The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing a contrarian who has pledged to reform scientific funding practices as the leader of the world’s premier medical research agency.Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — by a party-line vote of 53 to 47 — comes as the N.I.H., with a $48 billion budget, has been battered by recent cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those cuts at a confirmation hearing in early March.He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the writers of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence that shows no link between the two.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees the N.I.H.

How government cuts are slowing research.The Trump administration stormed into office, loudly firing workers and closing diversity programs. But behind the scenes, it has also brought biomedical research to the brink of crisis by holding up much of the $47 billion the United States spends on the field every year.The world’s leading medical labs can be found in the United States, and they rely on grants from the National Institutes of Health. The agency has stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments. Trump aides have said they just need time to review spending their predecessors had promised, but it’s unclear what they’re looking for at the N.I.H. or when scholars can expect to start receiving money again.In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through what happened — and why it matters.A complex machineLate last month, when the Trump administration froze government grants, a federal judge said it couldn’t just hold back money Congress had agreed to spend. But spending money at the N.I.H., which awards more than 60,000 grants per year, isn’t so simple.That’s because new grants endure a tortured bureaucratic process. The agency has to notify the public of grant review meetings in The Federal Register, a government publication. Then scientists and N.I.H. officials meet to discuss the proposals. The problem is that the Trump administration banned those announcements “indefinitely.” So new research projects can’t get approved.In effect, scientists say, the Trump administration is circumventing the court order. Health officials didn’t block research outright, but by shutting down the process, they’re still not spending much of the money Congress allocated to various research goals.The administration has also proposed other big changes, saying that universities should bear more of the “indirect costs” of research: maintaining lab space, paying support staff. Trump aides say the changes would trim administrative bloat and free up more government money for research.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The Trump administration has blocked key parts of the federal government’s apparatus for funding biomedical research, effectively halting progress on much of the country’s future work on illnesses like cancer and addiction despite a federal judge’s order to release grant money.The blockage, outlined in internal government memos, stems from an order forbidding health officials from giving public notice of upcoming grant review meetings. Those notices are an obscure but necessary cog in the grant-making machinery that delivers some $47 billion annually to research on Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments.The procedural holdup, which emails from N.I.H. officials described as indefinite, has had far-reaching consequences. Scores of grant review panels were canceled this week, creating a gap in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Together with other lapses and proposed changes in N.I.H. funding early in the Trump administration, the delays have deepened what scientists are calling a crisis in American biomedical research.Columbia University’s medical school has paused hiring and spending in response to funding shortfalls. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology froze the hiring of nonfaculty employees. Vanderbilt University is reassessing graduate student admissions. And lab leaders said in interviews that they were contemplating and, in some cases, making job cuts as grant applications languished.For the N.I.H., the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, the ban on announcing grant review meetings has effectively paused the vetting and approval of future research projects. Government advisers and scientists said that amounted to an effort to circumvent a federal judge’s temporary order that the White House stop blocking the release of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans across the Trump administration.“The new administration has, both in broad strokes and in rather backroom bureaucratic ways, stopped the processes by which the N.I.H. funds biomedical research in the nation,” said Vaughn Cooper, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

President Trump ordered on Friday that federal funding be withheld from schools and universities that require students to be vaccinated against Covid, White House officials said, another step in the administration’s campaign against coronavirus vaccine requirements.It was not clear how widely impactful the order would be. No states require K-12 students to be vaccinated against Covid. Only 15 colleges still required Covid vaccines for students as of late last year, according to No College Mandates, an advocacy group.Riding the same wave of anti-vaccine sentiment, 21 states had already moved to outlaw student Covid vaccine mandates, the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan research group, has said. And Republican elected officials across the country have pursued a tide of anti-vaccine measures, including a proposed ban in Montana on administering mRNA vaccines, which include some Covid shots, and a ban on a local health department in Idaho offering any Covid vaccines.