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Brooke Gladstone: 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.

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

News clip: The Trump administration has now frozen more than $2 billion in federal research funding.

News clip: This would impact medical, engineering, and science research at the school.

News clip: That is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases.

News clip: I've lost grants that have totaled $6 million or $7 million.

Sarah Kobrin: One of the things that he told us several times was that there are no bad words. 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.

Dr. Ashish Jha: Now, we're behind.

Ilya Marritz: Already?

Dr. Ashish Jha: Yes, like every serious person understands, and we are now behind China.

Brooke Gladstone: It's Season 2 of The Harvard Plan, our deep dive into the assault on universities. It's all coming up after this.

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Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. 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. Grants to study deadly illnesses like colon cancer.

Kamila Naxerova: Here's our cell culture room-

Ilya Marritz: Oh, wow.

Kamila Naxerova: -where we do genetic screens.

Ilya Marritz: You have the white lab coats on hangers.

Kamila Naxerova: Yes, exactly.

Brooke Gladstone: Harvard Medical School's Kamila Naxerova. We heard from her last week in the first episode of The Harvard Plan, Season 2, our miniseries produced with The Boston Globe about the struggle for control of higher education. For Naxerova, the cuts to grants are threatening her ability to keep her lab open.

Kamila Naxerova: It was unclear what would happen. Would we just have to fire people overnight, would we have to stop doing everything, or would there be some sort of help?

Brooke Gladstone: 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. The bulk of that money flows through one place, the National Institutes of Health. Ilya Marritz, reporter and host of The Harvard Plan, takes it from here.

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Ilya Marritz: Think about a teacher who made a difference in your life. Did you stay in touch, visit them, maybe send a Christmas card? This story is about a teacher and student who went so much further than that. The student was so inspired by the teacher. He followed in his footsteps, got the exact same academic degrees, then entered the same field. Then they worked together closely.

They wrote papers, did research, got grants. For decades, it continued this way, and then something changed. The country changed. The younger man and the older man found themselves no longer colleagues. They became adversaries in a big, big fight. A fight that is still raging today. At stake are billions of dollars, academic freedom, and the future of science. The older man is the president of Harvard University, Dr. Alan Garber. He's intelligent, kind, mild-mannered to the point of being a little boring.

Dr. Alan Garber: -the use of data to think about problems. My dissertation was actually on antibiotic resistance.

Ilya Marritz: The younger man is anything but boring and not at all shy.

News clip: Joining me now, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford University.

News clip: Who knows Dr. Jay Bhattacharya?

Ilya Marritz: For the past five years, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has been a fixture on podcasts and Fox News.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Thank you for having me.

Ilya Marritz: 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. Kennedy Jr.

Senator: It is an honor and a privilege to be able to introduce and recommend to you Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to be President Trump's nominee for the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Ilya Marritz: Jay Bhattacharya was introduced in that hearing by a senator. 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. The president of Harvard was willing to be there to introduce him, to vouch for him. It didn't happen. This episode is about why. It's about the forces that peeled apart two incredibly smart, successful scientists and put them on opposite sides in the fight over universities.

Just weeks after Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed, his National Institutes of Health cut off billions of dollars in funding allocated to researchers at Harvard and dozens of other universities, too. We reached out to both men and requested interviews. They both turned us down. In this episode, you'll hear recordings of them from podcasts, TV, and other places, and the voices of the people who know them. Alan and Jay. That's what the people who know them call them. I'm going to call them that, too. Let's begin with Jay.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I was born in Calcutta in 1968, well, near Calcutta. My mom actually grew up in a slum in Calcutta, my dad in a little more middle-class neighborhood.

Ilya Marritz: 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. When Jayanta was very young, his father won the visa lottery to come to the United States. The family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later Southern California. Jayanta became Jay, an American boy. Every few years, the Bhattacharyas went back to visit aunts and uncles in India. That part was great, having a lot of family, but the poverty made an impression on Jay. He described one trip when he was eight on Tetragrammaton, music producer Rick Rubin's podcast.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: There was this monsoon. The streets are flooded. There's homeless families, literally, like families like little kids, dogs, moms, and dads in the street. I was like, we're going down some rickshaw to get to the station. I was looking around asking my parents, "What is this?" That was one of my first impressions of what life was like for poor people in poor countries.

