S2 - Episode 2: The Harvard Plan

Speaker 1 On this week's On the Media, as funding for research hangs by a thread, some academics are worried about what has already been lost.

Speaker 3 The time has come to reclaim our once-great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.

Speaker 5 The Trump administration has now frozen more than $2 billion in federal research funding.

Speaker 6 This would impact medical, engineering, and science research at the school.

Speaker 8 That is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases.

Speaker 9 I've lost grants that have totaled six or seven million dollars.

Speaker 10 One of the things that he told us several times was that there are no bad words.

Speaker 10 Those of us who were spending a lot of time most days evaluating grants for their use of bad words know that that's not the case.

Speaker 11 Now we're behind.

Speaker 2 And already. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Like every serious person understands, and we are now behind China.

Speaker 1 It's season two of the Harvard Plan, our deep dive into the assault on universities. It's all coming up after this.

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Speaker 16 From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Speaker 1 And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Speaker 1 In the Trump administration's pressure campaign on universities, one of the most potent weapons has turned out to be something a lot of people never thought of as a weapon at all.

Speaker 1 Grants to study deadly illnesses like colon cancer.

Speaker 14 Here's our cell culture room.

Speaker 14 Oh, wow. Where we do genetic screens.

Speaker 17 You have the white lab coats on hangers.

Speaker 14 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 Harvard Medical School's Camila Naksarova.

Speaker 1 We heard from her last week in the first episode of the Harvard Plan Season 2, our mini-series produced with the Boston Globe about the struggle for control of higher education.

Speaker 1 For Naksarova, the cuts to grants are threatening her ability to keep her lab open.

Speaker 14 And it was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight? Would we have to stop doing

Speaker 2 everything?

Speaker 14 Or would there be some sort of help?

Speaker 1 The Trump administration is wielding the funding cuts as a weapon, turning its adversary's strength, cancer and obesity research, medical breakthroughs, into a weakness, exposing how dependent some schools have become on government dollars.

Speaker 1 The bulk of that money flows through one place, the National Institutes of Health. Ilya Meretz, reporter and host of the Harvard Plan, takes it from here.

Speaker 19 Think about a teacher who made a difference in your life.

Speaker 20 Did you stay in touch?

Speaker 21 Visit them?

Speaker 20 Maybe send a Christmas card?

Speaker 18 This story is about a teacher and student who went so much further than that.

Speaker 8 The student was so inspired by the teacher, he followed in his footsteps, got the exact same academic degrees, then entered the same field.

Speaker 27 Then they worked together closely.

Speaker 26 They wrote papers, did research, got grants.

Speaker 29 For decades, it continued this way.

Speaker 25 And then something changed.

Speaker 32 The country changed, and the younger man and the older man found themselves no longer colleagues.

Speaker 24 They became adversaries in a big, big fight.

Speaker 36 A fight that is still raging today.

Speaker 37 At stake are billions of dollars, academic freedom, and the future of science.

Speaker 32 The older man is the president of Harvard University, Dr.

Speaker 31 Alan Garber.

Speaker 41 He's intelligent, kind, mild-mannered to the point of being a little boring.

Speaker 27 The use of data to think about problems.

Speaker 43 And my dissertation was actually on antibiotic resistance.

Speaker 44 The younger man is anything but boring and not at all shy.

Speaker 45 Joining me now, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University.

Speaker 24 For the past five years, Dr.

Speaker 28 Jay Bhattacharya has been a fixture on podcasts and Fox News.

Speaker 33 And now he's the director of the National Institutes of Health, in charge of a vast pool of public money intended to fund groundbreaking scientific research and working under the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F.

Speaker 29 Kennedy, Jr.

Speaker 51 It is an honor and privilege to be able to introduce and recommend to you Dr.

Speaker 50 Jay Bhattacharya to be President Trump's nominee for the director of the National Institute of Health.

Speaker 54 Jay Bhattacharya was introduced in that hearing by a senator, but when I started calling people to report out this story, I learned that he had originally asked someone else to make the introduction, his old mentor, Alan Garber.

Speaker 56 The president of Harvard was willing to be there to introduce him, to vouch for him.

Speaker 21 It didn't happen.

Speaker 57 This episode is about why.

Speaker 17 It's about the forces that peeled apart two incredibly smart, successful scientists and put them on opposite sides in the fight over universities.

Speaker 39 Just weeks after Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed, his National Institutes of Health cut off billions of dollars in funding allocated to researchers at Harvard Harvard and dozens of other universities, too.

Speaker 61 We reached out to both men and requested interviews.

Speaker 38 They both turned us down.

Speaker 8 In this episode, you'll hear recordings of them from podcasts, TV, and other places.

Speaker 63 And the voices of the people who know them.

Speaker 31 Alan and Jay.

Speaker 38 That's what the people who know them call them.

Speaker 33 I'm going to call them that, too.

Speaker 37 Let's begin with Jay.

Speaker 65 I was born in Calcutta in 1968 while near Calcutta.

Speaker 66 And my mom actually grew up in a slum in Calcutta.

Speaker 12 My dad in a little more middle-class neighborhood.

Speaker 33 As he described on the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century podcast, the India where Jayanta Bhattacharya was born was economically poor and also poor in opportunity.

Speaker 36 When Jayanta was very young, his father won the Visa Lottery to come to the United States.

Speaker 38 The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later Southern California, and Jayanta became Jay, an American boy. Every few years, the Bhattacharyas went back to visit aunts and uncles in India.

Speaker 48 That part was great, having a lot of family, but the poverty made an impression on Jay.

Speaker 25 He described one trip when he was eight on Tetra Grammaton, music producer Rick Rubin's podcast.

Speaker 2 There was this like this monsoon, but the streets are flooded. There's homeless families, literally like families, like you know, little kids, dogs, moms and dads in the street.

