MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The Trump administration has terminated hundreds of scientific research grants, but in a few cases, it has restored the funding. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on how one scientist lost and then regained a $53 million grant to study a leading form of dementia.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: It's called vascular dementia, and it can occur when a stroke or other condition impairs blood flow in the brain. It's the most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's, so in 2020, the National Institutes of Health announced funding for a six-year study to understand how damage to blood vessels can affect memory and thinking.
CHARLES DECARLI: It is the only study that has been funded to do that.
HAMILTON: Dr. Charles DeCarli is the principal investigator and a neurologist at the University of California, Davis. He says the plan was to enroll more than 2,000 Black, white and Latino people 65 and older who had noticed a decline in their memory or thinking. The team would use MRI scans and blood tests to see if they could predict who would go on to develop vascular dementia. By March of this year, the study was about two-thirds done. Then, DeCarli got a call from the NIH.
DECARLI: My program officer called me. And she had been told on a Friday, and she called me on a Monday to say that it had been terminated.
HAMILTON: The official notice would come later.
DECARLI: It took a couple days for us to actually get the letter because they sent it to the wrong person (laughter).
HAMILTON: The letter read like others being sent to NIH-funded scientists around the country. It criticized research programs that study diverse populations and said that the grant in question did not align with NIH priorities. DeCarli was puzzled. The NIH had insisted that the study include populations at high risk, and Black and Hispanic individuals are at least 1.5 times more likely to develop dementia. What's more, DeCarli says, the study was fulfilling a congressional mandate to improve diagnosis and treatment of dementia.
DECARLI: The grounds of the termination notice were irrelevant to my study, and the lawyer's advice that I got agreed with that. And so we had more - if you would call it - leverage.
HAMILTON: DeCarli and a team of academic scientists and lawyers spent three weeks preparing an appeal, and it worked. The NIH restored the funding. DeCarli recounted the experience at a meeting hosted by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation. Without the restored funding, the team would have been unable to continue tracking study participants, and DeCarli says that would have made it nearly impossible to determine who was most at risk.
DECARLI: But the ability to predict because we needed follow-up, that opportunity would likely have been lost.
HAMILTON: And millions of dollars would have been wasted.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
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