(7 Aug 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Boston – 5 August 2025
1. Door with sign for the Center for Biostatistics in AIDS Research at Harvard University’s school of public health
2. Harvard researcher Alberto Ascherio walking through corridor toward freezers holding samples
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Alberto Ascherio, Harvard Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition:
“I’ve been working for 10 years with some of the best scientists in the world. These are really brilliant people that have been here, you know, trying to pursue science at the highest level. And now the uncertainty in funding, you know, I’m at risk of losing them and they are irreplaceable.”
4. Ascherio opening freezer storing blood samples
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Alberto Ascherio, Harvard Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition:
“If I lose the people who are working with me, restarting from scratch will be very, very difficult. It may take five or more years before I can find a comparable team and re-put things together and restart the research.”
6. Ascherio opening storage tank holding blood samples cooled with liquid nitrogen
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Alberto Ascherio, Harvard Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition:
“NIH has been our major source of funding for the past 30 years and in the past we were all complaining about it but at the same time we recognize that it is the best system in the world. Rigorous, meritocratic, peer review that allow to do the best possible research in the end.”
8. Wide of storage tanks holding blood samples cooled with liquid nitrogen
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Alberto Ascherio, Harvard Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition:
“I think over the past 30 years we have built the equivalent of a, you know, the space, Hubble Space Telescope and now we’ve lost the funding to launch it and to get the data that would allow us to discover really the causes of neurodegenerative diseases.”
10. Wide of a researcher walking through corridor at Harvard’s school of public health
STORYLINE:
Harvard University Professor Alberto Ascherio’s research is literally frozen.
The epidemiology and nutrition scientist has thousands of blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university’s school of public health. Collected from millions of U.S. soldiers over two decades using millions of taxpayer dollars, the samples are key to his research to discover the cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Ascherio is one of hundreds of Harvard researchers who have fallen victim to the freeze on funding by the Trump administration.
The halt in federal funding has meant that some of the world’s most prominent researchers exploring everything from opioid addiction to how diseases like cancer progress are laying off young researchers and shelving years or even decades of research. Some research might be lost forever.
The funding cuts are part of a months-long battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country’s top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern universities. It has taken a particular hard and aggressive line against Harvard, freezing the funding after one of the country’s oldest universities rejected a series of demands in an April 11 letter from a federal antisemitism task force.
The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. It was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.
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