The Harvard Plan: Jay & Alan

Summary

Podcast Summary: Embedded – The Harvard Plan: Jay & Alan

Host: Ilya Marritz (for NPR, with OTM & Boston Globe)
Date: November 24, 2025
Episode Focus: The deeply intertwined personal and professional histories of Dr. Alan Garber (President of Harvard) and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Director of NIH), exploring how their mentor-mentee bond devolved into an adversarial relationship at the center of a high-stakes fight over the future of science, academia, and federal research funding in Trump-era America.

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the personal and ideological split between two influential academic figures: Alan Garber and Jay Bhattacharya. Once bound by a close professional and personal relationship, Garber and Bhattacharya now find themselves on opposite sides of a national battle over science, higher education, and academic freedom—one that has real consequences for billions in research funding and the direction of American biomedical inquiry. Through interviews, archival audio, and on-the-ground reporting, the episode explores how their trajectories diverged amid a changing political landscape marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration’s antagonism toward elite universities.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mentor–Mentee Origin Story: Alan & Jay

• Jay Bhattacharya’s Early Life & Inspiration ([04:15]):
  Jay, born into poverty in India and later moved to the US by his family, was shaped by witnessing poverty firsthand and grew passionate about bridging medicine with economics.
  • Quote:

    “There was this monsoon. The streets are flooded... and I was like 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.”
    — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ([05:04])

• Meeting Alan Garber at Stanford:
  • Jay was inspired by Alan, who, “cloaked in an Illinois accent and unassuming manner, was fiercely intelligent and ambitious,” and showed Jay it was possible to pursue both medicine and economics.
  • Quote:

  “Absolutely idolized him. His name is Alan Garber.”
  — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ([06:13])

• Their Collaboration:
  • Worked closely for decades; Alan mentored Jay, and they co-authored research on topics like cancer, aging, and prescription drug costs.
  • “There's a handful of these very special people in the world... people who will sit down and spend hours and hours with you, helping you be a better scientist...” ([10:29])

2. Career Divergence & the Pandemic's Impact

• Jay’s shift to Research:
  • Despite medical training, Jay lost interest in clinical practice, focusing instead on health economics and research ([08:52]).
• COVID-19 as the Breaking Point ([14:20]):
  • Jay became a contrarian voice on lockdowns and COVID policy (Great Barrington Declaration), alienating him from much of the public health establishment, including former allies.
  • Quote:

    “He was pushing for schools to open in a way that a lot of people weren’t. And I thought that was, that was smart and good.”
    — Dr. Ashish Jha ([17:42])

  • Jay faced institutional backlash, internal investigations, and was labeled by NIH leadership as part of the "fringe.”
  • Quote:

    "It felt like an inquisition. They’re asking about a thousand questions about, like, my motivations.”
    — Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ([18:03])

• Alan’s Steadiness amid Crisis:
  • As Harvard provost (later president), Alan led campus pandemic response, largely following public health norms—though his earlier writings were more cautious about full lockdowns.
  • Alan’s approach: rational, understated, focused on making decisions by consensus and staying analytical—even as the cultural and political pressure mounted.
  • Quote:

    “He’s just very much focused on the facts, like what’s going on and what to do.”
    — Dan Lieberman ([24:15])

3. Institutional Upheaval & Political Weaponization

• The Trump Administration’s Higher Ed Backlash ([28:00]):
  • Trump’s 2024 campaign and subsequent administration target elite universities, DEI efforts, and propose radical overhauls to federal science funding.
  • RFK Jr. (an anti-vaccine crusader) is made Secretary of HHS; Bhattacharya becomes NIH Director.
  • The so-called “Doge cuts” (named after Elon Musk's efficiency czars) slash budgets and pause clinical trials, putting NIH and its grantees under enormous strain.
• Jay’s Confirmation and Early Tenure as NIH Director ([29:38]):
  • Jay testifies before the Senate. Alan, who Jay wanted to introduce him, is absent.
  • Jay’s stance: the NIH and American science have grown cautious and lost public trust, citing poor public confidence and the need for bolder, more transparent research agendas.
  • He navigates the tightrope of appeasing his ideological bosses while expressing conventional support for vaccines, but declining to see off autism conspiracies, to the evident discomfort of lawmakers.
  • Quote:

    "My concern is the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases."
    — Senator Bill Cassidy ([31:53])

  • Billions of research dollars to “politically problematic” universities are frozen; Harvard is notified, with a formulaic offer to appeal directly to Jay.