Speaker 2 And I was like, we're going down some rickshaw to get to the station.

Speaker 2 And I was like looking around asking my parents what is this and that was one of my first impressions of what life was like for poor people in poor countries.

Speaker 67 Back in America young Jay excelled at math and science.

Speaker 19 When he got to college his path was clear.

Speaker 33 He was going to become a doctor.

Speaker 20 But at Stanford, as he told Rick Rubin, something happened to change his thinking.

Speaker 38 He took an intro to economics course.

Speaker 2 I took it and my brain just lit up.

Speaker 2 It was like, okay, you can use like the math and statistics methods that I thought would be useful for science to ask questions about how people live, how people make decisions when there's like scarcity, which is like all the time.

Speaker 2 And do I still want to be a doctor? But I could see how you could use that kind of thinking to like make better decisions in medicine.

Speaker 8 Could there be a way to do both, though, economics and medicine?

Speaker 2 Enter Alan. I met this man.
He was my honors thesis advisor as an undergrad. And he had an MD and a PhD in economics.

Speaker 25 I absolutely idolized him.

Speaker 2 His name is Alan Garber.

Speaker 63 Idolized him.

Speaker 2 Before I met him, I didn't realize it was possible to do the two things together. And after I met him, I was like, okay, I have to do that.

Speaker 13 It takes some imagination to hear what it was about Alan that captivated Jay.

Speaker 42 And the trend, which is not statistically significant, actually showed a slight increase in mortality with treatment.

Speaker 38 I found this cassette recording of Alan from 1994 speaking to a women's health research seminar.

Speaker 42 So there developed a real schism in the medical profession with the majority saying that maybe it's this.

Speaker 44 Cloaked in an Illinois accent and unassuming manner, Alan was fiercely intelligent and ambitious to do things.

Speaker 48 He was only 13 years older than Jay, two advanced degrees, professor at a top college, and oh, by the way, a practicing physician too.

Speaker 74 He had a great way of setting the patients quickly at ease, often with a smile or a little joke.

Speaker 35 This is Dina Bravada, another one of Alan's mentees.

Speaker 24 When When she encountered him in the 1990s, it was at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, where Alan saw patients.

Speaker 8 Dina Bravada was in training.

Speaker 44 Many of the men who came in had served in Korea or Vietnam.

Speaker 65 In addition to common ailments like diabetes or hypertension, they bore the scars of war.

Speaker 74 So PTSD, even Agent Orange exposure, these were very, very common issues.

Speaker 18 As the internist, Bravado would be the first to meet with a patient.

Speaker 38 Then she'd bring her notes to Alan, who is the attending physician.

Speaker 74 He would often ask one pointed question that would get to the heart of the matter of, of course, the most important thing for the patient that I had neglected to ask.

Speaker 75 What would you say you learned from Alan Garber specifically?

Speaker 74 Well, he was my first

Speaker 74 role model in the trenches, if you will. I hope that I learned from him to be kind.

Speaker 74 to bring the full measure of one's intellect and training to each patient encounter and to try to bring one's sense of humor, perhaps, as well.

Speaker 31 Alan thrived on being a doctor and a professor.

Speaker 27 You could do both.

Speaker 41 But here, Jay's path diverged from Alan's.

Speaker 38 By the time he completed medical school, Jay found he had lost interest in seeing patients. Again, here he is on the capitalism and freedom in the 21st century podcast.

Speaker 2 Every time I would do medicine, I would feel like I was missing doing research. I didn't want to feel like I was only half-heartedly doing it.

Speaker 2 Whereas I was wholeheartedly really interested in research.

Speaker 25 And so instead of completing a medical internship and getting licensed like his mentor Alan, Jay goes to work at a think tank, the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, and he starts mentoring others.

Speaker 54 Amitov Chandra arrived as a summer intern interested in labor economics.

Speaker 62 As he recalls, Jay invited him on a walk along the beach and tried to persuade him healthcare economics was the next big thing.

Speaker 76 He didn't have to do that for me. He didn't know me at all.

Speaker 30 Later, towards the end of the internship, Chandra presented the fruits of his research to the Rand economists.

Speaker 67 More than anyone else, Jay showed he cared.

Speaker 76 I mean, he was completely immersed in the research for an hour and a half. He pushed me in a way that nobody else in that room pushed me.

Speaker 76 He really wanted to understand where what I was doing broke down. It's not that he didn't believe it.
He just wanted to understand, like, okay, you're making this assumption.

Speaker 76 What if you had made this other assumption instead?

Speaker 62 Chandra went on to become a health economist at Harvard.

Speaker 33 Meeting Jay, he told me, was decisive.

Speaker 19 Jay didn't stay long at Rand.

Speaker 24 In 2001, Alan hired him to be a professor at Stanford.

Speaker 41 The two men were now truly colleagues.

Speaker 25 This is the period when they do the most research together, often with other academics as well.

Speaker 38 They tackled the big devils in American healthcare, cancer, aging, the cost of prescription drugs. Again and again, they found ways to work together.

Speaker 76 There's a a handful of these very special people in the world and you can count them like people who will sit down and spend hours and hours with you helping you be a better scientist without regard for how you are actually going to help them, right?

Speaker 76 That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. The other dimension of specialness that's shared by Alan and Jay is

Speaker 76 they are not ideological about answers. They are extremely data-driven and empirical about answers.

Speaker 76 And you can get both of them to change their mind, which is another, the third dimension of them being special, because there are some people who care about evidence, who will mentor other people, but they're not going to change their mind.

Speaker 13 In 2011, Allen was recruited to become provost at Harvard, chief academic officer, really, the number two there.

Speaker 27 He left California, but he kept Jay in his life.

