US National Institutes of Health has become a political target—how did we get here?

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has long been the gold standard for biomedical research around the world. “The NIH is the envy of the world in biomedical research,” says Robert Kaplan, from the Stanford University School of Medicine Clinical Excellence Research Center and a former associate director at the NIH. “In comparison to any other environment, its accomplishments have been really quite remarkable.”

Home to talented scientists and cutting edge research across 27 institutes and centres, the NIH’s scientific esteem has long been accompanied by strong political support with “remarkable bipartisan support,” says Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health at Duke University. A doubling of the agency’s budget initiated under Democratic President Bill Clinton, for example, continued under his Republican successor George W Bush, despite a clampdown on research on embryonic stem cells and fetal tissue.

But things have changed in recent years. The NIH has become a political target for a large and vocal segment of the Republican Party. And the new leadership of the country is at best sceptical of its work and at worst actively hostile to large parts of its mission.

President Donald Trump, newly sworn in on 20 January this year, has nominated prominent anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, …