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that monitoring has shown that Covid vaccines are safe for children.Younger people are much less likely to be severely sickened by the coronavirus, but doctors have said that the virus has still harmed many children.For Mr. Trump, whose first administration accelerated the development and rollout of Covid shots, saving some 140,000 lives in their early months of availability, the latest executive order was a turn toward reining in efforts to promote the vaccines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Tiny genetic alterations could help the bird flu virus enter cells in the upper respiratory tract, the C.D.C. said. But there is no sign that mutations are widespread in nature.After someone in southwest Louisiana was hospitalized with a severe case of bird flu, the first such illness reported in the United States, health workers swabbed the person’s nose and throat, looking for genetic clues about the virus.On Thursday, federal health officials reported some unsettling results. Some of the genetic samples contained mutations that in theory might help the bird flu virus, H5N1, infect people more easily.One of those mutations was reported last month in a viral sample taken from a teenager with a severe case of bird flu in British Columbia, Canada. The teenager was placed on a ventilator during a long hospitalization.Worrying as those severe cases are, the new report about the Louisiana patient contained some reassuring findings, scientists said.For one thing, the mutations seemed to develop as the virus adapted to its human host. The genetic changes were not present in H5N1 samples from a backyard poultry flock that infected the patient, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.That suggested that viruses in nature had not yet acquired the concerning mutations. Still, every additional human case gives H5N1 more opportunities to adapt to people, potentially making it more capable of spreading from one person to the next.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The results of a new clinical trial have overturned the “wait and see” approach that cardiologists have long favored for symptom-free patients.For decades, people with failing heart valves who nevertheless felt all right would walk out of the cardiologist’s office with the same “wait and see” treatment plan: Come back in six or 12 months. No reason to go under the knife just yet.A new clinical trial has overturned that thinking, suggesting that those patients would be much better off having their valves replaced right away with a minimally invasive procedure.The trial, whose results were published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, could change the way doctors treat severe aortic stenosis, a narrowing of the valve that controls blood flow from the heart. The disease, which has a prognosis worse than that of most cancers, afflicts more than 3 percent of people ages 65 and older. It is expected to become more common as people live longer.Replacing people’s heart valves, even if they were not yet experiencing any ill effects, appeared to roughly halve their risk of being unexpectedly hospitalized for heart problems over at least two years, the trial found.Patients who were put on the more conservative treatment plan overwhelmingly ended up needing surgery anyway: Roughly 70 percent of them developed symptoms and needed to have their valves replaced within two years, suggesting that the disease worsens more quickly than previously understood.“You may be able to at least prevent that progression and perhaps improve patient outcomes by treating earlier,” said Dr. Gregg Stone, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, describing the implications of the trial. The findings, he said, “will have a major effect on practice.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The presidential candidate’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher whose egalitarian politics often bucked a patriarchal lab culture.On her first day of work, the young bioengineering major climbed down the basement steps of a cancer laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and caught sight of someone summarily beheading a mouse.The student, Elizabeth Vargis, felt faint. She grasped for a chair. A child of Indian immigrants whose dipping grades had just cost her a scholarship, she reckoned her difficulty staying upright spelled the end of her research career, too.Her new boss, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, took a different view. A slight woman of 5 feet with a siren of a laugh, Dr. Gopalan Harris listened a few days later as her student reproached herself for being an inadequate scientist, and then cut in with a question: “Did you eat that day?”The younger biologist had not.“You have to eat!”The reply was not exactly warm — more “are you stupid?” than “I’m so sorry you fainted,” Ms. Vargis said. Nor was it as ready-made for a meme as Dr. Gopalan Harris’s aphorisms, like the one about the coconut tree, that caught the imagination of voters online during her daughter Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.But in the professor’s admonition, Ms. Vargis heard an echo of her own Indian aunties, and an affirmation that she belonged in a scientific world where neither she nor her professor had ever felt entirely at home.“She wanted me to be in that room,” said Ms. Vargis, who earned her doctorate and now runs a lab at Utah State University, a career that she credits in part to Dr. Gopalan Harris. “She wanted to give everybody a chance, an equal chance.