Speaker 44 Allen had just obtained an NIH grant to study rising Medicare costs.

Speaker 38 He brought on Jay as a collaborator.

Speaker 67 The project lasted five years and took in several million dollars, ending only in 2016.

Speaker 36 I very much doubt either Alan or Jay had any inkling Jay would one day lead the NIH and what that would mean for Alan.

Speaker 32 People who knew Jay then say he was a consummate professor, committed to classroom debate and scholarly discussion in the pages of academic journals.

Speaker 44 He was not looking to get famous or climb any ladder.

Speaker 41 Then, the pandemic came, and everything changed.

Speaker 78 This is episode two of the Harvard Plan.

Speaker 31 More after the break.

Speaker 60 Stay with us.

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Speaker 2 I'm Ira Glass.

Speaker 80 On This American Life, we tell real-life stories.

Speaker 46 Really good ones. My mother said,

Speaker 46 I'm sorry you aren't here because Father Sager was here visiting and he found a very nice orphanage for you.

Speaker 51 And I said, but I'm not an orphan, Ma.

Speaker 80 Surprising stories every week, this American Life.

Speaker 25 Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 48 This is on the media. I'm Ilya Meritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a collaboration between OTM and the Boston Globe.

Speaker 25 To recap, we've met our two protagonists, the doctor economists Alan Garber and Jay Bhattacharya, two men whose careers seemed destined to follow a similar trajectory until the arrival of a deadly, fast-spreading illness that came to be known as COVID.

Speaker 54 In March of 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency due to the pandemic.

Speaker 38 From the start, Jay saw things differently from much of the public health establishment, which urged lockdowns and moving life online.

Speaker 35 To Jay, there was so much we still did not know about the disease, like how many people had contracted it without even knowing it.

Speaker 47 Just after lockdowns went into effect, Jay co-wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that there wasn't enough evidence for the virus's lethality to justify stay-at-home orders.

Speaker 67 Then, he and some colleagues pulled together an analysis of data from Santa Clara County, where Stanford is located.

Speaker 31 They concluded a lot more people had already had COVID than was known, meaning the disease really was less dangerous than the authorities were saying.

Speaker 22 In October 2020, after a little over six months of lockdowns, Jay and two other scholars came together to issue a manifesto.

Speaker 79 They did this at the headquarters of a libertarian think tank in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Speaker 24 The Great Barrington Declaration called for something radically different, which they called focused protection.

Speaker 38 For most people, there should be a return to in-person living.

Speaker 31 Herd immunity would provide enough protection, while the elderly and vulnerable could quarantine and get vaccines once they became available.

Speaker 72 This is the saner approach, the more moral approach, the more scientifically based approach.

Speaker 63 Within days, Jay and the other two authors were invited to meet with two Trump appointees, including the then Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 54 Trump World had begun to embrace the Great Barrington Declaration.

Speaker 68 But the public health establishment was appalled.

Speaker 49 Dr.

Speaker 27 Ishish Jha used to work under Allen at Harvard School of Public Health and went on to advise the Biden administration on COVID policy.

Speaker 33 He's now the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown.

Speaker 25 I had very strong disagreements with that piece.

Speaker 12 I thought it was really ill-time that it came out a month before vaccines were available.

Speaker 12 I mean, the idea that like you're going to kind of lift all restrictions, just let everybody get infected a month before vaccines come out just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 22 But lately, there's been a recognition by Jah and others that the Declaration probably got some things right, too.

Speaker 12 He was pushing for schools to open in a way that a lot of people weren't, and I thought that was smart and good.

Speaker 20 Still, for Jay, his outspokenness came with professional consequences.

Speaker 38 Within Stanford, where he still taught, Jay was blocked from giving a talk about the Declaration, he says.

Speaker 8 And then, as he told Rick Rubin, he was investigated by the school.

Speaker 2 It felt like an inquisition. They're asking me about a thousand questions about my motivations.

Speaker 24 He kept his job.

Speaker 41 Stanford never answered our questions about that.

Speaker 38 Jay's Jay's feeling of being picked on, disrespected, was amped up when emails surfaced in a Freedom of Information request showing the then director of the NIH, Francis Collins, referred to Jay and his great Barrington allies in an email to his colleague Anthony Fauci as fringe epidemiologists and urged a quick and devastating published takedown.

Speaker 83 As Jay told Laura Ingram, It feels like some novel from the 1950s where the House on American Committee is like meeting to decide who to suppress.

Speaker 83 And I'm some sort of like movie star in Hollywood that they're blacklisting because I'm a communist or something. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 83 If we'd had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad.

Speaker 84 Like so much else in American life, COVID had become a polarizing issue, a wedge.

Speaker 31 No doubt Jay's critics thought they were acting in the urgent interest of public health.

Speaker 38 Jay saw them as comfortable elites with no awareness of their own blind spots, as he described it on Andrew Huberman's podcast.

Speaker 72 The lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class.

Speaker 37 So Jay made allies where he found them, even if his new crowd had a weakness for pseudoscience and quackery.

Speaker 85 Amazingly, there appear to be growing connections between Viagra and treatment for the coronavirus.

Speaker 51 Ivermectin, as well as other proactive

Speaker 45 hydroxy as a way to prevent from getting the virus.

Speaker 2 And I have to ask myself, why did I have this very different reaction to the lockdown?

Speaker 31 Jay, again, on Rick Rubin's podcast.

Speaker 2 Because one of my very first thoughts when I heard about the lockdown was that experience when I was eight, seeing what life is like for poor people.

Speaker 2 And I just had this vision of like, this is going to happen at scale to every poor person on earth.

Speaker 38 Jay thought of the India he saw in the 1970s with power cuts and a fragile economy.

Speaker 2 We're essentially pulling the rug out from under the sort of the economic infrastructure that allows poor people to have some semblance of access to food, access to healthcare, all this stuff.

