research institutions and agencies. Some of that money has been restored, but as NPR's Katia Riddle reports, some researchers say it's too late to save their work.
KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: There's a laboratory at Harvard that now stands empty, except on this day for Professor Sean Eddy. He is the head of this lab and one of the few researchers who survived last year's cuts.
SEAN EDDY: Seeing these labs empty is - this is not the way it's supposed to be. This was a very vibrant lab.
RIDDLE: When the space was built more than 10 years ago, Eddy worked closely with an architect to design it. On the wall are pictures of animals. His daughter, who was 12 at the time, stenciled them for him.
EDDY: There's a zebra finch. There's a bacterial virus called T4 that I did my thesis on.
RIDDLE: Eddy is a computational biologist. For him, this work comes down to one simple question.
EDDY: So I'm really interested in the origin of life. I want to know where it all came from.
RIDDLE: Eddy and his team spent years building software. Scientists around the world now use these tools to compare DNA and protein sequences, identify genes and predict what they do. Their work underpins countless studies, including research related to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.
EDDY: It's a universal technique that everybody in this field uses.
RIDDLE: Eddy says it's hard to quantify how much modern science relies on his team's work. It's as ubiquitous as microscopes or pipettes.
EDDY: It's actually very affirming for me to pick up sort of semi-random papers in the literature in fields that I care about and see them using our software over and over and over again.
RIDDLE: In 2025, Eddy received a letter from the National Institutes of Health.
EDDY: It informed us that my work had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the U.S. taxpayer and therefore it was being specifically terminated.
RIDDLE: He had more than a dozen people working for him. Over the last year, he's had to let almost all of them go. He did his best to help them find jobs elsewhere. Eddy says he has given up on any dream that his funding would be restored.
EDDY: I haven't talked to my program officer in years now, and I - my guess is that he's under instructions not to talk to me. So we're just - we're sort of left guessing what the status of the grant is.
RIDDLE: Advocacy groups have been sounding alarm bells about a lack of transparency at NIH. Money approved by Congress this year has been slow to reach researchers, they say. Analysis from the Association of American Universities showed that NIH issued 66% fewer grant awards in the first few months of 2026 than they did in previous years.
JEREMY BERG: In the past, you had a pretty good sense of how NIH was going to behave.
RIDDLE: Jeremy Berg is a former high ranking official at NIH. He's now become a kind of watchdog for the organization, tracking how it's changing under the Trump administration. Berg says in the past, the agency took care to be clear about deadlines, funding forecasts and expectations from researchers. This reliability fostered good science.
BERG: And now that level of trust is pretty much gone.
RIDDLE: In an email, a representative from HHS, Andrew Nixon, acknowledged the slowdown in funding. He blamed Democrats for the federal shutdown that slowed funding to federal agencies. Nixon said that, quote, "timelines have returned to typical funding patterns," unquote. Even if that's the case, it's too late for Sean Eddy. He doesn't see his lab coming back, even if his funding was restored.
EDDY: I think that this is something on the order of a 10-year hit to a lab and therefore, for someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable.
RIDDLE: Eddy is 60. He had planned to work another 10 years with his team. Instead, he will do what work he can on his own. Walking through the empty lab, he looks at the desks where his colleagues used to sit.
EDDY: This one's empty. This one's empty. So...
RIDDLE: What will happen, do you think, to this space?
EDDY: I think we need to give it to a new computational faculty member. I'm perfectly happy to do that.
RIDDLE: If somebody could rebuild a new lab.
EDDY: And that's the problem. For now, we are not envisioning getting new faculty.
RIDDLE: Eddy says he's planning to keep looking for the origin of life, but he's not as hopeful he'll find it all by himself. Katia Riddle, NPR News, Boston. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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