A priceless treasure trove of biodata gathered from generations of Americans by Harvard University researchers may soon be lost due to additional funding cuts by the Trump administration, a leading nutrition researcher told CNN.
The latest round of cuts to Harvard by the Trump administration will halt funding for the upkeep of dozens of giant freezers filled with DNA, blood, urine, stool and tissue samples used for ongoing research, said Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Researchers gathered the samples over decades as part of the Nurse’s Health Study, one of the largest and longest investigations ever done on women’s risk factors for chronic disease. Another long-term study, the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, has chronicled the health and diet of men via questionnaires.
“We’ve been following almost 300,000 women and another 50,000 men for about 45 years,” said Willett, who has published over 2,000 original research papers and reviews on the link between nutrition and health.
The biological samples and data from both studies have led to major advances in science, including the discovery of the dangers of trans fats and the subsequent ban from the US food supply; the link between obesity and breast cancer, even in adolescents; and the connection between cigarette smoking and heart disease.
“We are scrambling to try to protect the samples and the data we have,” Willett said. “We can’t last more than a few weeks, a couple of months, depending on which aspect of the study we’re talking about. But we’re on a short timeline now, unless we get some additional funding.”
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which receives 46% of its funding from the federal government, was already reeling from the $2.2 billion cuts in federal grants and contracts announced by the Trump administration in mid-April.
“The federal government has a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer dollars do not flow to institutions that allow open harassment of Jewish students or tolerate antisemitic intimidation,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which manages research grants to institutions.
“That includes Harvard. No university will be given a pass on ignoring civil rights. If Harvard wants continued federal support, it must uphold basic standards of safety, lawfulness, and equal protection — for all students, including Jewish students. That is non-negotiable,” Nixon said in an email.
However, the carefully preserved biological samples, accompanied by decades of disease follow-up data, offer tremendous opportunities for research, said Dr. Wei Zheng, an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. He has used the Harvard data in his research.
“They are fundamental to identifying biomarkers for early detection of diseases, understanding risk factors, and informing effective prevention strategies, Zheng said in an email. “The irreplaceable nature of these samples underscores their critical role in advancing medical knowledge and improving public health outcomes.”
The biodata from the Nurse’s Health Study sits in row after row of large freezers, kept cold by liquid nitrogen, an expense that Willett says adds up to several hundred thousand dollars a year. That amount doesn’t include funds for staff who access and analyze the samples or supplies for the labs where the work is done.
“We have blood that we use for DNA — we can look at nutrients in those samples, hormones. We have urine samples where we can measure other things, contaminants, for example, that are excreted. We have toenail clippings that are good for trace metals,” Willett explained.
“We have stool samples and oral samples that can be used for microbiome analysis that have been collected specifically for that purpose,” he added. “We also have tumor tissues from many thousands of women who developed breast cancer, so we can go back and look at the specific characteristics in those cancer tissues.”
Willett and his team were the first to link alcohol consumption, even in modest amounts, to breast cancer — alcohol use is now widely considered a known risk factor for a cancer that kills over 42,000 women a year.
Data from the long-term studies can also inform and even change prior research. Research by the prestigious Framingham Heart Study in the 1970s and 1980s concluded that “smoking was a risk factor for heart disease in men, but not in women,” Willett said. Data from the Nurse’s Health Study, however, found the link applied to women as well.
It’s not just Willett’s team members who access this data. “We have several hundred investigators around the US, and some in other countries, too, that use this for their own research. It really is a national resource,” he said.
There is also exciting research yet to come. Some study participants are now reaching 100 years old, and the data will soon be able to determine what behaviors over the decades may lead to longer lives — research Willett said will never happen if the thousands of dollars needed to keep the work safe disappears.
“One of the really big questions people have is: ‘How could I live to 95, or 100, and still have good cognitive function, good physical function?’ And we’re just coming to that point in our study where we can do that,” he said.
“In the younger part of the cohort, we’ve also collected data on what they were consuming during their adolescent years, and so just now, we’re starting to get a good view of what people were eating while they were teenagers. How is that related to cancer?”
The elimination of all research grants to Harvard was announced Monday evening in a three-page letter to the university from Education Secretary Linda McMahon. In that letter, she accused Harvard of “ugly racism” and “violating federal law,” and said the university will “cease to be a publicly funded institution and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution.”
“I’m not too sure why people would suffer when Harvard has a $53 billion endowment that I believe they could fund a lot of these projects with, and there are donors who are very willing to give large amounts of money to Harvard,” McMahon told CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Tuesday.
University endowments aren’t as easy to access as bank accounts. Most funds have to be maintained in perpetuity and access is largely restricted, often by stipulations from donors.
About 80% of Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment is earmarked for financial aid, scholarships, faculty chairs, academic programs or other projects, according to the school. The remaining 20% is intended to sustain the institution for years to come.
Harvard says it has been funding nearly two-thirds of its operating expenses from other sources, including federal research grants and student tuition.
The university has filed a lawsuit in Boston federal court against the administration, saying it “will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.”
“The Government has not — and cannot — identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation,” the lawsuit said.