Speaker 2 And we just basically said, no, the fear around this virus, the well-being of like relatively well-off people, is so much more important than that.

Speaker 52 While Jay became a public opinion haver with a following, Allen went in the opposite direction.

Speaker 63 As provost at Harvard, he built consensus, ran meetings, spoke publicly only on occasion.

Speaker 41 When the pandemic came, Allen led the university's COVID advisory group.

Speaker 8 Learning quickly moved online, dorms emptied out, many classrooms didn't reopen for over a year.

Speaker 24 I'm not so sure Allen personally favored this approach, though.

Speaker 33 Early in the pandemic, Allen had co-authored an opinion piece in the New York Times warning against taking measures that would shut down the economy.

Speaker 41 The piece even mentions herd immunity as the pathway back to normal life.

Speaker 32 Not so different from the Great Barrington Declaration.

Speaker 31 But the policies Harvard adopted were in line with what public health authorities recommended.

Speaker 68 A couple years later, as Harvard entered its worst leadership crisis in years with its first black president under withering attack, Alan remained as provost, embodying continuity.

Speaker 37 My name is Claudine Gay, and I am the president of Harvard University.

Speaker 39 It's an honor to be here today.

Speaker 41 And when that new president was hauled before Congress and questioned by Republican Elise Stefanik, Alan sat directly behind her.

Speaker 87 Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term intifada, correct?

Speaker 65 For over five hours, he occasionally nodded at something or other she said,

Speaker 52 but betrayed very little emotion.

Speaker 87 A call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?

Speaker 37 That type of hateful speech is personally horrid.

Speaker 38 The hearing was ostensibly about the campus reaction to Hamas's attack on Israel, but there were all kinds of pent-up complaints about how college had changed.

Speaker 22 It was ideologically rigid, lacking conservatives, lacking the capacity for debate.

Speaker 38 Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were a waste of time.

Speaker 62 Within a month of the hearing, Gay was out of the job, and Allen became Harvard's acting leader.

Speaker 28 At the end of 2024, he was sworn in as Harvard's official, actual, president.

Speaker 33 This is the moment for many people when Allen first came into focus.

Speaker 48 He grew up in a small Midwestern city.

Speaker 24 His father had a liquor store.

Speaker 65 He was raised Jewish and is observant.

Speaker 78 He graduated from Harvard College, class of 1976.

Speaker 33 In true, all roads lead back to Harvard fashion.

Speaker 57 Allen's year also included Robert F.

Speaker 29 Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 57 and John Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Speaker 88 So I got to know Alan when, actually just before he came to Harvard, he was still at Stanford.

Speaker 79 Dan Lieberman is a professor of evolutionary biology and Alan's longtime running buddy.

Speaker 48 Alan had read some of Lieberman's academic work and got in touch.

Speaker 88 And he had had some running injuries and I published a lot on the biomechanics of running. So we had lunch somewhere in the square and talked about running.

Speaker 88 And then I invited him to come to my lab so we could study his gait. I have a fancy treadmill and all this fancy equipment.

Speaker 70 You said study his gait, how he runs.

Speaker 88 Yes, his running gait. And because he had some injuries, so after we had this lunch, he came to my lab and I found found out that he was hitting the ground really hard.

Speaker 36 Once you start thinking about Alan running long distances, concentrating on modifying his stride, the parallels to his current predicament are almost too tempting.

Speaker 39 Lieberman told me that on one of their runs years ago, Alan suggested he pick up a book about stoicism by William Irvine, and he did.

Speaker 38 Lieberman sees Alan's low-drama analytical approach as the key to how he handles most challenges, including the government's pressure campaign right now.

Speaker 88 He's not very emotional about the crisis, which is a really very serious crisis. He's just very much focused on the facts, like what's going on and what to do.

Speaker 33 A lot of people who know Alan talk about him this way.

Speaker 44 But surely rationality will only get you so far in a world where the old rule book has been tossed out.

Speaker 79 I prodded Lieberman to help me think this thing through.

Speaker 33 How does someone like Alan, who has lived his whole adult life in the halls of the academy, academy, deal with an aggressive antagonist who has no respect for rules or established precedent?

Speaker 33 Knife to a gun fight.

Speaker 65 You know what I mean.

Speaker 88 I mean, a lot of norms have been broken. I think the most basic norm that's been broken is essentially the golden rule, to treat others as you would have them treat you.

Speaker 88 And right now we're in a world where people are quite happy to ignore that and all kinds of levels. And I would say that this particular fight is just one of them.

Speaker 33 The winds were changing direction fast at the moment Allen became Harvard president.

Speaker 61 A lot of the stuff that had been built at Harvard when he was provost was now being undone.

Speaker 21 The Faculty of Arts and Sciences dropped diversity statements.

Speaker 36 The DEI office was renamed.

Speaker 31 Harvard adopted an institutional voice policy, other places call it institutional neutrality, to put an end to the expectation that Harvard speak about the pressing social issues of the day.

Speaker 53 There were revised policies on student protest and discipline.

Speaker 79 Plenty of people at Harvard were unhappy with these changes.

Speaker 57 Because he is so precise, so guarded, so cautious, because he works by consensus, it's hard to say whether the new order more closely reflects Allen's actual view of how universities should be.

Speaker 86 But all of this was poor insurance against what was coming.

Speaker 13 That's After the Break.

Speaker 30 This is episode two of The Harvard Plan.

Speaker 2 I'm Ira Glass.

Speaker 80 On This American Life, we tell real-life stories, really good ones.

Speaker 46 My mother said,

Speaker 46 I'm sorry you weren't here because Father Sager was here visiting and he found a very nice orphanage for you.

