"I want to make sure that I always leave open the possibility that I'm wrong," says Trump's director of the National ...

"We haven't yet achieved the mission of the NIH, which is research that improves the health and longevity of the American ...

In a report commissioned by President Joe Biden’s administration and declassified five days after Trump’s inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency changed its position to say that a lab leak was ...

The federal government is full of scientists who lend their expertise to key decisions about our food, medicines, environment ...

Over the past several decades, concerns about costs and producing short-term results have narrowed the NIH’s impact.

Jenna Norton, who works at the NIH as a researcher, poses for a photograph during an interview with the Associated Press in Bethesda, Md., Friday, June 6, 2025. Credit: AP/Jose Luis Magana ...

The NIH staffers further blasted the canceling of nearly completed studies. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million,” they wrote.

They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. “We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,” the staffers wrote.

Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the NIH to succeed.” The NIH’s nearly $48 billion budget makes it the world’s largest public funder of scientific research.

The NIH’s controversial in-house Clinical Center on its Bethesda, Md., campus had been accused of pushing pneumonia-causing bacteria into 2,000 beagles’ lungs, among other brutal experiments.

On Monday, scores of scientists at the agency sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled The Bethesda Declaration, challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public ...