4. Fallout – Inside Science Under Siege

• How Decisions Get Political ([34:34]):
  • Former collegial respect between Alan and Jay now strained by the fight. Alan is “calm and rational.” Jay, described as “a fundamentally good guy,” must now decide how long he tolerates being part of attacks on friends and institutions.
  • Ashish Jha compares the steep learning curve of academics in DC, and the necessity of picking which battles matter most for integrity.
  • Jay must implement, defend deep cuts to NIH’s mission and budget, increasingly giving ground to political appointees (rather than scientists) on what gets funded ([38:03]).
• The Bethesda Declaration:
  • NIH staffers publish a manifesto (echoing Jay’s own past radical declaration) protesting the “selective canceling of high-quality work at out-of-favor universities” and chilling of academic freedom ([40:11]).
  • Jay meets with signers, reassures them there are “no bad words” for grant applications, but staffers say the reality is otherwise—all while appointees hold sway and review criteria become opaque ([41:23]).
  • “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.”
    — Sarah Cobrin, NIH scientist ([47:52])

5. Consequences and Existential Stakes

• Researchers Feel the Chill ([48:42]):
  • Peer review is replaced or overshadowed by political review; scientists don’t know what “criteria” will tank their funding, making long-term scientific work untenable.
  • “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.”
    — Camilla Naxarova, Harvard researcher ([51:07])
• National and Global Implications:
  • "The heart of the biomedical... is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that's where they have taken their gun.” — Dr. Ashish Jha ([51:49])
  • Jha warns of a devastating self-inflicted loss of American leadership in biomedical science, especially relative to China.
  • “Jay must know this, he must understand this... if he has integrity... he has got to wrap this battle up quickly and move forward with getting America back on track.” ([52:37])

---

Selected Notable Quotes

• On Mentor & Influence

  • "Before I met him, I didn’t realize it was possible to do the two things together. And after I met him, I was like, okay, I have to do that."
    – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ([06:23])

• On the Science-Politics Divide

  • "He really wanted to understand where what I was doing broke down."
    – Amitabh Chandra about Jay ([09:51])
  • "They are not ideological about answers. They're extremely data driven and empirical about answers."
    – Ilya Marritz ([10:53])

• On Professional Fallout and Changing Identity

  • "The lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class."
    – Dr. Jay Bhattacharya ([19:16])

• On the Crisis for Science & Academia

  • "He’s just very much focused on the facts, like what’s going on and what to do."
    – Dan Lieberman about Alan ([24:15])
  • "Jay is at the heart of that self-destructive behavior... If he has credibility, which I believe he does, and if he has integrity... he has got to wrap this battle up quickly and move forward with getting America back on track."
    – Dr. Ashish Jha ([52:37])

---

Important Timestamps

• 00:39: Introduction to the episode’s core relationship: Alan and Jay.
• 04:15–06:29: Jay’s early background, meeting Alan Garber, and the origins of their bond.
• 14:20–20:26: COVID-19, the Great Barrington Declaration, public backlash, and Jay’s growing isolation.
• 28:00–32:53: Trump's election, Jay’s controversial confirmation as NIH head, and the first major blows to academic science funding.
• 34:34–38:03: Fallout for Harvard and other schools, shifting norms at the NIH, and staff anxieties.
• 40:11–47:34: The Bethesda Declaration, interviews with protesting NIH scientists, difficulties in safeguarding academic freedom in the new paradigm.
• 48:42–51:07: The impact on long-term research, the brain drain risk, and reflections on the direction of American science.
• 51:49–52:37: National competitiveness, the danger of losing global scientific leadership.

---

Tone & Takeaways

This narrative episode echoes with tension, loss, and the search for integrity. The tone is thoughtful, sometimes somber, as it details the disintegration of trust and continuity in American scientific institutions. It offers an intimate look at how even the most personal professional relationships can fray under the pressure of political polarization and institutional upheaval, all while raising urgent questions about the future of academic freedom and US leadership in science.

---

Coming Up

The next episode promises to explore potential solutions, including a new Trump administration “Compact” that would guarantee research funding in exchange for universities' alignment on controversial issues surrounding admissions, hiring, and institutional neutrality.

Transcript

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from the Council for Interior Design Qualification. Safety matters. That's why NCIDQ certified interior designers meet rigorous standards to protect health, safety and welfare. Learn [e-mail] NPR Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is embedded from NPR.

[Ilya Marritz]

So we're going to share a new.

