In late May, when the Trump administration issued a call for new research investigating the causes of autism, many scientists feared that anti-vaccine politics would decide which projects received funding.
The call for proposals seemingly gave health officials greater control than usual over the vetting process. Researchers had only weeks to propose studies.
And with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spreading the debunked theory that vaccines caused autism, potential applicants worried openly that the Trump administration might bless only those research projects that would prop up its favored conclusions.
So scientists were cautiously optimistic this week to find that the 13 projects chosen to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health were nothing of the sort.
The projects, which were awarded a combined $50 million, drew on diverse sets of patient data. They were grounded in decades of credible autism science. And they planned to examine how strong genetic explanations for the disease interacted with environmental influences to determine someone’s risk of developing autism.
They represented, in short, the very opposite approach to one that came into focus this week in an explosive news briefing at the White House: unproven claims that Tylenol caused autism, along with a barrage of disproved theories that childhood vaccines were dangerous and had driven up rates of the disease, too.
“We’re very enthusiastic and very optimistic that these projects will lead to important answers, no matter what question they’re looking at,” said Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation.
The chosen projects, she said, “had to do with everything from toxicants to nutrition to early contextual factors like socioeconomic status.”
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the N.I.H., the world’s premier funder of medical research, stood beside Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy at the White House on Monday to announce the research awards.
His comments were quickly overshadowed by Mr. Trump’s strident warnings about acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and childhood vaccines.
Many autism scientists blanched at the president’s claims. And even as they took heart from the research projects awarded N.I.H. funding this week, many of them remained wary of the wider body of autism research being pushed by the Trump administration.
That includes a vaccine safety review that Mr. Kennedy entrusted to David Geier, a steadfast figure in the anti-vaccine movement who also has publicized the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said recently that it intended to award a contract for investigating a link between vaccines and autism to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
And many autism researchers saw their federal funding slashed or delayed earlier this year as the Trump administration purged studies related to disfavored topics like gender and diversity.
But for now, the N.I.H. effort, known as the Autism Data Science Initiative, offered researchers a measure of reassurance about the direction of the field. Dr. Bhattacharya said this week that more than 250 research teams had sought funding.
Judith S. Miller, an associate professor at the Center for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, helps lead a team that was awarded funding to examine the interplay of genetic and environmental factors related to autism.
The team is looking at, among other things, changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism, air and water quality, green space, poverty and early childhood interventions.
“We have known there’s a big genetic component, and that genetics account for about 80 percent of the identifiable causes of autism,” Dr. Miller said. “But even when we know the genetic cause, that doesn’t really tell us very much about the outcome, or how to specifically help that individual.”
Her team is relying on a large set of maternal and childhood health data from Philadelphia. Researchers will be allowed to guard patient data closely, Dr. Miller said, dispelling fears that arose in the spring over the idea of a federal registry of autistic people.
Jonathan Sebat, a leader in the field of autism genetics at the University of California, San Diego, was awarded funding as part of a team trying to use genetics to help investigate the role of environmental exposures in autism diagnoses.
He had worried that the federal government was trying to vet research proposals so quickly that the quality of the reviews would suffer. But, he said, “those fears were unfounded — the applications really did get a rigorous review.”
Dr. Sebat’s project, he said, would shed light on the links that other studies have suggested between environmental factors and autism.
“The mechanism that explains these correlations is unclear,” he said. “The genetics of autism is a key piece of the puzzle that we have a good handle on.” That helps “the other pieces, including the environment, fall into place.”
Other projects will look at dietary and chemical exposures and factors predicting improved outcomes for autistic children.
Autism experts marveled at the dissonance between the unproven theories touted by Mr. Trump on Monday and the well-founded research that another arm of his administration was pushing forward.
“To me, they come from different universes,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, the director of Boston University’s Center for Autism Research Excellence and the founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists. “This is all very serious, forward-looking, exciting, rigorous, gold-standard science.”
Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.
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