Ilya Marritz: Back in America, young Jay excelled at math and science. When he got to college, his path was clear. He was going to become a doctor. At Stanford, as he told Rick Rubin, something happened to change his thinking. He took an intro to economics course.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I took it, and my brain just lit up. It was like, "Okay, you can use 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 scarcity, which is all the time." I knew I still wanted to be a doctor, but I could see how you could use that kind of thinking to make better decisions in medicine.

Ilya Marritz: Could there be a way to do both, though, economics and medicine? Enter Alan.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I met this man. He was my honors thesis advisor as an undergrad, and he had an MD and a PhD in economics. Absolutely idolized him. His name is Alan Garber.

Ilya Marritz: Idolized him.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Before I met him, I didn't realize it was possible to do the two things together. After I met him, I was like, "Okay, I have to do that.

Ilya Marritz: It takes some imagination to hear what it was about Alan that captivated Jay.

Dr. Alan Garber: The trend, which is not statistically significant, actually showed a slight increase in mortality with treatment.

Ilya Marritz: I found this cassette recording of Alan from 1994 speaking to a women's health research seminar.

Dr. Alan Garber: There developed a real schism in the medical profession, with the majority saying--

Ilya Marritz: Maybe it's this. Cloaked in an Illinois accent and unassuming manner, Alan was fiercely intelligent and ambitious to do things. 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.

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

Ilya Marritz: This is Dena Bravata, another one of Alan's mentees. When she encountered him in the 1990s, it was at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, where Alan saw patients. Dena Bravata was in training. Many of the men who came in had served in Korea or Vietnam. In addition to common ailments like diabetes or hypertension, they bore the scars of war.

Dena Bravata: PTSD, even Agent Orange exposure, these were very, very common issues.

Ilya Marritz: As the internist, Bravata would be the first to meet with a patient, then she'd bring her notes to Alan, who was the attending physician.

Dena Bravata: 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.

Ilya Marritz: What would you say you learned from Alan Garber specifically?

Dena Bravata: Well, he was my first role model in the trenches, if you will. I hope that I learned from him to be kind, 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.

Ilya Marritz: Alan thrived on being a doctor and a professor. You could do both. Here, Jay's path diverged from Alan's. 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.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: 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, whereas I was wholeheartedly, really interested in research.

Ilya Marritz: 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. He starts mentoring others. Amitabh Chandra arrived as a summer intern interested in labor economics. As he recalls, Jay invited him on a walk along the beach and tried to persuade him healthcare economics was the next big thing.

Amitabh Chandra: He didn't have to do that for me. He didn't know me at all.

Ilya Marritz: Later, towards the end of the internship, Chandra presented the fruits of his research to the RAND economists. More than anyone else, Jay showed he cared.

Amitabh Chandra: 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. 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. What if you had made this other assumption instead?

Ilya Marritz: Chandra went on to become a health economist at Harvard. Meeting Jay, he told me, was decisive. Jay didn't stay long at RAND. In 2001, Alan hired him to be a professor at Stanford. The two men were now truly colleagues. This is the period when they do the most research together, often with other academics as well. They tackled the big devils in American health care, cancer, aging, the cost of prescription drugs. Again and again, they found ways to work together.

Amitabh Chandra: There's 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? That makes Alan and Jay extremely special. The other dimension of specialness that's shared by Alan and Jay is they are not ideological about answers. They are extremely data-driven and empirical about answers. 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.

Ilya Marritz: In 2011, Alan was recruited to become provost at Harvard, chief academic officer, really, the number two there. He left California, but he kept Jay in his life. Alan had just obtained an NIH grant to study rising Medicare costs. He brought on Jay as a collaborator. The project lasted five years and took in several million dollars, ending only in 2016.

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. People who knew Jay then say he was a consummate professor, committed to classroom debate and scholarly discussion in the pages of academic journals. He was not looking to get famous or climb any ladder. Then the pandemic came, and everything changed.

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Ilya Marritz: This is Episode 2 of The Harvard Plan. More after the break. Stay with us.

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Ilya Marritz: This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Marritz, host of The Harvard Plan, a collaboration between OTM and The Boston Globe. 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.

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Here with me, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Dr. B, I think you were probably on the show, I don't even know how many times, like 40 times. During COVID, 50 times.