[NPR Announcer]

Series about the fight between the Trump administration and the country's oldest university.

[Ilya Marritz]

It's called the Harvard Plan. It's hosted by reporter Ilya Merritts and produced by our friends at WNYC's on the Media and the Boston Globe.

[NPR Announcer]

The last episode followed the Trump administration's.

[Ilya Marritz]

Attacks on the university through the perspectives of three very different Harvard professors. This episode focuses on the decision makers at Harvard and in the Trump administration. Turns out the two men at the top actually have a personal connection which eventually unraveled. If you haven't heard the first episode, go back and listen. If you have heard it, here's episode two. And here's Ilya. I'm Ilya Maritz. This is the Harvard Plan, Season 2, Episode 2. 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. And 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, Tom, Dr. Alan Garber. He's intelligent, kind, mild mannered to the point of being a little boring. The use of data to think about problems, and my dissertation was actually on antibiotic resistance. The younger man is anything but boring and not at all shy. Joining me now, Dr. J. Bhattacharya, Stanford University. Joining me now is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. 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]

And 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

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 Institute.

[Ilya Marritz]

Jay Bhattacharya was introduced in that hearing by a senator. But 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 Jai 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. And 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 with. 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. And 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 8 on tetragrammaton music producer Rick Rubin's podcast.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

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

[Ilya Marritz]

Back in America, young J excelled at math and science. When he got to college, his path was clear. He was going to become a doctor. But 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, like, 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. And 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. And the trend, which is not statistically significant, actually showed a slight increase in mortality with treatment. I found this cassette recording of Alan from 1994 speaking to a Women's Health research seminar. So there developed a real schism in the medical profession, with the majority saying that, well, that's interesting, but probably not real, and we should. 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. He had a great way of setting the patients quickly at ease, often with.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

A smile or a little joke.

[Ilya Marritz]

This is Dina Bravada, another one of Allen's mentees. When she encountered him in the 1990s, it was at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto where Allen saw patients. Dina Bravada 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.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

So ptsd, even Agent Orange exposure, these.

[Ilya Marritz]

Were very, very common issues. As the internist, Bravada would be the first to meet with a patient. Then she'd bring her notes to Alan, who was the attending physician.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

He's a very smart man and an excellent clinician, and 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?

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

Well, he was my first role model.

[Ilya Marritz]

In the trenches, if you will. I hope that I learned from him.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

To be kind, to bring the Full measure of one's intellect and training to each patient encounter, to treat patients with.

[Ilya Marritz]

Respect and to try to bring one's sense of humor. Perhaps as well, Alan thrived on being a doctor and a professor. You could do both. But 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]

And so 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, and he starts mentoring others. Amitav 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. He didn't have to do that for me. He didn't know me at all. 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. I mean, he was completely immersed in the research for an hour and a half.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

He pushed me in a way that.

[Ilya Marritz]

Nobody else in that room pushed me. He really wanted to understand where what.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

I was doing broke down.

[Ilya Marritz]

It's not that he didn't believe it.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

He just wanted to understand, like, okay.

[Ilya Marritz]

You'Re making this assumption.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

There's a handful of these very special people in the world, and you can count them like people who will sit.

[Ilya Marritz]

Down and spend hours and hours with you, helping you be a better scientist.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Without regard for how you are actually.

[Ilya Marritz]

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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Not ideological about answers.

[Ilya Marritz]

They're extremely data driven and empirical about answers.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

And you can get both of them.

[Ilya Marritz]

To change their mind, which is another, the third dimension.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Of them being special because there are some people who care about evidence, who.

[Ilya Marritz]

Will mentor other people, but they're not going to change their mind. In 2011, Alan was recruited to become provost at Harvard, chief academic officer, really the number two there. He left California, but he kept J 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 NI 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. This is Episode two of the Harvard Plan. More after the break. Stay with us.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

This message comes from Schwab at Schwab how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own, plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from BetterHelp. Most FSA dollars expire at the end of the year, so it's time to use them or lose them. With BetterHelp, you can invest those funds in taking care of your mind with online therapy. Join today and you can be matched with a licensed therapist in as little as 24 hours. Visit betterhelp.com NPR to get 10% off your first month. This message comes from Saatva, official mattress and restorative sleep provider for Team usa. All athletes have to clear hurdles at some point, one of which is the need to get quality restorative sleep to perform at their peak. That's why Saatva is proud to be providing athletes with mattresses and bedding for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. You can enjoy that kind of sleep too. Visit saatva.com NPR and save $200 on $1,000 or more. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Shopify. No idea where to sell? Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your business without the struggle. Once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the Internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. Go to Shopify.com NPR to take your business to the next level. Today.

