Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Brenna Henn: In my lab, we’re interested in characterizing human diversity, especially from populations that live in Africa or are descendants from Africa. One thing we wanted to address is the huge focus on personalized genetic medicine. The idea is that you get your genome sequenced, and then for heart disease or tuberculosis — pick your favorite disease — we’ll be able to give you a score of how likely you’ll be to develop these things.
Almost all of this work is done in Europeans or their descendants in the United States. When we apply the scores to other populations, they don’t work as well. And that is a big problem, because you’re developing a clinical tool that only works on half the people who walk into a clinic in the United States.
One of our goals is to understand why that happens. Is it because people have unique mutations that are not found in Europeans? Or do they have the same kinds of genes, but they have a different interaction with the environment?
In 2019, I got a grant for early career investigators from the National Institutes of Health. We aggregated about 3,600 genomes from populations of African descent, either in continental Africa or in the Americas. We contributed 80 samples that we collected in South Africa from this extremely interesting group called the Khoisan. They have more genetic diversity than any other human population. I love being in those communities; I love talking to the people.
That data helped us come up with a new model for early human evolution in Africa. For a long time, there’s been a perception that humans originated in just a single location in Africa. But our species probably had much more of a pan-African emergence.
My grant is on a five-year renewal schedule. We put in our renewal last year. The program officer contacted me in September and said, “It looks like you’ll be funded.” After a few months, the grant moved to “pending.” Normally, when a grant moves to “pending” in the system, you’re issued an award within a couple of weeks.
And then it sat pending, from December of last year to September of this year. Finally I said, “Can you give me an update?”
The program officer basically said, “I can’t point to a policy. But because your grant involves a collaboration with South Africa, it will not be funded.” That was the entirety of the email.
I asked for an appeal, and my program officer got back to me in 24 hours and said, “I’ve pushed it up the chain, and they said no.” So that’s the end. The program officer said, “You can apply again — and when you apply again, don’t mention South Africa.”
I just feel very devastated. One of our goals was to publish this huge database of African genomes. This resource would be available to thousands of biomedical researchers in the United States and globally. Now I don’t have money to pay to host the data or run an analysis. I have 200 terabytes of data that’s just sitting on a server in Quebec. It’s very sad.
Brenna Henn is a geneticist at the University of California, Davis.
Carl Zimmer covers news about science for The Times and writes the Origins column.
The post She Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine appeared first on New York Times.