Ilya Marritz: In March of 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency due to the pandemic. From the start, Jay saw things differently from much of the public health establishment, which urged lockdowns and moving life online. 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.

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

In October 2020, after a little over six months of lockdowns, Jay and two other scholars came together to issue a manifesto. They did this at the headquarters of a libertarian think tank in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Great Barrington Declaration called for something radically different, which they called "focused protection." For most people, there should be a return to in-person living. Herd immunity would provide enough protection, while the elderly and vulnerable could quarantine and get vaccines once they became available.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: This is the saner approach, the more moral approach, the more scientifically-based approach.

Ilya Marritz: 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. Trump World had begun to embrace the Great Barrington Declaration, but the public health establishment was appalled. Dr. Ashish Jha used to work under Alan at Harvard School of Public Health and went on to advise the Biden administration on COVID policy. He's now the dean of the School of Public Health at Brown.

Dr. Ashish Jha: I have very strong disagreements with that piece. I thought it was really ill-timed that it came out a month before vaccines were available. The idea that you're going to lift all restrictions, just let everybody get infected a month before vaccines come out, just doesn't make any sense.

Ilya Marritz: Lately, there's been a recognition by Jha and others that the declaration probably got some things right, too.

Dr. Ashish Jha: 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.

Ilya Marritz: Still, for Jay, his outspokenness came with professional consequences. Within Stanford, where he still taught in, Jay was blocked from giving a talk about the declaration, he says. Then, as he told Rick Rubin, he was investigated by the school.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It felt like an inquisition. They're asking me about a thousand questions about my motivations.

Ilya Marritz: He kept his job. Stanford never answered our questions about that. 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, as Jay told Laura Ingraham.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It feels like some novel from the 1950s, where the House Un-American Committee is meeting to decide who to suppress, and I'm some sort of movie star in Hollywood that they're blacklisting because I'm a communist or something. It's ridiculous. If we had an open discussion, the lockdowns would have been lifted much earlier because the data and evidence behind them was so bad.

Ilya Marritz: Like so much else in American life, COVID had become a polarizing issue, a wedge. No doubt Jay's critics thought they were acting in the urgent interest of public health. Jay saw them as comfortable elites with no awareness of their own blind spots, as he described it on Andrew Huberman's podcast.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The lockdowns wore a luxury of the laptop class.

Ilya Marritz: Jay made allies where he found them, even if his new crowd had a weakness for pseudoscience and quackery.

Tucker Carlson: Amazingly, there appear to be growing connections between Viagra and treatment for the coronavirus. Ivermectin, as well as other proactive--

Laura Ingraham: -taking hydroxy as a way to prevent from getting the virus.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I was asking myself, "Why did I have this very different reaction to the lockdown?"

Ilya Marritz: Jay again on Rick Rubin's podcast.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: 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. I just had this vision of like, "This is going to happen at scale to every poor person on earth."

Ilya Marritz: Jay thought of the India he saw in the 1970s with power cuts and a fragile economy.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: We're essentially pulling the rug out from under the economic infrastructure that allows poor people to have some semblance of access to food, access to health care, all this stuff. We just basically said, no, the fear around this virus, the well-being of relatively well-off people is so much more important than that.

Ilya Marritz: While Jay became a public opinion-haver with a following, Alan went in the opposite direction. As provost at Harvard, he built consensus, ran meetings, spoke publicly only on occasion. When the pandemic came, Alan led the university's COVID advisory group. Learning quickly, he moved online. Dorms emptied out. Many classrooms didn't reopen for over a year. I'm not so sure Alan personally favored this approach, though.

Early in the pandemic, Alan had co-authored an opinion piece in The New York Times, warning against taking measures that would shut down the economy. The piece even mentions herd immunity as the pathway back to normal life. Not so different from the Great Barrington Declaration. The policies Harvard adopted were in line with what public health authorities recommended. A couple of 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.

Claudine Gay: My name is Claudine Gay, and I am the president of Harvard University. It's an honor to be here today.

Ilya Marritz: When that new president was hauled before Congress and questioned by Republican Elise Stefanik, Alan sat directly behind her.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik: Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term "intifada," correct?

Ilya Marritz: For over five hours, he occasionally nodded at something or other she said, but betrayed very little emotion.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik: 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?