[Ilya Marritz]

This is ON THE media. I'm Ilya Maritz, host of the Harvard Plan, a collaboration between OTM and the Boston Globe. To recap, we've met our two protagonists, the Dr. 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. 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. 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]

All three of the authors went on. The hard to categorize but Definitely right leaning UK channel UnHerd, that's herd present an alternative way to approach COVID 19 and protect the elderly while letting the young live their lives.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Depression, suicidal ideation, all that enormous collateral damage when they face very little risk from death from the disease that has to end.

[Ilya Marritz]

I would be confident in saying that if we adopted this strategy, then maybe we could all have a very nice.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Normal Christmas.

[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 Allen 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 had very strong disagreements with that piece. I thought it was really ill time that it came out a month before vaccines were available. I mean, the idea that, like, you're gonna kind of lift all restrictions, just let everybody get infected a month before vaccines come out just doesn't make any sense.

[Ilya Marritz]

But 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, in a way that a lot of people weren't. And I thought that was, that was smart and good.

[Ilya Marritz]

Still, for Jay, his outspokenness came with professional consequences. Within Stanford, where he still taught, Jay was blocked from giving a talk about the Declaration. He says, and then, as he told Rick Rubin, he was investigated by the school.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

It felt like an inquisition. They're asking about a thousand questions about, like, 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, it feels.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Like some novel from the 1950s where the House UN American Committee is, like, meeting to decide who to suppress, and I'm some sort of, like, 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 health. Jay saw them as comfortable elites with no awareness of their own blind spots. As he described it on Andrew Huberman's.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Podcast, the lockdowns were a luxury of the laptop class.

[Ilya Marritz]

So Jay made allies where he found them. Even if his new crowd had a weakness for pseudoscience and quackery.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Amazingly, there appear to be growing connections between Viagra and treatment for the coronavirus.

[Ilya Marritz]

Ivermectin as well as other proactive hydroxy as a way to prevent from getting the virus.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

I always ask myself, why did I have this very different reaction to the lockdown?

[Ilya Marritz]

Jay again on Rick Rubin's podcast Because.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

One of my very first thoughts when I heard about the lockdown was that experience when I was 8, seeing what life is like for poor people. And I just had this like 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 sort of the economic infrastructure that allows poor people to have some semblance of access to food, access to healthcare. All this stuff we just basically said no. The fear around this virus, the well being of like relatively well off people is so much more important than that.

[Ilya Marritz]

While Jay became a public opinion haver with the 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 moved online, dorms emptied out. Many classrooms didn't reopen for over a year. I'm not so sure Allen personally favored this approach, though. Early in the pandemic, Allen 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. But the policies Harvard adopted were in line with what public health authorities recommended. A couple years later, as Harvard entered its worst leadership crisis in years with its first black president under withering attack, Allen remained as provost, embodying continuity. My name is Claudine Gay and I am the president of Harvard University. It's an honor to be here today. And when that new president was hauled before Congress and questioned by Republican Elise Stefanik, Allen sat directly behind her. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you're familiar with the term intifada, correct? For over five hours, he occasionally nodded at something or other, she said, but betrayed very little emotion. 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? That type of hateful speech is personally 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 Allen 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 Allen 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

So I got to know Alan when 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

And he had had some running injuries. And I published a lot on the biomechanics of running. So 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Yes, his running gait. And because he had some injuries. So after we had this lunch, he came to my lab and 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, he's not very emotional about.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

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. But 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?

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

I mean, a lot of norms have been broken. I think the most basic norm that's been broken, again, this is just my opinion, right? Nobody else's opinion. But I think that the most basic norm that's been broken is essentially the golden rule to treat others as you would have them treat you. And right now we're in a world where people are quite happy to ignore that in all kinds of levels. And I would say that this particular fight is just one of them.

[Ilya Marritz]

The winds were changing direction fast at the moment Allen 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 protest 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 Allen's actual view of how universities should be. But all of this was poor insurance against what was coming. That's after the break. This is episode two of the Harvard Plan.

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from the Council for Interior Design Qualification. Interior designer and CIDQ president Siyavash Madani describes his fundamentals of interior design.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

I think interior design is about responsibility. It's not just the way a space looks or the way a space photographs. To me, better design means functional, safe, accessible and inclusive design.