Speaker 51 and and i said but i'm not an orphan

Speaker 80 surprising stories every week this american live

Speaker 25 listen wherever you get your podcasts

Speaker 70 this is on the media i'm ilya merits host of the harvard plan a collaboration from otm and the boston globe as the 2024 presidential race took shape harvard was changing but slower than the speed of politics.

Speaker 25 The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, campaigned for president on the most anti-higher ed platform in recent memory.

Speaker 3 The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.

Speaker 33 And he won.

Speaker 22 And then he started building his team, selecting people for the top jobs in government.

Speaker 31 Robert F.

Speaker 58 Kennedy Jr., a noted adherent of conspiracy theories about vaccines, would lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 51 The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order.

Speaker 57 To lead the National Institutes of Health, which is part of HHS, Trump chose someone with a lot more scientific cred.

Speaker 23 Thank you, Dr.

Speaker 51 Bhattacharya, for appearing before the committee.

Speaker 32 Context.

Speaker 38 It was March of 2025, six weeks into the new administration.

Speaker 28 And a new non-agency agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Elon Musk's trusted people, had been moving through the organs of the U.S.

Speaker 22 government one by one, slashing staff and programs.

Speaker 51 I don't have my gavel, but Senator Murray said it's a Doge cut.

Speaker 51 So anyway.

Speaker 56 Now Doge had come for the NIH's $48 billion annual budget and its workforce of 20,000.

Speaker 29 Clinical trials were paused, grants frozen, firings en masse, and senators were on edge.

Speaker 20 And so it was under that cloud that Jay introduced himself.

Speaker 64 I am honored to speak with you today and deeply humbled by President Trump's nomination. I'm delighted to have with me my wife Kathy, my son Matthew, and my brother.

Speaker 25 Remember how I told you earlier that Allen had agreed to introduce Jay at his confirmation hearing?

Speaker 30 How Jay wanted him to be there?

Speaker 41 This is that moment. But Allen was not in the room.

Speaker 64 The NIH has played a pivotal role in my career. I served for a decade as a standing member of NIH grant committees.

Speaker 48 To the senators who thought the NIH was functioning great up until Elon Musk came along, Jay delivered a bucket of ice-cold water.

Speaker 64 American health is going backwards.

Speaker 38 Life expectancy has flatlined, he said, and there have been a bunch of research scandals.

Speaker 41 Public faith in science reflects this, he said.

Speaker 64 A November 2024 Pew study reported that only 26% of the American public had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interests. 23% have not much or no confidence at all.

Speaker 31 Bill Cassidy, a Republican and the committee chairman, is a doctor, a liver disease specialist who co-founded a clinic for the uninsured.

Speaker 51 Thank you, sir. I'll start with questionings.

Speaker 38 He went straight for the tension at the heart of this job.

Speaker 51 There's now a child who died from a vaccine-preventable disease in Texas. Let me repeat that, a child who died from a vaccine-preventable disease in Texas.

Speaker 22 Measles, a disease for which there is a safe vaccine, was raging just then.

Speaker 40 For years, Robert F.

Speaker 19 Kennedy Jr., the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, had been telling parents vaccines may cause autism.

Speaker 38 Kennedy would be Jay's boss.

Speaker 64 Senator, it's

Speaker 64 a tragedy that a child would die from a vaccine-preventable disease.

Speaker 41 I fully see.

Speaker 31 Jay affirmed his support for vaccinating kids for measles, but noted there's been a sharp rise in autism cases.

Speaker 38 And he said, we don't know the reasons why.

Speaker 64 So I would support an agenda of

Speaker 64 a broad agenda, a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that.

Speaker 67 Cassidy seemed genuinely disturbed that Jay was not swatting down the baseless linkage.

Speaker 31 He came back to this point again and again.

Speaker 51 My concern is the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Speaker 64 Senator, I guess I've turned it around and say, I want to, I don't want to disprove a negative. That's almost, that's impossible, really.

Speaker 53 Jay suggested, if part of the public has doubts about science, refuses to believe in it, then science must do better.

Speaker 8 Try harder to convince them.

Speaker 55 Jay seemed to have intuited something essential about the job he was trying out for.

Speaker 39 More than impress the senators, he needed to show his prospective bosses, Trump and Kennedy, that he will respect the conspiracy theory and viral disinformation crowd.

Speaker 64 I mean, I guess,

Speaker 64 yes, you're absolutely right, Senator.

Speaker 64 We don't need to address every idea

Speaker 64 or concern, but if those concerns result in parents not wanting to vaccinate their children for a vaccine that is well tested, my sense is that my inclination is to give people good data.

Speaker 64 That's how you address those concerns.

Speaker 62 We don't know why Allen didn't introduce Jay at that hearing, but we can imagine what he might have said about his former student.

Speaker 82 He might have talked about Jay's curiosity, his refusal to accept conventional wisdom at face value, his passion for science.

Speaker 16 He might have spoken about the decades they worked together as colleagues on containing Medicare costs, aging, fighting cancer, and he might have noted Trump's pressure campaign on universities, which was then gaining force, and called for a truce.

Speaker 48 Jay was confirmed in a party-line vote.

Speaker 67 Senator Cassidy, his biggest Republican skeptic, supported him in the end.

Speaker 61 At the start of April, Jay was installed as NIH director, with RFK Jr.

Speaker 25 administering the oath.

Speaker 2 Welcome aboard. The revolution begins today.

Speaker 33 At Donald Trump's NIH, now Jay Bhattacharya's NIH too,

Speaker 25 things were changing fast.

Speaker 5 The Trump administration has now frozen more than $2 billion in federal research funding.

Speaker 6 This would impact medical, engineering, and science research at the school.

Speaker 8 That is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases.

Speaker 9 I've lost grants that have totaled six or seven million dollars.