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Dr. Sam Yoon and a collaborator duplicated images across their research studies over many years. The collaborator has left Columbia.The chief of a cancer surgery division at Columbia University this week had five research articles retracted and a sixth tagged with an editor’s note, underscoring concerns about research misconduct that have lately bedeviled Columbia as well as cancer labs at several other elite American universities.With the latest retractions, the Columbia lab, led by Dr. Sam Yoon, has had more than a dozen studies pulled over suspicious results since The New York Times reported in February on data discrepancies in the lab’s work.The retracted studies were among 26 articles by Dr. Yoon and a more junior collaborator that a scientific sleuth in Britain, Sholto David, revealed had presented images from one experiment as data from another, a tactic that can be used to massage or falsify the results of studies.Dr. Yoon’s more junior collaborator, Changhwan Yoon, no longer works in the lab, Columbia said in response to questions on Wednesday. But the university has said little else about what, if anything, it has done to address the allegations.Since the Times article in February, Dr. Yoon’s name has been changed from Sam Yoon to S. Sunghyun Yoon on a Columbia website advertising surgical treatment options. Because of the change, the Columbia surgeon who is being promoted to many patients has a name that no longer matches the one Dr. Yoon used to publish his retracted studies. A Columbia hiring announcement from several years ago was also recently edited to change the rendering of Dr. Yoon’s name, according to web page archives.Columbia said that faculty members were responsible for any name changes on departmental web pages. The university declined to comment on the retractions. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Dr. Yoon worked when much of the questionable research was done, also declined to comment, saying only that it reviews such cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Four years ago, Casey Harrell sang his last bedtime nursery rhyme to his daughter.By then, A.L.S. had begun laying waste to Mr. Harrell’s muscles, stealing from him one ritual after another: going on walks with his wife, holding his daughter, turning the pages of a book. “Like a night burglar,” his wife, Levana Saxon, wrote of the disease in a poem.But no theft was as devastating to Mr. Harrell, 46, as the fading of his speech. He had sung his last Whitney Houston song at karaoke. A climate activist, he had delivered his last unassisted Zoom presentation to fellow organizers.Last July, doctors at the University of California, Davis, surgically implanted electrodes in Mr. Harrell’s brain to try to discern what he was trying to say. That made him the latest test subject in a daunting scientific quest, one that has attracted deep-pocketed firms like Elon Musk’s company Neuralink: connecting people’s brains to computers, potentially restoring their lost faculties. Doctors told him that he would be advancing the cause of science, but that he was not likely to reverse his fortunes.Yet the results surpassed expectations, the researchers reported on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, setting a new bar for implanted speech decoders and illustrating the potential power of such devices for people with speech impairments.“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in Mr. Harrell’s case but has developed different speech implants. A device that just years ago “seemed like science fiction,” he said, is now “improving, getting optimized, so quickly.”Mr. Harrell’s team sank into his brain’s outer layer four electrode arrays that looked like tiny beds of nails. That was double the number that had recently been implanted in the speech areas of someone with A.L.S., or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in a separate study. Each array’s 64 spikes picked up electric impulses from neurons that fired when Mr. Harrell tried to move his mouth, lips, jaw and tongue to speak.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

N.I.H. officials suggested federal record keepers helped them hide emails. If so, “that’s really damaging to trust in all of government,” one expert said.House Republicans on Tuesday accused officials at the National Institutes of Health of orchestrating “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of the agency to hide public records related to the origins of the Covid pandemic. And the lawmakers promised to expand an investigation that has turned up emails in which senior health officials talked openly about trying to evade federal records laws.The latest accusations — coming days before a House panel publicly questions Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a former top N.I.H. official — represent one front of an intensifying push by lawmakers to link American research groups and the country’s premier medical research agency with the beginnings of the Covid pandemic.That push has so far yielded no evidence that American scientists or health officials had anything to do with the coronavirus outbreak. But the House panel, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, has released a series of private emails that suggest at least some N.I.H. officials deleted messages and tried to skirt public records laws in the face of scrutiny over the pandemic.Even those N.I.H. officials whose job it was to produce records under the Freedom of Information Act may have helped their colleagues avoid their obligations under that law, several emails suggest. The law, known as FOIA, gives people the right to obtain copies of federal records.“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Fauci, wrote in February 2021. That email chain included Dr. Gerald Keusch, a scientist and former N.I.H. official, and Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers.“Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail,” Dr. Morens added, referring to his personal Gmail account.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.