[NPR Announcer]

Learn [e-mail] NPR this message comes from Babbel.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Babbel's conversation based language technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world with lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com NPR spelled B-A-B-B-E-L.com NPR rules and restrictions may apply.

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match, limited by state law, not available in all states.

[Ilya Marritz]

This is on THE media. I'm Ilya Maritz, 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical.

[Ilya Marritz]

Left and we will do that. And 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. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, labor and Pensions will please come to order. To lead the National Institutes of Health, which is part of hhs, Trump chose someone with a lot more scientific cred. Thank you Dr. Bhattacharya, for appearing before the committee. Context it was March of 2025, six weeks into the new administration and a new non agency agency, the Department of 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. I don't have my gavel, but Senator Murray said it's a Doge cut. So anyway, 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. And so it was under that cloud that Jay introduced himself.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

I am honored to speak with you today and deeply humbled by President Trump's nomination. I'm delighted to have with me my wife Kathy, 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 to.

[Ilya Marritz]

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. Thank you, sir.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

I'll start with questionings.

[Ilya Marritz]

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

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

There's now a child who died from.

[Ilya Marritz]

A vaccine preventable disease in Texas. Let me repeat that.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

A child who died from a vaccine.

[Ilya Marritz]

Preventable disease in Texas, 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. And he said, we don't know the reasons why.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

So I would support an agenda of a broad agenda, 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. My concern is the more we pretend like this is an issue, the more.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

We will have children dying from vaccine preventable diseases. Senator, I guess I've turned it around and say I want to. Don't want to disprove a negative. That's almost, 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 mean, I guess, yes, you're absolutely right, Senator. We don't need to address every idea or concern. But if those concerns result in parents not wanting to vaccinate their children for a vaccine that is well tested, my sense is that my inclination is to give people good data. That's how you address those concerns.

[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. And 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.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

Welcome aboard.

[Ilya Marritz]

The revolution begins today. At Donald Trump's nih. Now J. Bhattacharya's nih, too. Things were changing fast.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

The Trump administration has now frozen More than $2 billion in federal research funding.

[NPR Announcer]

This would impact medical, engineering, and science.

[Ilya Marritz]

Research at the school that is looking for cures for some of our most devastating diseases. Diseases I've lost grants that have totaled.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

Six or seven million dollars.

[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 Allen that Harvard's grant money has been terminated because Harvard's conduct around antisemitism is so bad in the eyes of the government. Still, the penultimate paragraph offers Allen one thin read of hope. He could appeal the decision directly to Dr. J. Bhattacharya, Director of the NIH.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

I wonder what Alan thinks when he gets that letter again.

[Ilya Marritz]

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 gonna behave. Alan's gonna send it to his lawyers, and they're gonna write up the letter, and he'll be very formal. But Alan's also a human being. There's gotta be part of him that's gotta be struggling with this.

[Ilya Marritz]

True to form, Alan responded calmly, rationally, when he was asked about the cuts on npr. 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. So that's Alan.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

And Jay is a fundamentally good guy.

[Ilya Marritz]

And he's got to be.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

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. What happens when doctors and health economists go to Washington, particularly people who haven't been involved in politics?

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

Yeah, 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.

[Ilya Marritz]

Accomplished.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

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. So those are his priorities. They may or may not be his boss's priorities. His direct boss. RFK Jr doesn't believe in germ theory, doesn't believe in vaccines. Yeah, Believes a lot of stuff that probably Jay, from his own experience and training as an academic, disagrees with. Yeah, but there. There are points of agreement about free speech and making space for other kinds of viewpoints, and there are places where they agree on sort of like make America healthy. Is there any way for Jay to sort of split the difference and preserve his dignity and preserve the respect of people in the scientific community?

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

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 dies. No serious person thinks that. But if Jae Go has to go out and talk about food dies every once in a while, I think it's fine. Like, no, we're all going to kind of 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.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

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. But 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.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

So we described it as dissent.

[Ilya Marritz]

Sarah Cobrin is one of them, a 21 year NIH veteran who agreed to speak with me in her personal capacity.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

You know, he, he laid that out for us. He has his own letter of dissent. He says publicly very often that he welcomes dissent. And so 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 Coburn told me Jay was courteous, personable. He listened.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

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. And 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]

Cobran 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.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

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. Yeah, 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 Cockburn feeling optimistic.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

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 Allen, the spokesperson called it a personal matter. 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 Vogt. 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 and 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 in Louisiana and the Gateway Pundit, a hub for conspiracy theories, and Jayside lost in a 6, 3 decision. He says that shows the First Amendment is on thin ice at this point.