Claudine Gay: That type of hateful speech is personally--

Ilya Marritz: 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. It was ideologically rigid, lacking conservatives, lacking the capacity for debate. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were a waste of time. Within a month of the hearing, Gay was out of the job and Alan became Harvard's acting leader.

At the end of 2024, he was sworn in as Harvard's official actual president. This is the moment for many people when Alan first came into focus. He grew up in a small Midwestern city. His father had a liquor store. He was raised Jewish and is observant. He graduated from Harvard College, class of 1976. In true "all roads lead back to Harvard" fashion, Alan's year also included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John Roberts, now chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Dan Lieberman: I got to know Alan, actually, just before he came to Harvard. He was still at Stanford.

Ilya Marritz: Dan Lieberman is a professor of evolutionary biology and Alan's longtime running buddy. Alan had read some of Lieberman's academic work and got in touch.

Dan Lieberman: He had had some running injuries, and I've published a lot on the biomechanics of running. We had lunch somewhere in the square and talked about running, 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.

Ilya Marritz: You said "study his gait." How he runs?

Dan Lieberman: Yes, his running gait because he had some injuries. After we had this lunch, he came to my lab. I found out that he was hitting the ground really hard.

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

Dan Lieberman: 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.

Ilya Marritz: A lot of people who know Alan talk about him this way. Surely, rationality will only get you so far in a world where the old rule book has been tossed out. I prodded Lieberman to help me think this thing through. How does someone like Alan, who has lived his whole adult life in the halls of the academy, deal with an aggressive antagonist who has no respect for rules or established precedent? Knife to a gunfight. You know what I mean.

Dan Lieberman: 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. Right now, we're in a world where people are quite happy to ignore that in all kinds of levels. I would say that this particular fight is just one of them.

Ilya Marritz: The winds were changing direction fast at the moment Alan became Harvard president. A lot of the stuff that had been built at Harvard when he was provost was now being undone. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences dropped diversity statements. The DEI office was renamed. 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, there were revised policies on student protests and discipline.

Plenty of people at Harvard were unhappy with these changes. 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 Alan's actual view of how universities should be. All of this was poor insurance against what was coming. That's after the break. This is Episode 2 of The Harvard Plan.

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Ilya Marritz: This is On the Media. I'm Ilya Marritz, 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. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, campaigned for president on the most anti-higher ed platform in recent memory.

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

Ilya Marritz: He won, and then he started building his team, selecting people for the top jobs in government. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a noted adherent of conspiracy theories about vaccines, would lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Senator Bill Cassidy: The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order.

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

Senator Bill Cassidy: Thank you, Dr. Bhattacharya, for appearing before the committee.

Ilya Marritz: Context. It was March of 2025, six weeks into the new administration. 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 US government one by one, slashing staff and programs.

Senator Bill Cassidy: I don't have my gavel, but Senator Murray said it's a DOGE cut, so anyway.

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Ilya Marritz: Now, DOGE had come for the NIH's $48 billion annual budget and its workforce of 20,000. Clinical trials were paused, grants frozen, firings en masse, and senators were on edge. It was under that cloud that Jay introduced himself.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I'm honored to speak with you today and deeply humbled by President Trump's nomination. I'm delighted to have with me my wife, Cathy, my son Matthew.

Ilya Marritz: Remember how I told you earlier that Alan had agreed to introduce Jay at his confirmation hearing, how Jay wanted him to be there? This is that moment, but Alan was not in the room.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The NIH has played a pivotal role in my career. I served for a decade as a standing member of NIH grant committees.

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

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: American health is going backwards.

Ilya Marritz: Life expectancy has flatlined, he said, and there have been a bunch of research scandals. Public faith in science reflects this, he said.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: 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.

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

Senator Bill Cassidy: Thank you, sir. I'll start with questionings.

Ilya Marritz: He went straight for detention at the heart of this job.

Senator Bill Cassidy: 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.

Ilya Marritz: Measles, a disease for which there is a safe vaccine, was raging just then. For years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of Health and Human Services, had been telling parents, vaccines may cause autism. Kennedy would be Jay's boss.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Senator, it's a tragedy that a child would die from a vaccine-preventable disease.

Ilya Marritz: Jay affirmed his support for vaccinating kids for measles, but noted there's been a sharp rise in autism cases. He said, "We don't know the reasons why."

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I would support a broad scientific agenda based on data to get an answer to that.

