Seattle – Andrea Gilbert thought he knew what would happen to her brain.
The 79 -year -old lawyer, who has Alzheimer’s disease and receives attention at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, agreed to donate it for research in 2023. He hoped to help scientists unlock the keys to a disease that had left his writing notes so that he had remembered if he had already brushed his teeth.
The destination of that program is now in Limbo because the Trump administration has altered the system that finances biomedical research.
“He will go one way or another. I am not taking it with me,” Gilbert said from a hospital bed while receiving an infusion of a medication designed to prevent the disease from worse. “I hope it is used well. But, you know, you can’t guarantee anything.”
Thousands of subsidies, including many in public universities and on such politically benign issues as Alzheimer’s, have been trapped in what critics say it is an unprecedented deceleration of the American research system that threatens universities and stops progress towards innovations, treatments and medical priests.
Even temporary deceleration threatens to hinder or spit programs that have been developing decades, and some of which are also actively treating patients.
The National Health Institutes have been the main financier of the Disease Research Center of Alzheimer’s Diseases at the University of Washington since 1985. The program supports a brain bank that accepts more than 200 annual donations and is preserving more than 4,000 brains. The financing of subsidies from the center, which is waiting for renewal, expires at the end of April. But subsidy decisions throughout the country have slowed down, according to judicial presentations.
The program has focused on unraveling the basic biology of the disease and the factors that counteract it. He discovered or helped identify three genes in which mutations cause Alzheimer’s.
The situation has left Gilbert’s neurologist, Dr. Thomas recordowski, confused and fighting. What will happen to patient care and brains offered for research in Harborview?
“We have gone through a lot of contingency planning,” said recordowski, who is also the director of the ADRC. “When it begins to seem multiple, several, several months, then there is no good answer to your question.”
Dr. Dirk Keene, professor and director of Neuropathology at UW Medicine who runs the Brain Bank, said that if the federal financing dries, it will go to almost any purpose to “honor the gift” of the donation of the people.
“I will beg you, I will borrow. I don’t think I steal, but I will do everything possible to find money,” Keene said.
Legal battle
Universities are staggering. The Trump Administration has executed a large number of research subsidies in private institutions in general such as Johns Hopkins and Princeton University. In a recent judicial case against NIH, the American Union of Civil Libertads argued that the Administration directed the cuts to subsidies on issues that disadvantage such as diversity, LGBTQ problems and gender identity.
Among public universities, the University of Washington is one of the most affected, and researchers and students have said that the consequences of the cuts have turned their careers and have forced some to consider leaving the United States.
“We are going to have a great brain drainage in the United States of these really talented people,” said Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, vicecan of postgraduate research and education in UW Medicine. “It’s not just a switch you turn, right? If people move in another direction with their careers, they often do not return.”
In a statement to NBC News, Nih said he was dedicated to restoring the “gold science based on evidence.”