Speaker 25 In early May, the NIH sent a letter to Allen, a letter which I think is significant, even though really it's a formality.

Speaker 27 It's from a senior NIH staffer informing Alan that Harvard's grant money has been terminated because Harvard's conduct around anti-Semitism is so bad in the eyes of the government.

Speaker 32 Still, the penultimate paragraph offers Alan one thin read of hope.

Speaker 46 He could appeal the decision directly to Dr.

Speaker 9 Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH.

Speaker 12 I wonder what Alan thinks. When he gets that letter.

Speaker 38 Again, Dr.

Speaker 26 Ashish Jha.

Speaker 36 He knows both Alan and Jay.

Speaker 38 I described the contents of the letter to him.

Speaker 12 I don't know for sure, but I know how Alan's going to behave. Alan's going to send it to his lawyers and they're going to write up the letter and he'll be very formal.

Speaker 2 But Alan's also a human being.

Speaker 12 There's got to be part of him that's got to be struggling with this.

Speaker 38 True to form, Alan responded calmly, rationally, when he was asked about the cuts on NPR.

Speaker 90 Do you really want to cut back on research dollars?

Speaker 43 There is a lot of actual research demonstrating the returns to the American people have been enormous.

Speaker 68 So that's Alan.

Speaker 47 And Jay is a fundamentally good guy.

Speaker 12 And he has got to be, when he's lying in bed going to sleep, he's got to be thinking about, like, how much longer do I tolerate being in a place where I'm going after my friends and who are great researchers and great institutions.

Speaker 24 One reason I wanted to talk with Ashish Shah is that, like Jay, he's a scientist who went to Washington.

Speaker 25 He became President President Biden's COVID response advisor.

Speaker 70 What happens when doctors and health economists go to Washington, particularly people who haven't been involved in politics?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 12 It's a steep learning curve, and you got to get learning real fast. I spent a lot of time trying to think about where are my lanes of influence? How do I move policy? What do I care about?

Speaker 12 What are battles that I'm willing to have? What are battles I'm willing to lose? I picked battles that I thought were really, really important.

Speaker 12 And then I use all of my connections, my relationships, to figure out how to get the things that I wanted to get accomplished accomplished. It's hard.
It's a steep learning curve.

Speaker 24 In his confirmation hearing, Jay laid out his goals for the National Institutes of Health.

Speaker 41 He wants to fund more early career scientists, more moonshot research.

Speaker 25 He says for too long, the agency has been too careful, favoring incremental projects instead of big leaps.

Speaker 8 Jay actually co-wrote a whole paper about this back in 2020.

Speaker 23 So those are his priorities.

Speaker 61 They may or may not be his boss's priorities.

Speaker 70 His direct boss, RFK Jr.,

Speaker 70 doesn't believe in germ theory, doesn't believe in vaccines,

Speaker 70 believes a lot of stuff that probably Jay, from his own experience and training as an academic, disagrees with.

Speaker 70 But there are points of agreement about free speech and making space for other kinds of viewpoints. And there are places where they they agree on sort of like make America healthy.

Speaker 70 Is there any way for Jay to sort of split the difference and preserve his dignity and preserve the respect of people in the scientific community?

Speaker 24 Yes, there always is.

Speaker 27 There always is.

Speaker 12 You have to, again, decide which stuff is most important.

Speaker 35 You're not going to win every battle.

Speaker 12 RFK Jr. has decided that the big issue of American diet is food dyes.
No serious person thinks that.

Speaker 12 But if Jay Guy has to go out and talk about food dyes every once in a while, I think it's fine. Like, no, we're all going to kind of be like, we get what he's doing.

Speaker 12 But he gets to do that if he's preserving the core stuff.

Speaker 12 If he is overseeing the destruction of the core things and talking about food dyes, then he doesn't get to retain his credibility and his standing.

Speaker 20 We did this interview in July, by the way.

Speaker 38 Over the summer and into the fall, Jay's leadership at NIH seemed to unfold as a series of agility tests.

Speaker 89 He submitted and defended in Congress a budget request that's almost 40% smaller.

Speaker 20 He defended the decision to cancel mRNA vaccine development, which scientists consider to be extremely promising.

Speaker 27 Meanwhile, President Trump moved to give political appointees, not committees of area expert scientists, authority over research funding, giving him, Trump, effectively more power over how the money is spent.

Speaker 53 One of Jay's colleagues, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, was forced out of the job after less than a month.

Speaker 25 She said RFK Jr.

Speaker 89 politicized our processes and repeatedly censored science.

Speaker 89 In September, Trump gave a news conference where he said painkillers could cause autism, which is not true, according to major medical and scientific groups.

Speaker 3 With Tylenol, don't take it. Don't take it.

Speaker 38 Look to Trump's right side.

Speaker 63 Jay is there, beside his boss, RFK Jr.

Speaker 31 They're there for over an hour.

Speaker 32 When it's his turn to speak, Jay does not endorse or refute the purported link between Tylenol and autism, but announces a new program to pump 50 million additional dollars into peer-reviewed autism research.

Speaker 72 For too long, it's been taboo to ask some questions for fear the scientific work might reveal a politically incorrect answer.

Speaker 21 Jay's colleagues in health economics are near unanimous that he believes in good science, but within the NIH, a lot of people are worried.

Speaker 24 In June, a a group of NIH staffers put out their own manifesto, the Bethesda Declaration.

Speaker 31 They contend that the Trump administration and NIH harmed academic freedom by selectively canceling high-quality work at out-of-favor universities.

Speaker 24 They say that essential research into health disparities has been blocked even when it does not include the words diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Speaker 89 The declaration has close to 500 signatures just from current employees.

Speaker 75 So we described it as dissent.

Speaker 44 Sarah Cobran is one of them, a 21-year NIH veteran who agreed to speak with me in her personal capacity.

