A Harvard Scientist’s Tuberculosis Research Is Threatened by Trump’s Cuts

Dr. Sarah Fortune, an immunologist who spends a lot of time in her laboratory at Harvard, never expected to be caught in a battle with the White House.

But early Tuesday morning, she received an official notice to “stop work” on her lab’s federally funded research on tuberculosis, an infectious disease that kills more than a million people a year worldwide.

Just hours earlier, the Trump administration had vowed to freeze $2.2 billion in research funding at Harvard. If fully executed, it will be the deepest cut yet in a White House campaign against elite universities that began shortly after President Trump took office in January. Other universities, including Princeton, Cornell and Columbia, have also seen deep cuts to research funding.

Dr. Fortune’s contract, a $60 million National Institutes of Health agreement involving Harvard and other universities across the country, appeared to be one of the first projects affected. Stop-work notices also began arriving this week at an obscure Harvard office called “sponsored programs” that coordinates federal research funding.

One Harvard professor, David R. Walt, received a notice that his research toward a diagnostic tool for Lou Gehrig’s disease, or A.L.S., must stop immediately. Two other orders will affect research on space travel and radiation sickness, just weeks after the scientist, Dr. Donald E. Ingber, who engineers fake organs that are useful in studies of human illnesses, was approached by the government to expand his work.