Last month, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jayanta Bhattacharya, gave the keynote address at the National Health Research Forum. He expressed concern about various problems facing early career researchers and pledged that the NIH would support them. Notably, however, he neglected to mention the biggest issue currently affecting early career researchers: recent actions by NIH leadership that—on his watch—have thrown biomedical research in the United States into chaos.
I am a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and a steward of the NIH Fellows Union–UAW 2750, which represents more than 5,000 early career researchers across the NIH. Over the past eight months, early career researchers at the NIH have faced setback after setback, affecting our training and research. These challenges are still ongoing.