Speaker 75 You know, he laid that out for us. He has his own letter of dissent.
He says publicly very often that he welcomes dissent.

Speaker 75 And so he said specifically in our letter and even in the email that accompanied the letter, we hope you welcome this dissent.

Speaker 41 Jay did not at first respond directly, but posted his thoughts on X, saying the declaration contained misconceptions about NIH's new policy direction.

Speaker 21 But then, in July, he invited many of the signers to meet with him.

Speaker 38 Sarah Cobran told me Jay was courteous, personable.

Speaker 24 He listened.

Speaker 75 One of the things that he told us several times and wanted to emphasize, it seemed, was that there are no bad words that cause grants to be cut or not funded. There are no bad words.

Speaker 75 And those of us who were spending a lot of time most days evaluating grants for their use of bad words know that that's not the case.

Speaker 29 Cobran and others saw grants connected with ideas like gender and diversity being blocked, although exactly how this was happening was not totally clear to them.

Speaker 75 In our thank you note, we did say thank you and then said one urgent note.

Speaker 75 You said that there are no bad words, and we don't think that message is making it all the way down to the people who are making the funding choices.

Speaker 75 If you could please communicate that more strongly, we would be appreciative. Or something along those lines.

Speaker 75 I don't think he's the one choosing what gets cut.

Speaker 75 I don't think he's the one.

Speaker 75 Yeah,

Speaker 75 that's the reason. I think those priorities are not his personally, not his scientifically.
They come from elsewhere.

Speaker 60 Although the meeting was cordial, it didn't leave Cobran feeling optimistic.

Speaker 75 He wants to be a scientific colleague working in collaboration at NIH for the good of NIH.

Speaker 75 But that's not really the truth of the job he's accepted.

Speaker 61 We sent the NIH a detailed list of questions raised by our reporting.

Speaker 24 A spokesperson responded with some bullet points.

Speaker 30 She did not address the idea of banned words, but told us, any updates to NIH review processes aim to strengthen accountability and efficiency while maintaining the central role of expert peer review.

Speaker 55 As for Jay's relationship with Alan, the spokesperson called it a personal matter.

Speaker 44 The disgruntled NIH staffers manifesto, the Bethesda Declaration, in 2025, followed Jay's Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, both documents, in response to a sense that scientific inquiry and speech were being improperly stifled.

Speaker 68 The idea of speech, the proper boundaries of it, who sets the rules, it runs through this whole thing.

Speaker 33 For example, on September 3rd, Jay gave a talk at the National Conservatism Conference.

Speaker 24 He had top billing alongside Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and OMB director Russell Vogt.

Speaker 78 Jay recounted what happened to him on Twitter a few years back.

Speaker 35 Jay said his speech was suppressed at the request of the Biden administration, although as he acknowledged he was not directly personally singled out by the White House.

Speaker 41 Still, the Biden people did ask social media companies to help contain the spread of what they considered harmful messaging around COVID.

Speaker 38 Jay joined a lawsuit over this, which went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 36 His co-plaintiffs included the states of Missouri and Louisiana and the Gateway Pundit, a hub for conspiracy theories.

Speaker 69 And Jay side lost in a 6-3 decision.

Speaker 33 He says that shows the First Amendment is on thin ice.

Speaker 66 At this point, the only thing protecting free speech in this country is, frankly, is President Trump.

Speaker 29 Jay did not mention that his own parent agency, HHS, had been sued by Harvard for violating its free speech rights when research dollars were cut.

Speaker 49 In court, Harvard argued that the government pressure campaign, the weaponized research dollars, amounted to attempted interference in what can be taught and who can be hired.

Speaker 32 This is something Alan talks about.

Speaker 90 We cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights.

Speaker 38 The very same day Jay went on stage to claim his speech had been improperly suppressed, the judge in Harvard's lawsuit against the government issued her decision.

Speaker 38 She granted Harvard summary judgment on most of its claims.

Speaker 48 What lies at the core of this dispute, she wrote, is the fact that defendants are trying to pressure Harvard to accede to the government's demands in a way that squarely violates plaintiffs' First Amendment rights.

Speaker 60 She went on, in language that is bracingly direct.

Speaker 28 The idea that fighting anti-Semitism is defendants' true aim is belied by the fact that the majority of the demands they are making of Harvard to restore its research funding are directed on their face at Harvard's governance, staffing, and hiring practices and admissions policies, all of which have little to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with defendants' power and political views.

Speaker 75 Okay, we are now recording.

Speaker 30 Hey, Sarah, how are you doing?

Speaker 91 Hi.

Speaker 75 Doing okay.

Speaker 91 Do you want to give me the business again?

Speaker 32 I caught up with Sarah Cobran in late September, about two months after our first conversation.

Speaker 75 Yes, so just to be clear, I'm speaking as myself. I am a person, citizen of the United States.

Speaker 31 Not in her role as an NIH staffer. Now that that was clear, I wanted to know how things were going for her and the other signers of the Bethesda Declaration.

Speaker 91 So this was actually my number one question, whether there've been any reprisals of any kind. No.

Speaker 75 Okay. Not at NIH.
Just know.

Speaker 27 So that's the good news.

Speaker 62 The bad news?

Speaker 8 Everyone is stressed.

Speaker 24 Everything feels broken.

Speaker 75 It's eight months now of being asked to do things that we think are wrong.

Speaker 68 The formerly functional grant review process has lately been turned on its head, she told me.

Speaker 27 High quality proposals are not getting approved.

Speaker 41 Is it because of something they wrote?

Speaker 75 Now the new administration is saying, okay, we have some new criteria we want to use, but we won't tell you what they are.

Speaker 75 Grants being caught up in spreadsheets and the program directors being told these grants were flagged.

