BY HANK REICHMAN

A little more than a year ago the AAUP released a report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.  The report documented “the Trump administration’s alarming hostility to science” in international scientific exchange and the field of climate science, which “has been subjected to vicious attempts to discredit its validity.”  The report also highlighted the case of Dr. Eugene Gu, then a surgical resident at Vanderbilt University, whose research seeks to transplant healthy fetal organs in utero to fetuses with fatal congenital diseases so they can survive to adulthood with fully functioning hearts and kidneys. Dr. Gu was investigated by House Republicans over his alleged use of fetal tissue from abortion clinics and subjected to withering online and direct harassment.

Now fetal tissue research is under renewed assault.  According to a report first published December 7 by the journal Science, the Trump administration has shut down at least one government-run study that uses fetal tissue implanted into mice even before federal health officials reach a decision on whether to continue such research.  A senior scientist at a National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory in Montana told colleagues that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) “has directed me to discontinue procuring fetal tissue” from a firm that is the only available source, according to an email he sent to a collaborator in late September.  “This effectively stops all of our research to discover a cure for HIV,” the researcher wrote. The research disruptions might extend to a handful of other labs using fetal tissue, all of which are part of NIH, although not necessarily to outside research institutions operating on NIH grants.

Rocky Mountain Laboratory, NIH

The HIV experiment disrupted by the suspension was being conducted at NIAID’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana, which focus on infectious diseases.  The lab had, for several years, obtained the human fetal tissue from Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR), based in Alameda, California.

“We were all poised to go and then the bombshell was dropped,” HIV researcher Warner Greene, director of the Gladstone Center for HIV Cure Research in San Francisco, California, who was collaborating with the Montana NIH laboratory that received the order, told Science. “The decision completely knocked our collaboration off the rails. We were devastated.”

In September, Science reports, the administration “canceled a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) contract for acquiring human fetal tissue for testing candidate drugs.”  In addition, HHS, which oversees NIH, “told researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), that it would be extending a contract for work involving human fetal tissue for just 90 days instead of the usual 1 year, prompting media reports that the department was preparing to cancel the contract.”  HHS said it has made no decisions regarding federal funding for human fetal tissue research pending the outcome of the ongoing review of all such work.

The laboratory at UCSF is a linchpin in the development of new drugs to prevent and treat HIV, using mice implanted with human fetal tissue to run the first animal tests of chemical compounds developed by pharmaceutical companies and other academic scientists that seem promising in lab dishes.

On December 7, “an NIH spokesperson confirmed that the agency asked staff scientists ‘to pause procurements of fetal tissue’ pending the outcome of the HHS review.  The suspension applies only to scientists who work directly for NIH’s intramural program, and not extramural researchers who typically work at universities and receive grants from the government.  It affects two laboratories, NIH officials say.  One is operated by the National Eye Institute. (Fetal retinal tissue is used to study eye diseases.)  The other is run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).” According to Science, “It is unclear whether HHS will next place restrictions on the grants of NIH-funded investigators at universities who don’t work for NIH but whose projects also rely on access to new fetal tissue.”

“Everything I am doing involves humanized mice.  It would shut my lab down if we were not able to use fetal tissues,” said Jerome Zack, a virologist who studies HIV at UCLA, and has been using humanized mice for 25 years.

“This is scientific censorship of the worst kind,” Greene told the Washington Post.  He was poised to collaborate with the Montana researcher, Kim Hasenkrug, on a new experiment that has been thwarted.  “You spend your life trying to do good experiments and organize your science carefully,” Greene said, “and suddenly, at the whim of some politicians in Washington, D.C., they remove a critical piece of your scientific armamentarium.”  According to the Post, “Hasenkrug was not available for comment.  Greene and Irving Weissman, a pioneer in stem cell research at Stanford University, said government officials imposed a gag order on him.”

Thomas Packard, a postdoctoral student of Greene’s, called the HHS review and its attendant constraints “really just a travesty for the outlook for HIV research.  Mice made with human fetal tissue are critical to moving from discoveries in the lab to clinical treatments.  Blocking this significantly hurts our chances of finding an HIV cure.”

Greene added that even if the HHS order is eventually lifted, the lost time would be consequential.  “If we were given the green light right now” to resume acquiring fetal tissue, he says, “it would probably take us a year to get back in the position we were in when the ban was put in place.”