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This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato.

Today on the podcast, checking in on the NIH with a former director.

What's the future of the NIH during a time of government cuts?

Proposals that were made recently could be deeply, deeply destructive to the enterprise that we've built up.

And it would take decades, not years, to restore some of that.

One of President Trump's targets for cutting has been the National Institutes of Health,

including layoffs of some 1,200 NIH employees, termination of research grants, and an order

capping indirect costs to grants. Some of these moves have been paused following court cases, but they are still

an ongoing topic of concern. Joining me now to talk about how the NIH operates what the new

administration changes could mean for medical research in this country is Dr. Harold Varmus.

He was director of NIH from 1993 to 1999, currently professor of

medicine at Wild Cornell Medicine, senior associate at the New York Genome Center, and the 1989

Nobel Prize winner in medicine. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you, Eric. Good to see you.

Nice to see you. Last month, you wrote an op-ed for the New York Times entitled,

I used to run the NIH. Here's What Worries Me.

I mean, tell us how you would characterize what worries you, what's being done to the NIH.

Well, there are a number of things that are concerning me at the moment.

One is the general threat to science, which is one of the prides of our country and a way to

solve some of the biggest problems that face our citizens.

The other is the threat to investigators who've spent their lives training to do these jobs,

...