US President Donald Trump is rapidly dismantling US scientific institutions, with potentially devastating effects on SA’s research enterprise. If the government doesn’t move quickly, projects and jobs will be lost, along with the dreams and aspirations of the next generation of scientists.
SA has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with various US scientific bodies, ranging from US space agency Nasa to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most important of all has been its collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research.
For the past 80 years, the NIH has led the way in discovering new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent diseases, funded work that led to more than 100 Nobel prizes, and built a network of projects around the world. That has all come crashing down since Trump assumed office in January.
In a series of shock moves, his administration has terminated NIH grants in the US and beyond, precipitating an unprecedented crisis for SA science. Trump is now proposing that the NIH budget be slashed from $47bn to $27bn, along with cuts to other scientific institutions. And in a further blow, the NIH recently announced that it would no longer allow US grant recipients to direct funds to collaborators overseas.
Until very recently, SA was the single biggest recipient of NIH grants awarded outside the US, with 86 awards totalling $40.6m in 2022 alone. These awards went to scientists at the SA Medical Research Council (MRC), research institutes, and SA’s research-intensive universities — primarily UCT and Wits. Most of these were sub-awards, provided to recipients collaborating with US scientists.
This was not charity: NIH grants were won in a fiercely competitive process that pitted the world’s top scientists against each other. Proposals were rigorously scrutinised over a period of months before approval, awards were tightly managed to ensure the money went where it was intended to, and terminations were extremely rare.
Over the past 30 years, NIH grants have helped establish SA as a key location for conducting clinical trials and supported the careers of scientists at the cutting edge of global HIV and tuberculosis research. Their work has had a global effect, helping to improve HIV prevention and treatment, and leading to shorter and better pill regimens for TB patients. It has also created an ecosystem for training and developing young scientists.
In the absence of any visible effort by the government to counter the damage, SA’s research institutions and universities have quickly moved to assess the damage, seek new funding sources and apply to the National Treasury for emergency funding under Section 16 of the Public Finance Management Act. That work, co-ordinated by the MRC, estimates the funding gap confronting the sector due to Trump’s cuts to science is in excess of R1.2bn.
International donor organisations are willing to step in, and have already committed R400m, but their support is contingent on the government matching their contributions rand for rand.
As SA’s leading scientists have repeatedly pointed out, this is an unfolding crisis that puts hundreds of research projects on the line, jeopardises SA’s future scientific leadership, and places SA’s research infrastructure at risk.
The scale of the catastrophe is unprecedented: the Wits Health Consortium, for example, has already started the retrenchment process for more than 1,800 employees, ranging from highly skilled laboratory staff to field workers. While the scientists that secured NIH grants are usually employed by a university or research institute, their staff are not — the grants cover salaries, laboratory infrastructure and the costs associated with clinical trials. Universities cannot step into the breach, as years of dwindling public funding for core research have left them with little cash to spare.
It is time for health minister Aaron Motsoaledi and science, technology & innovation minister Blade Nzimande to step up and persuade the Treasury that investing in science is good for the economy. The consequences of inaction are simply too grave to countenance.
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