Ilya Marritz: Cassidy seemed genuinely disturbed that Jay was not swatting down the baseless linkage. He came back to this point again and again.

Senator Bill Cassidy: My concern is the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Senator, I guess I've turned it around and say I don't want to disprove a negative. That's impossible, really.

Ilya Marritz: Jay suggested, if part of the public has doubts about science, refuses to believe in it, then science must do better, try harder to convince them. Jay seemed to have intuited something essential about the job he was trying out for. 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.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I guess, yes, you're absolutely right, Senator. We don't need to address every idea or concern. If those concerns result in parents not wanting to vaccinate their children for a vaccine that is well-tested, my inclination is to give people good data. That's how you address those concerns.

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Ilya Marritz: We don't know why Alan didn't introduce Jay at that hearing, but we can imagine what he might have said about his former student. He might have talked about Jay's curiosity, his refusal to accept conventional wisdom at face value, his passion for science. He might have spoken about the decades they worked together as colleagues on containing Medicare costs, aging, fighting cancer. He might have noted Trump's pressure campaign on universities, which was then gaining force, and called for a truce. Jay was confirmed in a party-line vote. Senator Cassidy, his biggest Republican skeptic, supported him in the end. At the start of April, Jay was installed as NIH director, with RFK Jr. administering the oath.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Welcome aboard. The revolution begins today.

Ilya Marritz: At Donald Trump's NIH, now Jay Bhattacharya's NIH, too, things were changing fast.

News clip: The Trump administration has now frozen more than $2 billion in federal research funding.

News clip: This would impact medical, engineering, and science research at the school.

News clip: That is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases.

News clip: I've lost grants that have totaled $6 million or $7 million.

Ilya Marritz: In early May, the NIH sent a letter to Alan, a letter which I think is significant, even though really it's a formality. 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. Still, the penultimate paragraph offers Alan one thin read of hope. He could appeal the decision directly to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH.

Dr. Ashish Jha: I wonder what Alan thinks when he gets that letter.

Ilya Marritz: Again, Dr. Ashish Jha. He knows both Alan and Jay. I describe the contents of the letter to him.

Dr. Ashish Jha: 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. Alan's also a human being. There's got to be part of him that's got to be struggling with this.

Ilya Marritz: True to form, Alan responded calmly, rationally, when he was asked about the cuts on NPR.

Dr. Alan Garber: Do you really want to cut back on research dollars? There is a lot of actual research demonstrating the returns to the American people have been enormous.

Ilya Marritz: That's Alan.

Dr. Ashish Jha: Jay is a fundamentally good guy. 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?"

Ilya Marritz: One reason I wanted to talk with Ashish Jha is that, like Jay, he's a scientist who went to Washington. He became President Biden's COVID response advisor.

Dr. Ashish Jha: What happens when doctors and health economists go to Washington, particularly people who haven't been involved in politics? It's a steep learning curve, and you got to get learning real, 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? 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, 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.

Ilya Marritz: In his confirmation hearing, Jay laid out his goals for the National Institutes of Health. He wants to fund more early-career scientists, more moonshot research. He says, for too long, the agency has been too careful, favoring incremental projects instead of big leaps. Jay actually co-wrote a whole paper about this back in 2020. Those are his priorities. They may or may not be his boss's priorities.

Dr. Ashish Jha: His direct boss, RFK Jr., doesn't believe in germ theory, doesn't believe in vaccines. He believes a lot of stuff that probably Jay, from his own experience and training as an academic, disagrees with, but there are points of agreement about free speech and making space for other kinds of viewpoints. There are places where they agree on like Make America Healthy. Is there any way for Jay to split the difference and preserve his dignity, and preserve the respect of people in the scientific community?

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Yes, there always is. There always is. You have to, again, decide which stuff is most important. You're not going to win every battle. RFK Jr. has decided that the big issue of American diet is food dyes. No serious person thinks that. If he has to go out and talk about food dyes every once in a while, I think it's fine. We're all going to be like, "We get what he's doing," but he gets to do that if he's preserving the core stuff. 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.

Ilya Marritz: We did this interview in July, by the way. Over the summer and into the fall, Jay's leadership at NIH seemed to unfold as a series of agility tests. He submitted and defended in Congress a budget request that's almost 40% smaller. He defended the decision to cancel mRNA vaccine development, which scientists consider to be extremely promising.