Speaker 75 They were flagged.

Speaker 75 And we don't want to tell you what search terms we used and we don't want to tell you what it is that we want to cut. We just want

Speaker 75 you to figure it out.

Speaker 75 And Dr. Bhattacharya, when we met with him at that roundtable, said, no, there are no banned words.

Speaker 75 He said that to our faces. And we said to him, that's great.
Please communicate that to the IC directors and the grants management people because they're hearing something else.

Speaker 26 IC directors, those are the directors of institutes and centers.

Speaker 21 The NIH contains 27 of these, like the National Cancer Institute, where Cobran works.

Speaker 33 They're supposed to be reviewing grants, funding science, but with no formal list of banned words, it's all guesswork.

Speaker 75 So we are between Iraq and Iraq and Iraq.

Speaker 75 A judge has said it's illegal to do it. Our leadership is telling us we have to do it.
Our boss is telling us it doesn't exist.

Speaker 21 Jay said, science should not be partisan.

Speaker 41 Coburn told me any scientist applying today for federal money would have to have an acute sense of the Trump administration's politics rather than relying on traditional scoring by a committee of scientists.

Speaker 75 So people won't be able to have a sense, oh, I got an excellent score. No,

Speaker 75 the score is only going to be one piece. That's the peer review result.

Speaker 75 And that the ultimate decisions will be made by the presidential appointees who are now numerous within NIH and many more numerous than in the past. We used to only have two.
Now we have dozens.

Speaker 24 I thought about Camilla Naksarova, the Harvard cancer researcher we met in the last episode.

Speaker 44 She told us back in July that she is prepared for her current NIH grants, which were recently restored by court order but could be challenged again.

Speaker 53 She is prepared for these grants to potentially disappear and never come back.

Speaker 14 I think I could live with that. I would just work really hard and write new ones, somehow make it work.

Speaker 41 But then you think about what else could happen.

Speaker 14 Maybe a budget cut. Okay, so that would be bad.
Then this means you would have to write even more grants and do an even better job. Maybe you could still get funded.
I could live with that too.

Speaker 14 But then it sounds like they're trying to make further changes to the system where

Speaker 14 not only are the grants reviewed now, but then there is some political appointee that looks at them and that can

Speaker 14 decide, you know, based on, I don't know what criteria, you know, whether they're in the national interest or not.

Speaker 20 Science moves at its own speed, ignorant of the rhythms of politics.

Speaker 14 We can only do the work if we can do it for a long time. Otherwise, there's no point in even doing it.

Speaker 14 So if that becomes more of a concern that your grants may get yanked as political situations shift, then I think I'd want to leave.

Speaker 14 I think I wouldn't do it anymore just because it's not just not possible. I can't work on projects with a one-year outlook.
I would go look for a different job.

Speaker 89 Alan told the Wall Street Journal, it's not just about Harvard or universities.

Speaker 34 It's about America's place in the world.

Speaker 90 For example, quantum science, which right now is a huge strategic area for the nation, particularly in our competition with China.

Speaker 69 They support this research because of the economic benefits.

Speaker 82 A Xi Jia is more direct.

Speaker 12 The heart of the biomedical and the convergence of biology and IT and AI in America is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that's where they have taken their gun.

Speaker 18 He is very concerned that China is pulling ahead of the U.S.

Speaker 17 in biosciences.

Speaker 32 He says, we were neck and neck recently.

Speaker 2 Now we're behind.

Speaker 2 Already. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Like every serious person understands, and we are now behind China.

Speaker 17 Time is running out for the United States to hold its own against a rising China.

Speaker 8 Time is also running out for colleges and universities to settle on a strategy to defend themselves.

Speaker 31 Time is running out for Alan Garber to preserve everything Harvard is and has built.

Speaker 19 And time is running out for Jay Bhattacharya to leave the kind of mark he wants to make on American science.

Speaker 12 This is the most self-destructive move I've seen an administration do.

Speaker 11 And Jay is at the heart of that self-destructive behavior.

Speaker 12 Jay must know this.

Speaker 40 He must understand this.

Speaker 2 If he

Speaker 12 has credibility, which I believe he does, and if he has integrity, which I believe he does, he has got to wrap this battle up quickly and move forward with getting America back on track.

Speaker 12 Because otherwise, generations of people will look back and not blame just Donald Trump and R.F.K. Jr., but Jabe Hattacharya on overseeing the great American loss to China.

Speaker 52 Coming up on the final episode of the Harvard Plan season two, what if there were a way to ensure that critical research does get funded?

Speaker 86 The Trump administration is proposing a science grants fast lane for universities that sign on to its vision for higher ed.

Speaker 92 The compact list things that I think are pretty, I don't actually find them controversial.

Speaker 41 We meet the Trump advisor behind what they're calling the Compact.

Speaker 92 Merit-based admissions, merit-based hiring, rate inflation. These are the types of things that I don't feel like a partisan.

Speaker 92 They are actually just defining the necessary elements to a strong relationship.

Speaker 39 That's next week.

Speaker 18 The Harvard Plan, Season 2, is recorded and written by me, Ilya Maritz.

Speaker 36 The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen.

Speaker 63 It's edited by Kristen Nelson, head of audio for the Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer.

Speaker 67 Mixing and original music by Jared Paul.

Speaker 22 Tom Colligan is the fact-checker.

Speaker 89 Thanks to the Boston Globe's editor Nancy Barnes and to Ryan Huddle for episode Art.

Speaker 8 And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers.

Speaker 79 I'll see you next week for episode three of the Harvard Plan.

Speaker 33 This is On the Media.

Speaker 77 This is Irap Flato, host of Science Friday.

Speaker 77 For over 30 years, the Science Friday team has been reporting high-quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies.

Speaker 77 Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else.

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