[Dr. Jay Bhattacharya]

The only thing protecting free speech in this country is, 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 Ellen talks about. We cannot compromise on basic principles like defense of our First Amendment rights. 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. The idea that fighting antisemitism 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 antisemitism and everything to do with, with defendants power and political views. Okay, we are now recording. Hey, Sarah, how are you doing?

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

Hi. Doing okay.

[Ilya Marritz]

Do you want to give me the business again? I caught up with Sarah Coburn in late September, about two months after our first conversation.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

Yes. So just to be clear, I'm speaking as myself. I am a person, citizen of the.

[Ilya Marritz]

United States, 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. So this was actually my number one question. Whether there have been any reprisals of any kind.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

No.

[Ilya Marritz]

Okay.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

Not at nih, just no.

[Ilya Marritz]

So that's the good news. The bad news, everyone is stressed. Everything feels broken.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

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?

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

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. And 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. And Dr. Bhattacharya, when we met with him at that roundtable said, no, there are no bandwords. He said that to our faces. And 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 Cobran works. They're supposed to be reviewing grants funding science, but with no formal list of banned words, it's all guesswork.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

So we are between Iraq and Iraq and Iraq. 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. Cockburn 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.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

So 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]

That was in September this month, November 2025. One of the signers of the Bethesda Declaration, Jenna Norton, was placed on non disciplinary administrative leave from the NIH with full pay and benefits. She released this TikTok. I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity. We reached out to the nih. An anonymous official there told us over email, quote, instead of focusing on her actual job to promote gold standard science, radical leftist Jenna Norton chooses to constantly criticize this administration, even when she is supposed to be working. I thought about Camilla Naxarova, 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. I think I could live with that. I would just work really hard and write new ones, somehow make it work. But then you think about what else could happen. 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, you know, based on, I don't know what criteria, you know, whether they're in the national interest or not. And they want to further make changes such that the grants can be revoked at any given time for reasons that I don't quite understand or I don't know if there's, you know, any criteria for that. What really scares her is the idea that research funding is becoming a political decision rather than one made by scientists. That I think would be completely devastating. Science moves at its own speed, ignorant of the rhythms of politics. We can only do the work if we can do it for a long time. Otherwise there's no point in even doing it.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

So if that becomes more of a.

[Ilya Marritz]

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 not, just not possible. I can't work on projects with a one year outlook. I would go look for a different job. Allen told the Wall Street Journal. It's not just about Harvard or universities. It's about America's place in, in the world. 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. 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. And 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.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

Recently, now we're behind already. Yeah, 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. And 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.

[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 has is proposing a science grants fast lane for universities that sign on to its vision for higher ed. The Compact lists things that I think are pretty I don't actually find them controversial. We meet the Trump advisor behind what they're calling the compact merit based admissions, merit based hiring, things that maybe people don't think about as much like addressing grade inflation. These are the types of things that.

[NIH Staff / Interviewees (e.g., Sarah Cobrin, Dina Bravada)]

I don't feel like are partisan.

[Ilya Marritz]

They are actually just defining the necessary elements to a strong relationship. That's next week. The Harvard Plan Season 2 is reported and written by me, Ilya Merritts. The series is produced by on the Media's Molly Rosen. It's edited by Kristen 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. And thanks to Jasmine Aguilera and Valentina Powers. I'll see you next week for episode three of the Harvard Plan. This is on the Media.

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from the Council for Interior Design Qualification. Interior Designer and CIDQ President Siyavash Madani explains the value of having an NCIDQ certification.

[Dr. Ashish Jha]

An NCIDQ certified interior designer must complete a minimum of six years of specialized education and work experience and pass the three part NCIDQ exam. All three exams emphasize and focus on health, safety and welfare of the occupants. It's really about the implementation of design. Good design is never just about aesthetics. It's about intention, safety and impact. We take the responsibility of protecting the public seriously. A space needs to be functional, safe and accessible.

[NPR Announcer]

To learn more about NCIDQ certification or to hire a Certified Designer, visit CIDQ.org NPR this message comes from Carvana. Buy a car 100% [e-mail] with financing to fit your budget. Enjoy 7 days to return if it's not a fit. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See return [e-mail].