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. One of Jay's colleagues, the head of the Centers for Disease Control, was forced out of the job after less than a month. She said, "RFK Jr. politicized our processes and repeatedly censored science." 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.

President Donald Trump: With Tylenol, don't take it. Don't take it.

Ilya Marritz: Look to Trump's right side. Jay is there beside his boss, RFK Jr. They're there for over an hour. 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.

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

Ilya Marritz: Jay's colleagues in health economics are near unanimous that he believes in good science. Within the NIH, a lot of people are worried. In June, a group of NIH staffers put out their own manifesto, the Bethesda Declaration. They contend that the Trump administration and NIH harmed academic freedom by selectively canceling high-quality work at out-of-favor universities. They say that essential research into health disparities has been blocked even when it does not include the words "diversity, equity, and inclusion." The declaration has close to 500 signatures just from current employees.

Sarah Kobrin: We described it as dissent.

Ilya Marritz: Sarah Kobrin is one of them, a 21-year NIH veteran who agreed to speak with me in her personal capacity.

Sarah Kobrin: He laid that out for us. He has his own letter of dissent. He says publicly very often that he welcomes dissent. He said specifically in our letter and even in the email that accompanied the letter, "We hope you welcome this dissent."

Ilya Marritz: Jay did not at first respond directly, but posted his thoughts on X, saying the declaration contained misconceptions about NIH's new policy direction, but then in July, he invited many of the signers to meet with him. Sarah Kobrin told me Jay was courteous, personable. He listened.

Sarah Kobrin: 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. 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.

Ilya Marritz: Kobrin 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.

Sarah Kobrin: In our thank-you note, we did say thank you and then said one urgent note, "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. If you could please communicate that more strongly, we would be appreciative," or something along those lines. I don't think he's the one choosing what gets cut. I don't think he's the one. Yes, that's the reason I think those priorities are not his personally, not his scientifically. They come from elsewhere.

Ilya Marritz: Although the meeting was cordial, it didn't leave Kobrin feeling optimistic.

Sarah Kobrin: He wants to be a scientific colleague working in collaboration at NIH for the good of NIH, but that's not really the truth of the job he's accepted.

Ilya Marritz: We sent the NIH a detailed list of questions raised by our reporting. A spokesperson responded with some bullet points. 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. As for Jay's relationship with Alan, the spokesperson called it a personal matter.

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Ilya Marritz: The disgruntled NIH staffer's 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. The idea of speech, the proper boundaries of it, who sets the rules, it runs through this whole thing. For example, on September 3rd, Jay gave a talk at the National Conservatism Conference. He had top billing alongside Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and OMB Director Russell Vought. Jay recounted what happened to him on Twitter a few years back.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I was very naive. I decided I was going to join Twitter to tell people about the Great Barrington Declaration. When Elon Musk bought Twitter a couple of years later, it turned out that the day I joined Twitter in August of 2021, I had been placed on a blacklist. I found this out because Elon Musk invited me to Twitter headquarters. I got to see with my own eyes the database with my face on it and the word "blacklist" written over it.

Ilya Marritz: 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. Still, the Biden people did ask social media companies to help contain the spread of what they considered harmful messaging around COVID. Jay joined a lawsuit over this, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. His co-plaintiffs included the states of Missouri and Louisiana and The Gateway Pundit, a hub for conspiracy theories. Jay's side lost in a 6-3 decision. He says, "That shows the First Amendment is on thin ice."

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: At this point, the only thing protecting free speech in this country, frankly, is President Trump.

Ilya Marritz: 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. 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. This is something Alan talks about.

Dr. Alan Garber: We cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights.

Ilya Marritz: 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. She granted Harvard summary judgment on most of its claims. "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."

She went on in language that is bracingly direct. "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."

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Ilya Marritz: Okay, we are now recording. Hey, Sarah, how are you doing?

Sarah Kobrin: Hi, doing okay.

Ilya Marritz: [chuckles] Do you want to give me the business again? I caught up with Sarah Kobrin in late September, about two months after our first conversation.

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

Ilya Marritz: 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. This was actually my number one question, whether there have been any reprisals of any kind.

Sarah Kobrin: No.

Ilya Marritz: Okay.

Sarah Kobrin: Not at NIH, just no.

Ilya Marritz: That's the good news. The bad news? Everyone is stressed. Everything feels broken.

