Happy Friday! This week’s update includes reporting on the state of grants management at NIH, a new NSF initiative, a change in leadership at the FDA, and news out of MIT and Yale School of Medicine.
Today’s cover art is a screen grab of Paul Smith's rad X-Men portraits from the Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe (1982-1983). The subtitle is nonsensical spin on a common refrain for X-People.
Federal Research Policy
Nature published a piece this week about the staffing shortage at the National Institutes of Health. The picture of the situation at NIMH are particularly vivid, where intramural students and postdocs have reportedly been asked to voluntarily take on grants management responsibilities.
Like the NIH earlier this year, the CDC is looking to phase out the use of non-human primates in research and medical testing.
This week, the National Science Foundation announced its X-Labs initiative. This initiative will support “independent teams of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs pursuing milestone-based federal funding to solve specific scientific challenges.” The criteria required to apply (scroll down to the attachments) appears to preclude any university-based teams.
There is growing pushback from the Administration’s dismissal of the National Science Board, including a condemnation from House Democrats.
Public Health
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has resigned.
Late last week it was heavily rumored that he would either resign or be fired. The President confirmed the resignation on Tuesday.
Kyle Diamantas, previously the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Food, will lead the FDA in an acting capacity. The search for a new Commissioner is already underway.
According to reporting from multiple outlets, Makary’s departure is tied to his reticence to authorize the fruit-flavored e-cigarettes.
Nature is reporting that three senior officials at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have been asked to resign or be re-assigned outside of the agency. This means that eight of the ten top leadership positions in the agency have been asked to leave by the Administration.
Higher Education
The Department of Justice has concluded its investigation of Yale School of Medicine, finding that the school discriminated “on the basis of race in the incoming classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025” in violation of Title VI.
In a video message this week, MIT President Sally Kornbluth revealed that federal funding to the University is down 20% since last year (including a 20% decline in new awards). Overall, sponsored research is down 10%. For departments across the institution, graduate enrollment is also down about 20% since 2024.
Infrastructure - the parent company of Canvas - confirmed in a statement that it has reached a settlement with the hacking group that breached the platform last week. According to the statement, the stolen data was returned and all copies were destroyed following the settlement.
Elsevier — which publishes thousands of scholarly journals - has joined a class-action lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the technology company obtained and reproduced copyrighted works in developing its large language model (LLM) Llama. For comment, here is Ken Watanabe’s character from Godzilla (2014).
It appears that that arXiv will be moving towards a policy in which the submission of inappropriate AI-produced content (e.g. hallucinated citations) to the server will result in a one-year ban.