Sarah Kobrin: It's eight months now of being asked to do things that we think are wrong.

Ilya Marritz: The formerly functional grant review process has lately been turned on its head, she told me. High-quality proposals are not getting approved. Is it because of something they wrote?

Sarah Kobrin: 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." Grants being caught up in spreadsheets, and the program directors being told, "These grants were flagged. They were flagged. 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 you to figure it out." Dr. Bhattacharya, when we met with him at that roundtable, said, "No, there are no banned words." He said that to our faces. 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."

Ilya Marritz: IC directors, those are the directors of institutes and centers. The NIH contains 27 of these. Like the National Cancer Institute, where Kobrin works, they're supposed to be reviewing grants, funding science. With no formal list of banned words, it's all guesswork.

Sarah Kobrin: We are between a rock and a rock and a rock. 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.

Ilya Marritz: Jay said science should not be partisan. Kobrin 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."

Sarah Kobrin: People won't be able to have a sense, "Oh, I got an excellent score." No, the score is only going to be one piece. That's the peer review result, 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.

Ilya Marritz: I thought about Kamila Naxerova, the Harvard cancer researcher we met in the last episode. 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. She is prepared for these grants to potentially disappear and never come back.

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

Ilya Marritz: Then you think about what else could happen.

Kamila Naxerova: 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, but then it sounds like they're trying to make further changes to the system where not only are the grants reviewed now, but then there is some political appointee that looks at them and that can decide based on, I don't know what criteria, whether they're in the national interest or not.

Ilya Marritz: Science moves at its own speed, ignorant of the rhythms of politics.

Kamila Naxerova: We can only do the work if we can do it for a long time. Otherwise, there's no point in even doing it. 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. I think I wouldn't do it anymore, just because it's just not possible. I can't work on projects with a one-year outlook. I would go look for a different job.

Ilya Marritz: Alan told The Wall Street Journal, "It's not just about Harvard or universities. It's about America's place in the world."

Dr. Alan Garber: For example, quantum science, which, right now, is a huge strategic area for the nation, particularly in our competition with China. They support this research because of the economic benefits.

Ilya Marritz: Ashish Jha is more direct.

Dr. Ashish Jha: The heart of the biomedical and the convergence of biology and IT and AI in America is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's where they have taken their gun.

Ilya Marritz: He is very concerned that China is pulling ahead of the US in biosciences. He says, "We were neck and neck recently."

Dr. Ashish Jha: Now, we're behind.

Ilya Marritz: Already?

Dr. Ashish Jha: Yes, like every serious person understands, and we are now behind China.

Ilya Marritz: Time is running out for the United States to hold its own against a rising China. Time is also running out for colleges and universities to settle on a strategy to defend themselves. Time is running out for Alan Garber to preserve everything Harvard is and has built. Time is running out for Jay Bhattacharya to leave the kind of mark he wants to make on American science.

Dr. Ashish Jha: This is the most self-destructive move I've seen an administration do, and Jay is at the heart of that self-destructive behavior. Jay must know this. He must understand this. If he 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 because, otherwise, generations of people will look back and not blame just Donald Trump and RFK Jr., but Jay Bhattacharya on overseeing the great American loss to China.

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Ilya Marritz: Coming up on the final episode of The Harvard Plan, Season 2, what if there were a way to ensure that critical research does get funded? The Trump administration is proposing a science grants fast lane for universities that sign on to its vision for higher ed.

Trump Advisor: The compact lists things that I think are pretty-- I don't actually find them controversial.

Ilya Marritz: We meet the Trump advisor behind what they're calling "the compact."

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Trump Advisor: Merit-based admissions, merit-based hiring, grade inflation. These are the types of things that I don't feel like a partisan. They are actually just defining the necessary elements to a strong relationship.

Ilya Marritz: That's next week. The Harvard Plan Season 2 is recorded and written by me, Ilya Marritz. The series is produced by On the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristin Nelson, head of audio for The Boston Globe, and Katya Rogers, On the Media's executive producer. Mixing and original music by Jared Paul. Tom Colligan is the fact-checker. Thanks to The Boston Globe's editor, Nancy Barnes, and to Ryan Huddle for episode art. Thanks to Jazmín Aguilera and Valentina Powers. I'll see you next week for Episode 3 of The Harvard Plan. This is On the Media.

 

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